• Auto ISO sensitivity control is bliss. For birds in flight or any other wildlife in fast action, I normally have it set to: ISO sensitivity 100 (= minimum), Maximum sensitivity 1600, Minimum shutter speed 1/1600-1/2000. For slower moving or more static animals, 1/640 seconds seems to give good and sharp results.
• When using CF a general AF problem is that the focus point is often not on the eye. This is not specific to the D4/D800′s new AF system (Advanced Multi-CAM 3500FX). So just shoot and hope for the best.
• The new AF system seems to be very fast and hunt less than the previous one, especially when the background is the sky.
• With the new AF system I don’t need to overexpose +1 or +2 when shooting flying birds against the blue sky as with the old AF (Multi-CAM 3500DX).
• You don’t need more than 4fps to capture wildlife in action (I already knew this before and couldn’t understand all the fuss about it being slow).
• Having so many pixels at hand is really helpful, since it is easier to catch a bird in flight when it is further away, then just crop to get the right detail. This is a huge advantage over the D4 and I think far more relevant than the 4fps versus 10fps.
• If you only want photos that are sharp down to pixel level, be prepared to have to throw away many of your shots (Be aware that this makes sense only if you plan to crop or print in gigantic dimensions).

Photos of flying birds using a tripod

All photos below were taken with the Nikkor 600mm/f4 VR mounted on a Gitzo Tripod GT5541LS with a head by Dietmar Nill.

Flying Great Egret (Ardea alba) with a little fish in its beak. Taken at f5.6, 1/1600, ISO 640

100% crop of above egret photo revealing a little fish in its beak.

100% crop of photo above showing details of claws and water drops. Using a higher speed than 1600s might have made it sharper.

Photo of a Great Egret (Ardea alba) in flight taken at f5.0, 1/600, ISO 640. Even though it is not 100% sharp at pixel level (see photo below) this doesn't show up when downsampled. This is a huge advantage of the 36MP.

100% crop showing that the above photo is not sharp at pixel level.

Black Skimmer (Rynchops niger) in flight taken at f6.3, 1/2000, ISO 220. The photo is already cropped to 4338 x 2895 pixels, showing the advantage of having 7360 x 4912 pixels to choose from.

100% crop of the original photo showing only the eye and a part of the beak.

Handheld photos of flying birds

All photos below were taken handheld from a canoe with the Nikkor 300mm/f2.8 VR.

Flying Royal Tern (Sterna maxima) handheld from canoe at ISO 360, f8.0, 1/1600

100% crop of photo above. Notice ring on foot.

Royal Terns (Sterna maxima) taking off from a mussel bank. Photo was taken handheld at ISO 500, f8.0, 1/1600

100% crop of above photo

Handheld photo of a Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) in flight taken at ISO 360, 1/1600, f8.0

100% crop of photo above

Laugh no longer.

Below is just an innocent photo of a bird.

Portrait of an Anhinga (Anhinga anhinga) 7360 x 4912 pixels shot hand-held at f4.5, 1/640, ISO 800 using Nikkor 105mm/2.8

Unfortunately the photo was taken with the new Nikon D800, which could reveal incriminating evidence due to its 36 megapixels. Let’s zoom in to the eye…

Be aware of incriminating details even when hand-holding. That's me sitting on the ground using my legs to hold the lens as quietly as possible without a tripod.

Incredible, you can see the photographer.

In the meantime its sensor got tested by DxOMark and became their new king. Two days ago mine came by mail. I took some test shots to see if some of my lenses needed AF fine tuning, already that revealed how good the camera will perform. It also showed what an incredibly sharp lens the 600mm f4 VR is (see photos further down on page). Yesterday and today I went out to test it and came back with a few shots of a male and female Goosander (Mergus merganser). After looking at the results, pixel peeping included,  I am a very, very happy and excited new Nikon D800 owner. But see and peep for yourself:

Uncropped photo of Merganser (Mergus merganser) taken with the new Nikon D800 and the 600mm VR f4. You have 7360 x 4912 pixels available for cropping!

