Having gone out for a late evening walk last night, I was disappointed to find heavy clouds building as sunset approached, gradually sapping the colour from the surrounding countryside, pushing everything towards a dull, bluish grey.
As it looked like nothing interesting was going to happen, I set off back towards where I'd parked the car. This turned out to be a bad move, because, as I approached the car the sun hit a low lying break in the heavy clouds and began to light the sky, totally catching me off guard.
Given I was in a relatively unattractive spot, I turned around and briskly headed back up the lane towards a hopefully more interesting location, well aware that time was limited.
In the end, these are probably the best shots I got. The specific location was far from perfect and I didn't have much time to really think about the compositions, so I'm less than happy with the details on the ground, but that sky was well worth catching during the brief window of time it unexpectedly lit up.
All images taken hand held with the Nikon Z8 + 24-70 f/2.8S. Processed from single raw files in Capture One Pro 23.
He doesn't even have a hole :-(
It's just hung on a solid inside brick wall, at least the ventilation works OK to take the cooking smells out.
The kitchen is sort of open connected in like an "L" shape to a short corridor and a dining room with a balcony door on the other side, that's not too far away. So you can blast some air through occasionally
I like it. It's a lot more responsive and snappier than the Z7 and fixes one of my biggest gripes with the Z7, namely, for reasons I could never fathom, that it couldn't display a horizon level and a histogram at the same time. I used to shoot the Z7 exclusively with ES, so I'm used to using a camera without a physical shutter, but it's nice to know any movement wont be skewed by rolling shutter.
I haven't noticed any drop in quality through the slightly diminished dynamic range, despite pushing shadows quite heavily, although this is probably offset by the Z7's occasional tendency to introduce banding when heavily pushed.
The camera fits more comfortably in my hands and the weight difference is negligible, although considering I also use a GFX100S I consider this to be my lightweight system.
The AF is certainly a step up in general use, although I never found the Z7 to be unreliable for static subjects, but it did struggle a bit sometimes after dusk. I've played around with the various tracking options and they seem pretty solid, although I haven't used them in anger yet, hopefully when it eventually stops raining I'll be able to get back up on the moors looking for deer and birds of prey.
I prefer the classic Nikon pro control method to the mode and drive dial alternative used on the Z7.
One of the reasons I got it was for the much better video. Less rolling shutter, better quality codecs, log curves and support for in camera raw are all great things to have. It's also nice to have a waveform monitor, something I've missed since the days I used to shoot stuff with camcorders and one of the best ways to expose video.
Downsides are few, but there are some.
The main, really stupid omission is in the bracketing options. Where the Z7 can do negative bracketing sequences (e.g. 0,-1,-2,...) or positive ones (e.g. 0,+1,+2,...), this can only do balanced bracketing sequences (e.g. -2,-1,0,+1,+2). It's a mind boggling omission on a high end camera and something I hope they fix in a firmware update as it's really handy when shooting sunsets. Typically I expose for the scene and then bracket with several underexposed images. Now I've got to expose for the scene and then shift my exposure down by the range of the positive part of the bracket sequence. It's cumbersome and not something I've seen mentioned in any of the reviews I've seen / read.
The battery life isn't as good as the Z7. It's not terrible and still better than the GFX, but I have found myself having to use my spare battery on more than one occasion, which is something that rarely happened with the Z7.
The extra flexibility of the multi way tilt screen is nice to have, but it does feel a bit fragile and fiddly. Hopefully this doesn't become a problem at some point in the future.
The body is all plastic. I wasn't too concerned about this as it feels solid enough and I guess helps to keep the weight down, but the same week that I bought it, I saw videos from two separate photographers (Gary Gough and Matt Granger) who'd both managed to drop theirs and damage them. Gary Gough managed to shear a chunk off the viewfinder hump which was kind of shocking to see, while Matt Grangers damage was internal, he managed to dislocate the sensor shield. I guess the takeaway there is, don't drop it.
Minor gripe, but of you use an L-bracket, the base plate shape has been redesigned such that the battery door can't be opened without needing a little pop out piece on the L-bracket that needs to be opened first to make space for it. This wasn't a problem I had with the Z7 and the RRS L-bracket I have.
In terms of general grumbles, I have a few of these too, although the Z7 was guilty of some of these too.
Settings banks are (for me at least) a much better approach than custom positions on the mode dial, although I'd like it if there were more than four of them and also I'd like separate banks for still and video. I can't see any reason for this limitation unless they're really struggling for non volatile memory or something, but that seems unlikely.
