UK price for the D4 set at £4799

If you're a professional photographer, particularly in the target group of news and sports shooters you'll have had something of a moment this morning when Nikon announced the expected street price of its new flagship D4 camera. If you're not a photographer, bear in mind that news photographers will carry at least two camera bodies and sports photographers will routinely bring eight or more to major events such as the forthcoming London Olympics, deploying several as remote cameras.

Not that, on paper at least, the D4 isn't a fine camera, offering a little more resolution over the D3S but falling just short of the 40% increase that marks the point generally accepted to offer any noticeable difference in the real world. This isn't a bad thing by any account. Larger files mean more powerful computers and longer transmission times in a business where every second counts. Even photographers working without urgent deadlines will welcome this restraint on Nikon's part. As an illustration of the computing power required by the files produced by the cameras we already have, last night I converted 450 D3S NEFs into 16 Bit TIFFs for final retouching in Photoshop. That batch process alone took more than six hours.

The excellent ergonomics which characterise Nikon cameras also receive a tweak on the D4 with the addition of twin joystick controls for selecting AF points, bringing the most used controls into the same finger positions when using the vertical release.

For film makers there's also a long overdue means to monitor sound levels together with manual controls for recording level.

And that's it, the usual small changes to the focusing system and assorted minor controls excepted, most of the other changes are on the firmware side. So how do we get to £4799 when not that many years ago the then far more ground-breaking D2H was initially priced at £2500?

The answer lies partly in a  move by Nikon to match Canon's asking price for the 1DX, just as the D3X was priced in line with Canon's 1DSIII model. I don't think anyone ever really believed the D3X actually cost Nikon £1500-£2000 more to manufacture than the D3S, especially when compared with Sony cameras using the same sensor. But it lies mainly in a strategic move made by Nikon with the introduction of the original D3. With the arrival of the D3, photographers were assured the old distinction of  high speed versus high megapixel models was now a thing of the past, there was to be no D3X and because we were accustomed to the £3500 price of the D2X we didn't question the pricing of the 12 megapixel D3.

A pattern has developed lately of Nikon making point increments to equipment and introducing the new model at a considerably increased price. Nikon has badly misjudged the financial health of their market at a time when newspapers and magazines are closing. For anyone currently equipped with several D3S bodies, the D4 may well be the model many will choose to pass over.


Updated 7 January 2012:

It's never a simple matter to compare UK prices with those in other countries due to relative differences in the strength of the local currency and taxes but checking the website of New York based retailer B&H tonight reveals the D4 to be priced in the US at ($800) £522 more than the D3S. In the UK, the price difference is ($1960) £1280. Similar price disparities are being reported across Europe.

Equipment Price Rises and Short Supply Following Tsunami

As anticipated, the price of some professional camera equipment in the UK has risen by more than 10% in the month following the Japan tsunami with some items now in short supply. This means a Nikon D3S now costs a rather eye watering £3,600 from major suppliers. It's worth bearing in mind that "new for old" insurance cover is often based on the price of equipment at the time the policy was renewed and photographers should check that they have adequate cover at the new prices in the event of a total loss.

If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium

Back from a whirlwind visit to Brussels covering a conference on behalf of a client; shooting speakers, delegates and the accompanying exhibition space. I do a lot of this kind of work and believe me, it's challenging. Over the course of two days I shot, edited, captioned and uploaded more than 2,000 images to supply media outlets across Europe and it's always rewarding to watch the download statistics building in the hours, days and weeks following an event.

Conference lighting directors often use very low levels of light. It's intimate, and running the lights at such low levels makes skin glow. The eye has an affinity for the warm light of an incandescent light source reaching back to the dawn of time. For photographers this can mean working at ISO values which would have been impossible only a couple of years ago. Today, we shoot at ISO 3200 and above, confident that the quality will be there, and able to focus on an eyeball in levels of light where it's barely possible to see, let alone read.

I always like to include a few images like the one below in the coverage. This sort of picture  always finds a home in a design somewhere.

Moving quickly from a windowless room, lit largely by the reflected light from a projector screen, I made the first image using the 3000K white balance I already had set on my D3S before quickly dialing in a more technically correct white balance for the second frame. I prefer the first version.

You're never more than six feet from an Orphan Works bill

Orphan Works legislation is bearing down upon us in the UK once more, less than 12 months after it was last thrown out of Parliament. This time, if it's not our own government it seems the EU is coming for us too.

So what is an Orphan Work and how does it affect photography?

Simply put, an Orphan Work is  any intellectual property for which the owner cannot easily be traced.  Following a "diligent search" in Orphan Speak, the work, or image in our case, may be copied, reproduced and distributed without the inconvenience of any money changing hands. Except that is, for a token fee deposited with a yet to be created government orphan licensing agency.

Unfortunately for photographers, it's all too easy for our work to become orphaned once it appears on the internet. Few sites upload IPTC metadata in image files and many will actively strip it out. Once an image has been downloaded it's an orphan.

If that wasn't bad enough, the global nature of the internet means the work of photographers from the US, with its system of copyright registration and punitive damages, to Germany where intellectual property is inalienable, will find their work has not only lost its protection but the UK Exchequer has benefited at their expense.

Wow, great picture!!

"I found these great pictures on this site. It's on the internet so they're free, right?"

Actually, probably not. In fact if you can't see it explicitly stated in proximity to the picture, you should assume someone will require paying for you to use that image on your site. If in doubt it's always best to contact the photographer.

Sadly, there are tools that make it only too easy to indiscriminately  harvest pictures from insecure sites. If you're using one of these you're almost certainly one step away from breaking the law depending on what you do next, once your hard disc is heaving with booty.

My own images are stored using the Photoshelter system. That's where the links on the right take you. They're safe. If you're a photographer with your own server you might want to think about blocking the harvesters via an .htaccess file. No, I don't know what that is either. Luckily, US based photographer David Brabyn does.