I have been shooting with Nikons for a long, long time. I “borrowed” my big brothers F301 back in the mid 1980s so much that he got very, very annoyed and my Dad had to get me my own SLR… it wasn’t a Nikon but a Fuji with a broken light meter. I loved it, I learned a lot with it and it’s scratched and battered 50mm lens. When I eventually bought my own camera some years later it was back to Nikon. Ish. Yes, in 1994 I bought a Nikormat FT3 from 1977 - an absolute beast of a camera that has been around the world several times. I even lent it to my brother at one stage in a reversal of fortunes! I still have it, somewhere… perhaps I will put a film through for old times sake! Despite a brief dalliance with Canon and getting sidetracked by the Olympus OM System and Fujifilm, I have stuck with Nikon for most of my life.
A few months ago I decided to dip a toe in the Nikon Z waters with a used Z6 mk II, 14-30 f4 and 24-70 f4 lenses. Most of my work of late has been in real estate, but I kept the D850 and all the years worth of Nikon lenses to hand incase any other work came along that needed large file sizes. The little Z has about half of the resolution of the D850, but despite… or perhaps because of this… it fitted perfectly into the brief for my day to day work on property sales.
The smaller image size certainly helped speed up my workflow , which has been of huge benefit, but in the field it is the handling of this little camera that really shone. The live-view focus was a major bugbear when I was using the D850 for shooting houses, particularly in bathrooms with the multitude of reflective surfaces it would often struggle to lock on and rendered several shoots sub-par when a misfocus wasn’t noticed until later. Add in the inbody stabalisation and I can now do without the tripod for “standard” shoots (I still use it on HDR/Natural light work) and a form factor that facilitates a non standard grip style when shooting low (I wrap my hand around the body and work the shutter with my thumb!) and it means I am able to work through a property very quickly with absolutely flawless results.
Once I was confident that I was going to stick with the Z series rather than switching to the big Fujifilm GFX which was “Option B” I decided to add a 70-200 f2.8, an absolutely stunning lens that allows me to focus in on details, produce better portraits and also work landscapes as I often like to shoot in the medium to long telephoto range in order to compress the perspective for more dramatic results in upland areas. I also began the process of deciding whether to sell the D850 and if so what to replace it with… a Z9, wait for the fabled Z8, wait to see if a Z7 mk III would emerge or just get on with it and buy a Z7 mk II which does, after all, use the same (or a very similar) sensor to the D850 I love. After some long deliberation I decided to go with the Z7 II, a barely used example was available up the road in Ffordes so I traded my D850, almost all my F mount lenses, my Fujifilm X-T3 and all of it’s lenses and accessories against the sibling of my Z6 II. I also added an absolutely fantastic lens - the 24-70 f2.8 - as a general purpose “standard” zoom and an FTZ adaptor so that my existing 200-500 f5.6 and 50mm f1.4 (which I may be alone in loving) could live on. After an evening with the manual I have both cameras set up to function the same as one another so should be able to seamlessly switch from one to the other. To keep me on track the Z6II has a SmallRig L bracket in grey and the Z7II has a 3 Legged Thing Zelda bracket in copper! I now have the full functionality lens wise that I had between systems in the past (from 14mm - 500mm covered), I have a cracking mid resolution body and another that gives me the same 48MP files I got from the D850 but in a smaller package with much, much better optics.
And there are only a few short weeks until the good light starts to come back too! Once I have started working with the Z7 more for the work that I love doing most I will do a proper review. But for the moment here is a test shot using the big 500mm out of my office window!
