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| Sunflower (Click images to view larger.) |
The short answer is, "not yet." I like the advantages of a Nikon Z8 over my D800E, such as being able to crank the ISO up to 9000 to get a fast shutter speed for bird and other widlife photography, and to eliminating mirror-slap during focus-stacking and timelapse photography. The one disadvantage that holds me back is the means of focus-stacking in mirrorless cameras.
From what I gather, focus-stacking is automated to an extent, but isn't quite dialed in yet. It looks like a complicated set-up that involves going into the menu to punch in your settings, and there's no way to set the front-to-back range that you want to be sharp. Sometimes you want everything to be sharp, but other times you want a range to be sharp while leaving the background out of focus.
I'm surprised we can't just choose an aperture setting then press a button to set the front and rear focus points (one press for the front, another press for the back), and let the camera, with all its ingenious software, calculate and run the interval to cover the selected focus range. And we should be able to do that in the viewfinder, not just the display screen. I don't want to have to go into the menus.
There are other advantages to going mirrorless, but if I'm going to buy a $4,000 camera, I don't want to have to buy another one when a new model finally comes out that makes focus-stacking, which is one of the great innovations of digital photography, simpler.
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