Three years of using Nikon Z
And how it supports my growth as a photographer
I bought my Nikon Z6 body in December 2020. I’ve now owned it for nearly three years, so I thought it’s a good time to reflect on me using it and the Nikon Z line. I feel like the Nikon Z line supported my growth as a photographer. Read on so see why I made the leap to the Nikon Z cameras.
Why did I want a new camera: I await my package being delivered with the mail. In the box, the Nikon Z6 along with the 24-70 f/4 S and the FTZ adapter. Quite a step up from my beloved Nikon D5600 to the full frame world. My main reason to step up up are the promised night and low light shooting in the full frame world, which I enjoy very much. It also helps I got a good deal on the first generation mirrorless cameras with the recent release of the 2nd generation Z bodies. I was curious to see what mirrorless would bring. I had seen the new Z lenses and the were also a big reason why I made the plunge to mirrorless full frame.
First impressions: From day one it has been a lot of fun to use, and I like the image quality coming from the images, it has an amazing dynamic range, fantastisc colours out of camera and just working with the RAW files is really ease. I love low light shooting and astro images so I could immediately see the big difference between the files.
My lens pickings: I soon started looking at different Z lenses, I picked up the 50mm 1.8 S from Nikon. I am still stunned by the quality of the images, I can’t believe my eyes in front of the monitor. What a piece of glass. I’ve added some images below for you too see results from Z glass. I tested a lot of them: the short conclusion is that nearly every single piece of Z glass is amazing. You basically can’t go wrong. Sure there are image quality differences between lenses but they all have there own pros and cons.
Best value prime lens: Nikon Z 50 mm 1.8 S
Best value zoom lens: Nikon Z 24-120 f/4 S
How the camera helped me improve: I just really love to improve my work every year, and set myself some goals. Some are quite challenging but I feel as if this camera has helped me reach some of them. I wouldn’t say it all wouldn’t be doable with my old camera but the leap in quality of my images for me is visible. The camera made me go out more, before I never went on my own to photograph or scout new locations, now I often visit new spots I haven’t seen before to see if there are any images to collect. It triggered me mentally to go out more, but still I would like to go more. Setting goals is good, but often you will find you can’t reach them or you’ve just set your goals too low.
Positives of the Nikon Z6: The Nikon Z6 has been with me to a lot of European countries, I have used it in bad weather conditions, cold weather, hot weather and it never once failed me. I am also quite surprised how image stabilisation helps with all images, you can go to really low shutter speeds and still have perfectly sharp handheld images which is amazing. Also Nikon has done a lot to improve the firmware over the years, adding eye detect autofocus, which is amazing support from them. I used in once or twice but it does work well on a 5 year old body. I also like the EVF a lot, it is just so handy to see your exposure directly trough the viewfinder.
Downside of the Nikon Z6: The downside from coming from DSLR to mirrorless is fast moving action, I feel like my old D5600 was a lot better for wildlife. I used the Z6 in Norway and had a lot of trouble to get good results with fast flying puffins. It highly likely also has to do with my wildlife skills as they are less evolved. For me another negative is the dust. When you change lenses frequently you easily gather a lot of dust on the sensor. It is easy to clean but still I had a lot less trouble of dust on the sensor with my D5600. Last negative is the lack of astro mode, for lack of a better word, were the camera temporalely bumps ISO to maximum so you can compose the photo without any lightsource around. It would help if they added that so I can more easily search for compositions in the dark.
The future of Nikon Z line I recently tested the Z9 and Z8 in the nearby camera shop, it feels like cheating with the autofocus capabilities. It is so fast if you miss shots now it is always the photographers fault, never the camera body. I am tempted by these amazing Z line bodies but I won’t invest in them. For now, for my use case the Z6 is absolutely fine. I feel like Nikon is currently in a great spot, and is silently blowing all the competition away in terms of value.
If you want to ask my anthing about the gear I use contact me via social media or the contact page.
