Me and my five (so far!) Nikon Z7

The Nikon Z7 is a great camera, with the upcoming firmware update(s) it’s going to be even greater, and I won’t sing its praises here, others on the Internet are and have been doing it much better than I could hope to.

There is one thing, though, that bothers me: supported languages. And this is what this article is about, so that you can avoid making the same mistakes as I.

So, I bought my first Z7 mid-November 2018, just in time for my December photo trip to Brittany. Now, what is the first thing you do when you receive a new digital camera these days, after charging the battery, that is? You open the menus and start configuring it to make it more your own, and make it work the way you want.

And as soon as I started doing that, I discovered that the menus on my Z7 were in English and Chinese. Only.

Now, that doesn’t really bother me personally, as I’m used to configuring all my cameras in English, which is like a second native tongue to me, and which makes it a lot easier as most of the camera-related content found on the Web is in English anyway, so having the camera set up in English already makes it easier to try out the various tips I may stumble upon, but... but... when the day to resell it comes, what do I do, in France, surrounded by French-speaking, Italian-speaking, German-speaking, Spanish-speaking potential customers?

Obviously, it is going to be a problem.

So, I think “OK, my bad, I should have checked/asked, I’m not going to return it now as with scarce inventories, there won’t be time to obtain another one before I go to Brittany, I will procure another one later and resell this one with English only, hoping to take advantage of the fact that it will still be a very new camera to find a buyer that will be OK with English only...”

With a couple of weeks to spare before my trip, I chanced and ordered a second Z7 from the FNAC marketplace vendor Infinity Pro, which claimed to have the camera in stock... but finally decided to reimburse my3,431 euros as they could not procure the Z7...! The claim was false, obviously.

Not daunted (how stupid can one be?), I ordered a third Z7 from the E-global Central Belgium online vendor. I waited days and days, no one answering my emails, no one giving me any news (in spite of having promptly debited my VISA card!), and suddenly I was informed that my 3,018 euros were going to be reimbursed!

Considering the obvious difficulties to obtain this camera, I decided to wait until after Christmas, and so on January 7, I ordered my fourth Z7 from UK online vendor Progadgets KCS. UK vendors have very good prices because they source their products from Hong Kong, and there must be some special customs arrangement between the UK and their former colony, so that goods may enter the European Union without paying VAT, or something like that... Better hurry if one wants to take advantage of this, because after the Brexit, it will be too late...

Anyway, this time I had done my homework and asked about supported languages. That vendor had been very reactive and had listed five or six languages in their email, so I thought I was safe, but when I received the camera and began to configure it, I discovered that, in fact, what I had mistaken for the beginning of a long list of languages, was in fact the full list. And so, there was, in addition to English and Chinese, Dutch and Portuguese, which was already an improvement, but no German, no Italian, no Spanish, etc.

In other words, I was not really better off. I had to send it back, and I am expecting reimbursement (this time, of 3,031 euros) as I write this.

I have now sworn that the Progadgets KCS thing was going to be my last mistake, and therefore I have sent emails all over the place, asking vendors for an EXHAUSTIVE list of the supported language, and this allowed me to find out that Nikon have implemented really strange policies regarding the languages supported in the menus of the Z cameras: the reduced cost copies that come into Europe via Hong Kong are usually only in English and Chinese, and some also have Dutch, Portuguese and some strange languages that look like Hindu or Burmese...

Of course, I can always go to a “legitimate” Nikon dealership in France. Only today, I received an answer from Objectif Bastille, a well-known retailer in Paris (where I bought, in fact, my Z-mount 35mm f/1.8 S lens), detailing the supported languages, and they’re all there: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, German, English, French, Spanish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serb, Finnish, etc. In other words, all the languages I have, for example, on my D850. But then, the price of the Z7 plus an FTX adapter is 3,850 euros, which is quite a different deal...

At this point, my last hope is some obscure retailer in the Canary Islands, but they seem to keep strange business hours and I am still waiting for them to answer my query about the supported languages. If that fails, I will have no choice but to pay full price.

So, in conclusion, if you see some great buying opportunities on the Internet, make sure you ask the right questions and obtain the right answers in writing before you let them take your money...!

EDIT: After Progadgets KCS, I was once more taken in by inaccurate representations from an online vendor, this time Duke Fotografia in Las Palmas, Canary Island (Spain) as, in spite of my having asked (repeatedly!) the very specific question about languages supported in the menus), I was still sent a Z7 which only had English, French, Spanish and Portuguese...! I had to send it back once again, and then I decided to go to a very official Nikon authorized reseller in the city of Lyons, and actually look at the “Languages” item in the Setup menu: sure enough, dozens of European languages were listed, just as on my D850. I bought that Z7, which is going to be THE ONE for me —at last!