Another minor thing, they haven't improved the memory card door. I often found as I walked around with the Z7 on my sling strap, the memory card door would brush against my body and pop open. Typically this wouldn't be an issue, but if I was out in rain it could be disastrous. I'd hoped this might have been improved on the Z8 with the addition of a catch or something like the GFX has, but it's pretty much the same and has the same problem.
Also minor is the video mode doesn't use shutter angles. These are much nicer to work with than shutter speeds when shooting video (e.g. you can just set your shutter angle and not need to worry about adjusting it if you change the frame rate, whereas you'd need to remember to change the shutter speed to maintain a specific shutter angle) and would be a negligible thing to implement in firmware.
I hope that's helpful. Whether it's worth replacing one of your Z7s with one I wouldn't like to say, there's no quality advantage to it and I'm pretty sure I didn't really need it (I part exchanged my near mint X-H2 and a long Fuji X series lens that weren't getting any use against it, which took the edge off the cost), but I do find it to be a much nicer camera to use than the Z7. When I do get round to properly making use of the video features it'll be a significant step up from anything else I've previously owned for that application, but for landscape photography I think it's just a much nicer camera to use.
I've still got my Z7. The part ex price for it was almost insulting, so I figured I'd rather keep it as a backup body and might use it when going up mountains to shave a bit of weight off, although I could shave a lot more off by simply swapping lenses (e.g. using either the 24-70 f/4S or 24-200 rather than the 24-70 f/2.8S).
Yeah, there's quite a bit of latitude for that and looking at them on here they do look a bit dark, although that's not helped by the bright white background on this site.
When I originally edited them I did try lifting them a bit more, but felt it didn't look right. Maybe I should revisit them. I've noticed my edits tending to be a lot darker of late, I wonder if it's a mood / frame of mind thing with recent events? Either that or my glaucoma is kicking in. Yep, let's go with the mood thing.
Here's a quick edit of the image above. I've lifted the overall exposure a bit, dropped the highlights to stop them clipping and darkened the upper half of the sky. I think the sky loses some of its drama and creaminess in this version. What do you reckon?
Thank you for a very complete rundown. I think in all honesty my Z7 first version does all I want it to do and the Z8 would not bring much to the table for me. I might try and use a demo to see if it handles better. Very tempting. If it has button driven bracketing, like my D850, I might be sold on this camera.
The Z7 was much denigrated for having just one card slot. I see very low SH prices. Indeed my SH second body Z7 was a bargain. My D850 has double card slots, but I have never used the second slot. The power of internet influences basically ruined this cameras saleability.
Yes, there's a dedicated "BKT" button in the control cluster on the top panel, alongside the drive mode button to enable auto bracketing (i.e. take the entire set at once) right next to it. It does have the infuriating caveat I mentioned in that it can't do solely positive or negative bracketing though. A really strange thing to miss out.
It's a very underrated camera. I can't say I've ever felt the need to use a backup card slot either, but then I'm not a professional photographer. Ironically, I've never had an SD card fail on me, but the supposedly more robust CF Express card I originally used with my Z7 did get corrupted and lose a couple of shots.
The only thing I ever felt was really missing on the Z7 for landscape photography was being able to display a histogram and levelling horizon at the same time, which is something I don't think I've ever seen anyone else complain about, but I found it really frustrating. The tracking AF was a massive step backwards for Nikon compared to the D850, which I think is the main thing the Z7 gets criticised for, although I don't believe the Z7ii did much to improve that.
Looks like a lovely day out and quite different to your usual work too.
I particularly like the way the leaning telegraph poles all lean by the same amount, as if they were originally installed and lined up that way using a badly calibrated spirit level. It reminds me of a tale I heard when I used to work at BT aeons ago. A legendary engineer in the area installed a row of telegraph poles down a long straight road, but he did it in record time, getting commended by his bosses for his speedy work. Of course, the bosses didn't realise he'd achieved this incredible feat by sawing several feet off the bottom of each pole and not planting them as deep as they should have been. Unsurprisingly, a few weeks later the poles were pointing in all sorts of directions and all had to be dug out and replaced, at which point his ingenious shortcut was revealed.
Now, what you really needed for the frog shots was a 100-400 and a Z8 ;-)
Yes, there's a dedicated "BKT" button in the control cluster on the top panel, alongside the drive mode button to enable auto bracketing (i.e. take the entire set at once) right next to it. It does have the infuriating caveat I mentioned in that it can't do solely positive or negative bracketing though. A really strange thing to miss out.
Oh dear, the bracket button on my D850 saves a lot of time messing in the menus. Looks like I will be off to take a look at the Z8, as this stupid little feature is something I miss on the Z7
