The D810 viewfinder has a single line of the bare essentials underneath the frame, which takes up 100% of the view and you have to explicitly look down to see them. All I see in the frame are the autofocus markers, which usually amount to one in the middle unless I am shooting the Patrouille de France (like the Blue Angels) or surfers on our local beaches.
But nothing gets in the way and I get to see exactly what I will get in the recorded image. The only thing that would make it better would be a 5" x 4" ground glass screen and a darkcloth
Joanna, over time, things grow on me. With all the discussions we’ve been having, I might even want to buy that used D810. Used Nikon D810
I could afford it, but do I need it? They have three of them in stock, and were I to buy one, I’d get the best. I already have the D750, and while I’ll have 36 megapixels rather than 24, I’ve stopped playing that game…
@mikemyers I liked my D810 at the time. It was so much what the D800 should have been: quieter shutter, less vibrations ruining the photo (one of the D800’s shortcomings). Do you use the U1, U2 settings of your D750? Just asking as the D8xx have a very different concept to store settings you need more often. Coming from a D7000 to D800 that was the biggest thing to get accustomed to, but today I struggle with the U1…U3 concept more than with the banks, although U1…U3 is indicated on the to dial. And therefore quicker to access in theory. In practice I fail to remember for which setting I prepared the single user settings
Besides that, my DSLR times are over. I exchanged better AF precision against worse battery life, but a battery can die at the worst moments on a DSLR as well. And maybe it’s a good thing for me to be forced to keep that in mind all the time.
I even don’t use U1 … U3, but have my D750s ready set to take pics.
@mikemyers
24 MPix is way more than enough for web
– and I print (seriously) up to DIN A2 / ~ 16 x 23 " at 360 dpI
EDIT
as others have noticed … I have to do some upscaling, if printing that big.
And in the rare case to capture a large scenery I try with multiple pics, tripod and panoramic gear.
Otherwise I’m no landscape ‘junkie’, not interested in architecture or shiny cars, but in people.
You guys are really good in calculating print sizes.
But apparently all of you have always the right lens for the job, always the right spot to place the camera to get the perspective and never need to use keystone corrections, the gift for perfect compositions straight out of camera and always have a 2000 mm lens at hand to catch a bird far away… shall I go on? Yes, the final result at 24 MP is good enough for printing large sizes, especially since “normal” people/audiences don’t use loupes to see if the hairs on a leave are still all in focus. However, I do estimate and appreciate the reserves of a 45 MP sensor very well. I can crop a portrait oriented image out of a landscape oriented shot and still have the 20-24 MP. Or less because my other hobby is “avoid straight horizons…”
This kind of discussion sometimes reminds me of people calculating the need of fuel for a certain distance and don’t put more in their fuel tank. Traffic jams can happen, deviations can happen.
And I certainly don’t buy a camera to use it exclusively for internet pictures - for that each phone will do. Of course, multiple shot images to increase the pixel count are tempting, unfortunately they come with some downsides.
@platypus You mean, the old fashioned zoom swoops? I’m already doing that in my 400MP soccer snaps, saves endless money – who needs paraphernalia designer drugs when you have a camera and a zoom? And 600 GB memory cards, of course.
Yes, the D810 was and is still a great camera. Solid, reliable, comfortable in the hand, beautiful picture tonality, simple to use, everything just “worked” and worked well. I had one for years and loved it and never saw a reason to update or upgrade it until I discovered what mirrorless technology can do for me.
As I said in one of the other posts, after having had a Sony A7RIV and now a Canon R5 I have seen first hand how mirrorless cameras can make focusing easier and more accurate. THAT is the single most important factor that swung me to that technology. The overall complexity is maddening and frustrating but I deal with it and wait for the day that the “perfect” camera with just the right control system appears. Ha.
Why am I fixated on the focusing? My eyes. I have always been envious of people that can get so much more accurate focus than I can even when using the same camera but something about my eyes just won’t allow it. One person’s eyes aren’t necessarily able to see as sharply as another person’s eyes even if both can be corrected to 20/20 vision; there must be some subtleties other than acutance, somewhere, that influence the quality of vision and the perception of sharpness. If you can’t see pin sharp, you can’t focus pin sharp. That’s me. It’s really difficult to get the focus point exactly where I want it, and being a bit of a perfectionist it’s not fun to have so many pictures to be an inch or two (25mm-50mm for everyone else in the world) out of focus. The mirrorless cameras’ ability to find and focus on a subject’s eyes and/or by quickly magnifying the view to see and modify the focus point (I don’t know if all mirrorless cameras have that particular feature), plus the uncanny motion tracking, far surpass what DSLRs can do. It’s been a wonderful reintroduction to photography for me. Love it.
