April 2014. Client: Opportunity Now

I now have a Nikon D4s (after a battle with the insurance company) so everything is back on track. It gave impressive results after it’s first outing to photograph the Opportunity Now Awards hosted by Alice Arnold at The Brewery. Opportunity Now is a membership organisation representing employers who want to transform the workplace by ensuring inclusiveness for women and they filled the impressive Porter Tun room with people. If you don’t recognise Alice Arnold you’ll recognise her voice from many years at Radio 4 as a continuity announcer and newsreader.

My job was to capture all the events happening on stage as well as the winners’ group shots afterwards. In the last post I spoke about the D800 having a sensor that was too big for most of my uses (36MP).The D4s has a 16MP sensor but it also gives you the option to reduce the raw capture to a 4MP image capture (2464 x 1640 4MP) which is a clever move by Nikon – maybe they do read my emails 😉 This still gives you an 8×6” print and certainly plenty big enough for all web uses.
The picture of Alice was taken at 1/200 sec, f-stop F7.1 and ISO 3200 and the smaller image is a detail from that shot. The ISO 3200 quality has improved since the D3s, there’s hardly any digital noise (or dodgy discoloured pixels to use a less technical term) in the smooth blue background and Alice’s skin tones.