Cropped photo of a female Goosander (Mergus merganser) taken with the new Nikon D800 and the 600mm VR f4. Still a lot of pixels available for more cropping!

Photo of a female Goosander (Mergus merganser) taken with the new Nikon D800 and the 600mm VR f4. Cropped to 100% for pixel peeping! Please note this is ISO 800, f5, 1/400s !

Aren’t the colors and detail amazing? When editing the photos on the computer screen it feels like CSI or 24, where they have some magic image enhancer which generates information out of nothing.

Uncropped photo of a yawning male Goosander (original size 7360 x 4912) and two 100% crops for pixel peepers. Note that the focus was set on the eye and not on the spider. Furthermore this is ISO 800 and f5.6. I think this shows how amazing the D800 and the 600mm are.

Crop of the above yawning male Goosander (Mergus merganser) taken with the new Nikon D800 and the 600mm VR f4.

Crop of a photo of male Goosander (Mergus merganser) sitting on a rock taken with the new Nikon D800 and the 600mm VR f4

For the AF fine tuning tests I used an aluminum ruler taped to a window frame. The tests revealed that the 600mm VR together with the D800 didn’t need any corrections, I was just awed by the results.

The photo above was taken with a 50mm f1.8 The photo below was taken with the 600mm from the same standpoint. The crop to the left is done at 100%. Amazing!

My setup for the above photos was the 600mm VR f4 mounted on a Gitzo GT5541LS. The tripod head is from Dietmar Nil, which I can totally recommend especially for birds in flight. On top of the D800 the di-GPS Pro for geolocation.

Nikon D800 with the 600mm VR f4 mounted on a Gitzo GT5541LS tripod. On top a di-GPS Pro.

I will publish more photos as soon as I can. Stay tuned or have a look at my photo database in the meantime.

• dojo/store/Observable only works correctly when the object has an id. Unfortunately, dojo/store/Memory.add(object) does not add the id to the object when creating it (as of 1.7.1) .  See bugs http://bugs.dojotoolkit.org/ticket/12835 and http://bugs.dojotoolkit.org/ticket/14281. For a fix see changeset http://bugs.dojotoolkit.org/changeset/27072/dojo
• Observable does neither work correctly (for the reason above?) with a dojo/store/JsonRest nor a dojo/store/Cache, but that doesn’t really matter, because you can use it directly with the dojo/store/Memory instead.
• As stated in the docs, but easily missed: dojo/store/Cache automatically adds all returned objects from get() and query() calls to the cache, but only get() uses the cache, whereas query() directly uses the master store. If you want the query to come from the cache, directly call query() on the caching store, e.g. dojo/store/Memory.
• In the demo, the PHP script responds to the GET 2 by returning a Json object with id 2 and to a GET 2/ by returning an array of objects with parent id 2. If you want to query the Memory store for 2′s children, you have to provide an object as an argument, e.g. storeMemory.query({parId: 2}), whereas the JsonRest store expects a string e.g. storeJsonRest.query(’2/’);
• JsonRest store’s methods do not return the same types as Memory store, which can be confusing…
  storeMemory.add(newObject) returns the id
  storeJsonRest.add(newObject) returns the response from the server (or rather a Deferred providing it)
  …, but makes sense, because it can save an extra round trip to the server.

It is kind of frustrating that the Canon lenses are about half to a full kilo lighter than the Nikon ones if you are an owner of Nikon equipment. For the weight of a Nikon 500mm you get a Canon 600mm…

Schon erstaunlich, dass die Canon Objektive bei gleicher Lichtstärke rund ein halbes bis ganzes Kilo leichter als die entsprechenden Nikon Objektive sind. Für das Gewicht eines Nikon 500mm bekommt man ein Canon 600mm…

; used only for 'normal' extensions
extension_dir = "C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\ext"

; still necessary to use full path
zend_extension="C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\ext\php_xdebug.dll"

; won't work
; zend_extension=php_xdebug.dll