A New Year and New Gear...

I’m finally getting around to a new post. It’s been a little over six months since my last one. I have an excuse but no one wants to hear it.

My plan for 2020 is to post at least once a month, ideally more often than that.

So I’m starting out the New Year with some new gear. For the last several years I’ve scoffed at the trend towards mirrorless cameras. I never cares for the electronic viewfinder. And given that Nikon had no professional lever mirrorless cameras, switching camera brands would have been incredibly expensive.

Well, Nikon finally released two full frame mirrorless cameras, the Z7 and Z6. Again, both expensive bodies. In addition a new lens mount. Although they do have the FTZ adapter so you can mount F lenses on the Z bodies.

A few months ago, Nikon released the Z50, a DX body with two kit lenses; a 16-50 and a 50-250. The price for the body and two kit lenses was less than a Z6 body. So I thought I’d take a look at it.

And wow, I really like the Z50. Very small, easy to handle, feature rich, a very nice camera. Well I ended up buying a 24-70 Z mount lens and the FTZ adapter. With the FTZ I can use my 10-20 DX F mount lens and my Tamron 100-400 after updating the firmware. Older lenses are manual focus only with the FTZ but with focus peaking, getting sharp images is no problem.

So I sent the Z50 and kit lenses back and bought two Z50 bodies. I’ll forever be in the “I need two bodies” mindset. A hold over from when I worked professionally and would go on a shoot with two bodies and three to four prime lenses. Some shoots required three bodies. So it feels bizarre to have only one body, even tho I’m not shooting professionally anymore.

So, I sold my last two DSLR mirrored bodies and a couple of lenses.

I found out how to set up back button focusing. Am learning the menus, etc. The only issues now is not being able to read the RAW files in my older version of Lightroom, so I have to convert them to DNG format. I’m hoping a future release of Exposure X5 will include support got Z50 RAW files. But in the meantime, most of the images I take are JPEG and I transfer them to one of my iPads for processing and posting.

I’m quite impressed with the results I’m getting with the Z50 and the three lenses I have remaining. Here are a few.

"Tri-X, f/8, and be there."