Oh, one more thing. At least the Canon R5 has several info display modes that can reduce the clutter on the back screen.
I would love to! France is a beautiful country with amazing people. I’ve been to Europe only one time for two days on a business trip and will never forget riding on the Autobahn during a rain (scary!) and how incredibly tidy the Belgian people are. Wish we could have stayed a month to do Europe the proper way!
Nikon has introduced a new mirrorless, I think a “Z9”. I’m sure it has a lot more “gizmos”, menus, tools, and options - but for me, an optical viewfinder means seeing with my own eyes. Again, to me, all that “stuff” is meaningless compared to setting up a scene in my eye. All the photography greats from years ago had none of this stuff - they composed photos the hard way.
Joanna’s photos rarely look “digital”. She could have taken a similar photo with a 1970’s SLR, or a 1950’s rangefinder. That the technical detail is great too only helps, but (to me) that’s not what makes for a great photograph.
I think it’s dangerous for people to get too hung up on the technical stuff, as it’s much less important than SEEING, composition, timing, and so on. …but that’s not how camera companies make money. The need more, and better, and faster, and a good reason for people to upgrade from their perfectly usable camera to a new model with more “stuff”. To me, the camera mostly doesn’t matter - it’s the photographer’s eye, composition, timing…without which, the image will never be great. And “automation” - ouch. Press the button and always get a technically perfect image
It’s not dangerous, but can get expensive…and if we think of seeing as the thing happening in the brain rather than the eyes…
Remember: Brains can be trained, looking at paintings, sculptures and maybe even photos and finding out what the things are that speak to us: Colour, Clair-Obscur, leading lines, simplicity vs detail etc.
Well, if you use your fingers to hold it, it’s digital
Indeed. But, just as it was in the days of LF film, it takes both the seeing and the knowhow to realise what we see in the final print.
I am eternally grateful to people like Ansel Adams who taught us how to “pre-visualise” and how to make an image, rather than just simply taking a photo.
I am equally grateful for having met a master printer (darkroom) called Dave Lewis, who told me how he would sometimes make 27 exposures under the enlarger, dodging, burning and changing variable contrast filters on multigrade paper to get the image as he visualised it before he pressed the shutter.
But note I use the expression “visualise”, not “see” and there is a difference. Visualisation is much more than simply seeing, in that it involves conveying, not just the cold hard reality of what was there but, also, the feeling or emotion of being there.
Great artists rarely paint a subject exactly as it is. They rearrange landscapes to create a composition that is not just beautiful but, also, that is appealing to those who they hoped would buy the finished work.
I see another “problem” in having zoom lenses available. Yes, they are useful instead of having to change prime lenses and walk backwards or forwards to frame the shot, but it is my belief that they can also allow us to forget the power of perspective, where the foreground can be made to be more or less important in relation to the background. And I don’t just mean depth of field; there’s also the effect of the “looming rock”…
I could say that the first version is strictly what I saw, but what I wanted to convey is the second version.
As you well know, had I captured this on a view camera, I would have used movements to create this effect but, with the combination of a 36Mpx camera and DxO ViewPoint, I knew it was equally possible in post-production. And there is no difference in the end result - no “digital cheating”, no lack of integrity, just an alternative means to the same end.
Since I am useless at drawing and painting, I use photography as my “brushes and canvas”. Or am I not allowed to produce an image that is anything other than the “bare naked truth”? There is also the hope that, one day, people will be willing to pay as much for one of my images as they would had I painted it?
Well, once again, yes and no.
The fantasy of a technically perfect image whenever you press the shutter is just that - a fantasy.
Artists may have an intuitive eye for painting but it also takes learning to know which medium: oils, acrylics, gouache, pastels, etc; canvas, paper, wood, slate, etc - all sorts of technical things to reproduce what they see.
You are spot on when you talk about the technical getting in the way of seeing. I suppose it’s a case of knowing when to ignore the technology and when to leverage it. By way of example, here’s a before and after of another of Helen’s images…
yeah, that field is multiple image’s favourite. Or longtime exposures of waves in sunset, just to vary light and exposure time 
