Just hours after taking delivery of my new Nikon D4 camera body last week, I headed up to the Big Bear Mountains to play in the snow with my family.  The drive was an adventure with more than 12 inches of new snow on the roads, and we woke up the next morning to a picture-perfect sunny day to play in the snow!

 I grabbed my new Nikon D4, and a few of my favorite lenses (Nikkor 70-200mm f2.8, 200mm f2.0, 85mm f1.4 and my 35mm f1.4) and headed outside to grab some shots of my wife and four kids playing in front of the house.  I had spent a couple hours the night before, after we got the kids settled in for bed, fiddling around with the settings and discovering a few of the new features the Nikon D4 had to offer.

Since I’m sort of a control freak when it comes to exposure and white balance, I shot mostly everything in manual mode and kelvin white balance.  I did however really play with the autofocus settings to test out the new face recognition feature.  It was pretty cool watching the camera lock onto my kid’s little faces and follow them around as I snapped away.  Although I am so used to controlling my focus selector from previous models like the D3 and D3s, this may be a feature I will continue to use on the D4 the more I learn to trust it.  One thing for sure is that the D4 is extremely fast and smooth in all autofocus modes but I’m sure it will take a few months to test and decide which modes I prefer the most.

One thing that stood out to me right away is how amazingly quiet the shutter is on the D4 compared to all previous flagship DSLRs Nikon has released. In “quiet mode” it’s even more impressive because I can control when the mirror lays back down.  The skin tones straight out of the camera seem accurate and true to what I saw when shooting.  My associate Kat pulled some of her favorites from my little family shoot and used a new Aperture film plugin she found called VSCO to process the images.  I like what she chose!  Hope you like them too!

Chloe tearing it  up on the sled

My wife looking hot as usual.. the pink speed disc is so in right now!

Aidan getting some air

Accidental product placement of the Kelly Moore Thirst Relief Bag so why not give it a link? The bag rules!

Evan took a few face diggers but that didn’t phase him.

Now that’s a snowball!

Her first taste of fresh tracks

Love my girls