NikonRumours is reporting that this Brazilian website has leaked some official images and information about the Nikon D800. The rumoured release date is the 7th of February which means we're less than 24 hours away from knowing if this information is correct. There is no news on when the camera will be released for sale to the public but there is some speculations that the pricetag will be around $3000-$3300 (US).
The translation from the Brazilian Website reads as follows - I have made some adjustments to smooth out google's translation:
Tomorrow (February 7th) Nikon announces tomorrow the D800; a new DSLR camera with 36.3 megapixels of resolution with full-frame sensor.The new model succeeds the Nikon D700 and is a younger sister to the high-end Nikon D3X.
The new Nikon D800, with magnesium alloy body, has a 36.3 megapixel CMOS sensor (7360 x 4912 resolution) in FX format (35.9 x 24 mm) - the largest developed by Japanese company to date. It records images in JPEG and RAW.The manufacturer claims that the D800 has ISO settings ranging from 100-6400, with optional use of ISO 50 (Lo-1) and up to 25,600 (Hi-2).
The D800 will have full HD 1080p at 30/24 frames per second and 720p HD at 60 frames per second (both H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format with compression up to 29:59 B-Frame).
The D800 also has a 3.2 inch LCD screen (921,000 pixels) with brightness control, HDMI, Auto HDR, USB 3.0, shooting up to 4 frames per second (6 frames per second with battery module required).Nikon says the shutter cycle life is 200,000 cycles.The camera has a double compartment for dual memory cards (Compact Flash and SD) and can record images in RAW and JPEG files on separate cards, as well as video and photos (that's pretty cool, huh?)
The manufacturer has not reported the price of the D800 yet.
Here Art Streiber shares his opinion on what it takes to succeed and reach his level in photography. Key to this is the idea that the building of your brand and the building of your brand is not a sprint, it is a marathon. Part of this is the way in which you will develop. You can expect to develop in a stepwise fashion, going up in sudden bursts, rather than at a smoother constant rate.
YOU MUST BE COMMITTED TO THE CLIMB
You must shoot, maintain your archive, market yourself, and pay your bills in order to survive and, ultimately, thrive.
You must know your market. You must know your clients. You must put yourself in front of these people through marketing yourself and your skills to them. If you can identify people who will be your clients in the future and market to them before they are able to buy from you.
One way to do this is through your personal work. Personal unpaid work can demonstrate your skills to future clients but, more importantly, unpaid work can become paid work if the subject of your images becomes worthy of wider interest/publication.
Dom Bower's photography videos are often worth a watch and this one is no exception. Here he outlines what many of us already know about Nikon's new flagship camera, the Nikon D4 - Essentially it will be a great camera but it is not for everyone. While there are plenty of people talking about most of them don't need it and can't afford it. While it can be fun to get caught up in the rumours and excitement surrounding a new camera's release it's also important to focus on keeping your feet on the ground.
From a practical standpoint the D4 looks to be a bit of a tank. It will be big and robust making it ideal for sports photographers (particularly those travelling to the 2012 Olympics) and event photographers but less convenient for wedding photographers (due to their large size).
Last night I did a Trash the Dress shoot, my first one ever. Towards the end of the night we set up shop near a beached boat and fired off some champagne. Here is my favourite resulting image:
Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a wedding photography workshop run by Denis Reggie and organised by Queensbury. Denis Reggie is an American Wedding Photojournalist catering to the very upper end of the wedding market. His lesson was broken into 2 parts. The first focussed on business and the market while the second part focussed on how he achieves the look of his photos. Below is a video showing how he achieves his look for group photos. Be warned, it is part of an ad for pocket wizard.
Of the two parts of his talk the most enlightening part was the first part, the part that focussed on the market. Here he suggested that the market can be split into two main groups of couples (each with two subgroups) and two groups of photographers. To put it simply, adn to pull from the video above, couples either want to be themselves and have their photographer capture things as they actually happen or they want the photographer to tell them what to do. Similarly photographers either shoot things as they happen or try to control and orchestrate events.
Denis suggests that those who want the photographer to capture things as they happen are better clients as they are more likely to be high spend clients. While this is almost certainly true in his experience it is worth noting that his experience is skewed in two important ways: 1) He is a high end photographer with a high end price tag
As such he attracts high end, big spend clients. 2) He is a photojournalist
As such he attracts clients who want their day captured as it occurs without direction from the photographer.
Notice that I have separated these two things. What Denis Reggie seems to suggest is that these two things go hand in hand. While this is true for his clients we must remember that his clients come from a specific subset of the population. Essentially his viewpoint, with or without his knowledge of it, is effected by sampling error.
Don't believe me? In order for Denis Reggie's assertion to be true high end wedding photographers would ALL need to be photojournalists as photojournalists would be the only ones who could survive at this end of the scale. This is not true. There are plenty of high end wedding photographers who are not photojournalists and they are doing just fine.
What then is the take home message? The take home message is, perhaps, that there is a market for high-end wedding photojournalism.
Side notes, the students
The people attending the seminar seemed to struggle with Denis Reggie's ideas and approach in the first section of the course. The main difficulty seemed to stem from treating the ideas as a presentation of how Denis sees the world rather than a presentation detailing how the world is. Those who got stuck in this second version, thinking his words were describing how the world is, had difficulty reconciling their experience of the world with the description he was given. What they missed was that here we are describing two completely different world views, as such they are never going to align themselves with each other as they are fundamentally different.
Here's how they differ: Geographic Region
Denis' client base is world wide. For may of us our client base is restricted to the area that we live in. With a world wide client base you maximise the number of potential clients. Most importantly you maximise the number of potential big spend clients. As long as you're covering your travel costs you're away laughing. Target Market
Denis targets people who fit his way of photographing weddings. Consciously or not we also target clients who fit out way of shooting weddings as clients come to us because they like what we do. If we are shooting in fundamentally different ways to Denis then the clients we attract will also be fundamentally different. Many of the students felt that because they had never encountered the sorts of clients that Denis was talking about it was impossible for these clients to exist at all. Once again sampling bias is shaping opinions. As an illustration the fact that I have never met a US Senator does not mean that US Senators do not exist.
