Z9 First Impressions

As you may be aware, I recently purchased a Nikon Z9 mirrorless camera. I have only had it short while but so far, my first impressions are very positive. One of my favorite features, being new to mirrorless, is the ability to see the exposure in the viewfinder as I am taking pictures. That has made up for the biggest short coming I had with my Nikon D850s. For some reason Nikon doesn’t believe the light meter in your camera should tell you an accurate exposure. When I use Manual mode with Auto ISO (my go to starting point for wildlife), and then use Exposure Compensation, the light meter in my camera would say my exposure was at zero (correct exposure). This would happen even if I had a minus two exposure compensation. The meter would say zero and the camera would take a pictures two stops underexposed. The meter was not reflecting what the camera was doing.

Now with the mirrorless camera the light meter still behaves the same way but when I look through the viewfinder I see the image is two stops underexposed. It was so easy to get fooled by this in the D850 and take pictures with incorrect exposure when I thought it was correct, but now I don’t have that problem anymore!

The second best feature (the one everyone else is most excited by), is the amazing focusing ability of the camera and how it tracks wildlife. If you have used any of the great cameras with animal eye tracking, you know how much of a game changer this is for wildlife photography.

I am still experimenting with my menus and button customization. I will report on that once I lock in my decisions.

Here are a few images with the new camera.

Z9 More time

New Explorations