 |
| Ruby-crowned Kinglet in Aloe, SF Botanical Garden |
I finally broke down and bought a Nikon Z8 with a 180-600mm telephoto (a very popular combo) and 1.4X teleconverter. Today I took it out for its shakedown cruise at the botanical garden where I got off to a rocky start. No matter how much I pressed the shutter release, nothing happened!
Or so I thought. It took a minute to see that I had left the camera in "Silent Mode," which must have been the default setting. I hadn't thought much of it while setting up the camera over the last couple of days, and I hadn't even released the shutter on purpose even once until this morning's trip to the SFBG. (I didn't even have the right card reader until yesterday.)
Another default setting I used was "Normal" for image quality, which I assumed would be RAW mode, but it turned out to be JPEG. So all my shots today were done as JPEGs, which is probably a good thing since I came home after a couple of hours having fired off more than 600 frames. (Out of 634 frames, I deleted 552 in Lightroom.)
Anyway, after using the lightweight Lumix FZ-80D for so long, I was worried that the Z8 would be too heavy to hand-hold for fidgety little birds. But even though it was far heavier, it was still managable. When not in use I had it on a Waka neck strap. I'd carried it down the hill on my bike inside a Think Tank Glass Limo backpack. I'll still carry the much more portable Lumix for my daily walks and rides, but I'm looking forward to getting a lot of use out of the new Nikon otherwise. (For now I'm going to stick with my 13-year-old D800E, which is still excellent, for landscapes and macro.)
 |
| Hummingbird Feeding on Aloe Flowers |
 |
| This hummer was shot at ISO 12,800! Lightroom doesn't do noise reduction on JPEG files, so this is right out of the box, so to speak. |
 |
| The song sparrow was foraging on top of the aquatic weeds on the small pond in the Children's Garden. The camera easily acquired focus on shaded subjects (unlike the Lumix). |
 |
| Townsend's Warbler |
 |
| The Z8 couldn't actually read my mind when my subject was behind branches, so I still had to work to capture the orange-crowned warbler. |
 |
| Even though I was set on "Bird" capture, the camera easily found a squirrel's eye. |
 |
| By the time I photographed this yellow-rumped warbler I had re-learned one reason for using "back-button focus" after accidentally firing off a few frames while obtaining focus by pressing the shutter half-way. |
 |
| The pine siskins were back in the alder tree at the pond. |
 |
| Anna's Hummingbird |
 |
| The Townsend's warbler spent a fair amount of time collecting seeds in the alder as well. |
 |
| Pine Siskin Eating Alder Seeds |
 |
| A ruby-crowned kinglet also stopped by the alder. |
 |
| I had to get home in time for other activities today, so I left before I would have otherwise, and given how many frames I had to download, that's a good thing. |
 |
| Black Phoebe |
* * *
Posts
