My daughter Olivia and I went for a short hike in Glacier on Christmas Eve. The skies cleared and the light was perfect. I took this photo and looked at her and said, "Yep, that one's a keeper."

We had an unusually pleasant holiday. Deep blue skies. A little fog to add some frost. It's all supposed to go into the tank tomorrow with a sizable snow. We'll see...

We've finally had a few clear nights. The end of the day on one of the shortest days of the year...

Not all bad weather is bad.

Pine Marten with squirrel, ISO "12,800" or H1

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been putting the D7000 through the ringer in dark places — mostly at a slew of local school Christmas concerts, nearly all of them in horrible light.
It’s performed admirably at ISOs ranging from 1600 to 5000. The 1600 files are very, very good, the 5000 files are what I would call soft, but they reproduce, at least on newsprint, quite well.
The video is also very fun and quite good. I shot about 15 minutes of video the other night of a swan feeding. The skies were dark and gray and icy and I was shooting at ISO 3200 and the video simply looks great. One thing I have noticed is that in dark conditions with video, you’re better off setting the exposure manually. The autoexposure tends to run on the dark side.
But last night was a true test. I had slogged out to a favorite spot (it’s been raining hard the past couple of days, and the snow is soft) and it was pretty much dark. I saw a shape run in front of me carrying something in its mouth. It was a pine marten and I couldn’t see exactly what it had. It went up a tree and then stopped in the crotch of a branch and looked at me.
Now with my eyes I could only see the marten as a black blob. But I jammed the monopod into the snow, managed to get the 200-400 to focus on the marten, turned on the vibration reduction in the lens and then rattled off a series of shots ranging from ISO 6400 to 12,800. The 12,800 shots turned out sharper because I had a slightly faster shutter speed of 1/30th of a second (they’re all fairly grainy, because they’re underexposed, I didn’t have time to tweak the exposure before the marten took off).
But even so, I was amazed at the detail I got, considering it was dark (oh how I wished I had a flash in my pocket).
At any rate, the camera has proven its worth. It’s built like a small tank. The controls are easy to use (turning on the video takes just a flick of a switch and the push of a button). It shoots 6 frames a second and the autofocus is fast and accurate.
All in all, I’m very pleased.

I've added a short movie, shot with the new Nikon D7000. The video is dark because it was nearly dark outside and a little shaky because it was shot on a monopod using a Nikon 200-400. I'm just trying to show how deep the snow is. Right now it's anywhere from knee to hip deep. The high country has upwards of six feet of snow already. Though we've had a break the past few days and it's supposed to rain in lower elevations later this week.

To view the movie, click on the "movies" link at right.