Mirrorless : switching from Fuji to Nikon

Now that Nikon has launched its full-frame mirrorless cameras, and now that it has been confirmed that motorized F-mount lenses will be fully usable on the Z cameras (with the added benefit of in-body stabilization!), it makes sense for me to seriously contemplate getting rid of all my lightweight Fujifilm equipment.

One major caveat is, however, the electronic viewfinder. Until now, I never wanted to part with my Fuji X-Pro 2, mostly because of its superior optical/electronic viewfinder. The Nikon Z7 only has an electronic viewfinder. It was praised by most of the people who have handled the new camera so far, but I found one professional photographer who had this to say:

“However, there was one thing that I really struggled with: the EVF brightness. When you look through the viewfinder of a DSLR, you see the scene at the same brightness as with your bare eye. With an EVF that's different because you're basically looking at a miniature Live View monitor, and you need to set the brightness level for that yourself. Several times I found myself being fooled by the brightness of the EVF, tricking me into thinking that I shot a nice and bright image with tons of shadow detail, whereas in reality the image was actually horribly underexposed. While it is true that one look at the histogram would tell me this, in the heat of the moment that sometimes did not compute.

At first, I started to change the brightness level of the EVF to match what I was seeing, but that didn't prove to be a definitive solution either. I ended up more or less ignoring the brightness level of the image in the EVF and only use it for composition, light direction, focus, depth of field, and instead relying on the histogram for exposure. Overall, I would say the default setting of the EVF is too bright.”

This is not fully reassuring; it is exactly as I feared. And so, I will have to wait until I go to Paris and am able to have look myself through a Z7 viewfinder, to see if I can live with it or not.

I will also wait for all the hype and urgency to die down a bit and for the prices to relax as well. I will keep reading the reviews, especially those having to do with the viewfinder and the performance of F-mount lenses, which I’m sure will be quite good —I just want to see how good exactly, because there is just one small chance that it might not satisfy…

In the meantime, I will soon be putting up for sale my entire Fuji kit, which comprises an X-Pro 2 body, 4 or 5 batteries, various accessories, and the following lenses:

Fujinon 16 mm f/1.4

Fujinon 23mm f/1.4

Fujinon 35 mm f/1.4

Fujinon 56 mm f/1.2

Fujinon 90 mm f/2

Fujinon 55~200 mm

Capturing the Milky Way is no piece of cake

Having sailed for many years in times when the acronym GPS meant absolutely nothing to anyone, and having made a specialty of positioning the sailboat at all times (well, almost) through strange and complex, mantra-uttering procedures such as dead reckoning and astronomical navigation, I know a little bit about the night sky and its occupants, stars, galaxies, nebulæ, etc. Therefore, when I decided I wanted to give a go at photographing the Milky Way, I thought that would probably not be too daunting a task.

I was wrong.

First, I had to ingest and digest a hefty amount of basic knowledge about astrophotography (thank the gods for Youtube tutorials!). I had to learn about (and, as the case may be, procure, then learn to use) PhotoPills (stunning application!), didymium filters and “Sharpstar” focusing devices, dark sky maps, exposure stacking and median software filtering, LED panel foreground illumination and red headlamps, and even the electronic front shutter curtain, a concept I had never needed to really master before.

The Arca-Swiss “Cube” geared head

 

The Hoya “Red Intensifier” didymium filter

The PhotoPills application

The SharpStar focusing aid

The Petzl headlamp that I use

All of this, and much more, before I even went out for the first time to try and shoot the Milky Way, and why is that? do you ask: well, simply because the only time of the month when you can get good pictures of the Milky Way is during the new moon, and that lasts about a week, and if the weather is not cooperating during the said week, well, better luck next month...! And it’s not even all year round, but only between, roughly, March and November.

So, having studied a dark sky map of my region of France, having, a few days ago, dutifully spent hours on small and twisty mountain roads to scout out a possible location suitable for shooting, having found one (not great, but OK darkness-wise) 35 kilometers away from home, I headed out Sunday night with my 24mm ƒ/1.4, my big tripod, my Arca-Swiss geared head, my filters and all the rest of the equipment, including a comfortable folding armchair to watch the immensity of the skies while thinking great thoughts about the Universe.

The weather application on my iPhone said that the sky was clear at my chosen location... but weather forecasting is a difficult science at best, and when I arrived there, the cloud cover was in fact quite thick.

I parked the car, slid open the sunroof and started watching the skies from my reclined seat. There was not much wind, and the thick clouds did not move. Sometimes, a little window of darkness opened between two clouds (it’s amazing how clouds reflect light from the ground, however little there is), allowing me to see how black the sky was, and how sparkling were the few stars I could briefly glimpse... until the cloud cover was drawn back again.

I waited until one in the morning, then decided to call it a night. No need to unfold the canvas armchair, nor even to pull the tripod out of its bag, let alone set it up in position: there was not even a glimmer of hope in the heavens above.

