Rumours of this 36-megapixel beast has been floating around for a couple years and Nikon has finally officially announced the new camera which comes in a couple of flavours: The D800 and the D800E. The latter is a slightly sharper version of the former. The D800E doesn’t come with the same low-pass filter as the D800 thus making its images sharper (but leaving photographers with the potential for moiré patters in their images).

It’s more than just megapixels though. I’ll leave it to the experts at dpreview.com to give you the rundown of all the features in their preview, but suffice it to say, if this camera is as good in real life as it is on paper, photographers can expect some exceptional image quality to start filling their hard drives soon.

The D800 microsite has a few examples of shots from the camera if you can’t wait to see what some people have been doing with it.

One could expect this features set to be wholly unaffordable for enthusiasts, but not so. In the US, it carries a $3,000 price tag which is pretty great considering what you’re getting. It’s a good thing because I’ll probably need a new computer to manage the massive file sizes we can expect from this camera.

The great views from Scotland’s Rannoch Moor keep coming. All of these spots are just off the road that leads into Glen Coe. I hope I get the chance to go back and explore more of the area to see if I can find any good walking trails.

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From near the same spot as the previous photo of the day, the sun has set and the dusk colour paints the sky over Rannoch Moor.

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A perfectly colourful sunset breaks over Rannoch Moor in the Scottish Highlands.

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Last November, we stayed at one of the cottages at the Lovelady Shield Country House a couple of miles from Alston where our alarm clock was only the cows mooing in a nearby field. It was our base for exploring the Hadrian’s Wall and its surroundings, but I didn’t have to go far from the cottage to get a good view.

This bridge spanned a small brook that crossed the property and was only a few short steps from the hotel. The swirling current made for a great pattern in this long exposure as the sun sat low in the sky.

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Here’s the last one for now from Eilean Donan Castle. This is also from from this evening that threatened to kick up a serious storm with these brooding clouds. The rains never came in force, so I was able to capture this without getting too wet, though I did have to clean off the lens a few times. Scotland’s dramatic weather made for a colourful, moody background to this gorgeous location.

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Stormy skies gather in the evening above Eilean Donan Castle in Scotland.

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The last photo of the day was a bit far away from Scotland’s Eilean Donan Castle, so we’ve moved closer and in this shot. Now, we’re ready to cross the bridge on the way out to the little tidal island that is home to one of the UK’s loveliest castles.

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If megapixel-counting isn’t your thing and you’re more interested in seeing some exotic-location movies produced with the camera, these are the videos for you below.

Happy 2012 everyone! Let’s start the new year off with a photo of one of my favourite places on earth: Eilean Donan Castle.

This is one of the first castles I ever visited and I’ve been hooked on the things ever since. I grew up reading Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and whatever other fantasy novels I could get my hands on, so if I couldn’t spend any time around knights or dragons, a castle would suit me just fine. Unfortunately for me, you don’t find a lot of epic castles in western Canada.

So when I took a trip to Scotland in the year 2000, I was awestruck. All my romantic, idealised visions of medieval Europe came to life. I had never walked a castle’s walls until Eilean Donnan, so it holds a pretty special place in my fantasy-loving heart. After all, you never forget your first castle, right? It was just as great when we got the chance to last year.

This particular shot of the castle deviates from the usual views you’ll spot on the postcards in that it’s shot from the East to the West. The castle itself doesn’t cut quite as interesting a profile from this side, but this blossoming sunset was too good to pass up especially after a mostly rainy day driving up from Northwest England on our way to the Isle of Skye.

This panorama was a challenging one to get exposed properly. The sun obviously overwhelmed the scene on the left side, so I bracketed exposures through the whole panorama. There was a fair amount of post-processing work that needed to be done to align the photos and get the different exposures working together, butI got there in the end to reveal this photo which captures some of the warm glow that bathed the castle that evening.

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