Even the seemingly endless daylight in Alaska eventually ends. Last night we were outside until late in the evening when a large brown bear gave us a beautiful portrait opportunity, but...we had lost most of the light and in order to get any kind of reasonable shutter speed to freeze the motion of the walking bear I needed to move my D700 up to ISO 2200. This gave me 1/250s, just enough shutter speed, with my Nikon 200-400mm f/4 lens and 1.7x Nikon TC-17E Teleconverter for an effective 650mm focal length. The result was a sharp image of the bear. Of course the fur color is not as rich as it would have been a little earlier in the evening, but like so many subjects this bear chose to cooperate at the last possible moment.
The FX sensor on the D700 (the same as the one on the D3) delivered completely. I simply ran my standard "Raw Prep" action on the resulting NEF (it includes a quick pass with Noise Ninja & Raw Pre-sharpening with nik Sharpener Pro) and then added back a little of the color I saw in the subject using Curvemeister and did a little sharpening to create the finished image. Photographically being low in the grass to get eye-level with the bear was vital to creating the feeling of communication with the bear.
Participants in the workshop shooting on either side of me got similar images, either by using their D700 or D3 cameras, or with other Nikon and Canon cameras with smaller sensors which made it necessary to capture the original without a teleconverter (allowing a lower ISO) and then of course needing a little cropping to regain the full frame face in the portrait if they desired that look.