One amazing Nikon

My wife called me outside on Saturday to see a tiny deer that was bedding down next to our front steps. Naturally I grabbed my new Nikon D700. I set my ISO to 400 with a Tamron 28-300 lens. Well, I didn't need the long lens because the fawn was sitting right there just 4 feet below me. I quickly shot two images but the camera's monitor was black. I looked around for the problem and discovered that I had the camera still set on Manual from a commercial shoot the day before (125th @ f/22). I quickly switched the camera to Program mode but the deer had taken off. I did use the long lens to get some shots of the fawn dancing around like a little lamb. It was really cute but I was bothered that I had missed the sweet close-up shots. I always shoot in raw. Now you will see why: I opened this image in Camera Raw and there was almost nothing there. I swung the exposure slider to the right four (yes 4!) stops and added some fill light. My final move was to desaturate the greens a little. That was it. That is the image you see above.

Let me run over this one more time. It is a 400 ISO image shot with a Nikon D700. It was 4 stops underexposed and pushed in Camera Raw. After all of that there is NO noise in this image. If I want the kind of huge chunky grain that I used to create by pushing Ectachrome 3 stops I'll just have to use Lightroom 3 to get it after the fact. This Nikon does one splendid job of shooting with little or no noise. Yea Nikon!