So, that’s about where I am in terms of shooting the Milky Way: nowhere. I still have a few days left until the Moon begins to invade our night sky again and make our galactic core fade away in its reflected light, so let’s keep hoping!

EDIT: I wrote this in July 2017, and even though I tried again a couple of times, I never managed to get a decent photo of the Milky Way last year. I will try again this year...

What works well for me in Affinity Photo, what is still lacking with respect to Photoshop

Upon buying my Nikon D850 a few days ago, I had decided to fully switch over to Affinity, as I was son angered by Adobe’s reneging on their promise that Lightroom would remain “indefinitely” available as a standalone application —and I wrote about this move on this blog, however that article is in French.

However, no matter how hard I worked to customize Affinity’s shortcuts to duplicate as closely as possible my Lightroom/Photoshop workflow, I am still missing some features, which are key for me, although they may not be for other people.

The Develop module (or “persona”, as they call it a bit pompously) works fine, and I managed to customize it so that it works almost like Lightroom. And it reads the RAW files from the D850, which is more than my before-last version of Lightroom can do.

The big thing that is missing vis-à-vis Lightroom is the ability to import a series of pictures, easily navigate through them, process one and subsequently apply to all the same settings. Maybe all this can indeed be done in Affinity, but how is not so far quite obvious to me. And that’s a big waste of time.

The other big thing that it still missing is a decent library of lens profiles that could be applied automatically if the user so chooses. In Develop, you have to do everything manually, and some commands, such as Chromatic Aberration, take ages to execute, at least on the very large files produced by the D850.

There are other poorly designed things, such as when you correct for converging vertical or general orientation under the “Lens” tab: why don’t the guidelines show automatically as in Lightroom (I did select “Overlay: Thirds Grid”, but nothing appeared), and why don’t you have the option to “Constrain crop” if you desire, so that you may choose to see no white space appearing around the corrected picture? This is easy to implement, and its absence is irritating.

However, things get worse when I get into the Photo modu… I mean, “persona”. Even though I also did here a lot of Photoshop-look alike customization work, the buttons and controls are still laid out ever so differently, so that it becomes irritating to click on the wrong one out of habit, or wasting time looking for another. I know this is probably all a question of time and getting new habits carved in, but it is still a pain in the neck.

I also have no simple and easy way in Affinity to place a thin black border around my photos once I’m done, and there is no function that does what “Save for Web and devices…” does in Photoshop. Plus, resizing the brush on the fly is really less easy with so many keys to press at the same time. Once again, my things, my workflow, other people may well feel different.

Therefore, I have decided to adopt a mixed approach: I will use the Develop module of Affinity, since I was no other equivalent option at this time and it works quite well. I will, at the end of this phase, obtain a TIFF file which I will then drop into Photoshop for the editing per se.

It will be a little more cumbersome as Affinity and Photoshop are not integrated to work together as well as Lightroom and Photoshop, but it’s such a big relief to have all my favorite features at my fingertips again, that I will gladly suffer the little extra cumbersomeness.

Alors, ce Fuji, au retour d’Amsterdam ?

Rayon encombrement, poids, le Fuji est excellent. Même accompagné de 4 focales fixes, tout cela reste peu encombrant et plutôt léger dans le petit sac à dos Eastpak.

Rayon autonomie, c’est à peu près correct, même si je transporte en vérité 4 batteries (au lieu de 2 au maximum avec mon Nikon), et même si passer de « tiens, je n’ai plus qu’une barre dans cette batterie… » à « zut, la batterie est à plat ! » est parfois terriblement rapide, et surtout très imprévisible. Avec un bâton, on pense avoir encore de quoi faire au moins une bonne dizaine de photos, et parfois ça tombe en rideau bien avant cela !

Rayon agrément d’utilisation, les réflexes, l’emplacement des commandes, la façon même de photographier, sont assez différents. C’est un nouvel outil à apprendre, et on râle parfois de ne pas disposer des commandes figurant sur le D810, ou de ne pas pouvoir réaliser ce qui se fait si simplement sur l’autre boîtier… Cela dit, l’un dans l’autre le Fuji X-Pro 2 est agréable à utiliser, réactif et tombant bien en main (surtout avec le repose-pouce Lensmate). Dommage que le correcteur d’exposition, si… exposé, justement, aux manipulations involontaires, ne soit pas protégé par un verrou comme le barillet des vitesses ; on le déplace trop facilement sans s’en rendre compte.

Rayon qualité d’image… eh bien, quand on a le soleil plus ou moins dans le dos, la qualité est irréprochable, aussi bonne ou quasiment qu’avec mes optiques fixes Nikkor, Zeiss ou Voigtländer. Mais quand les conditions de prises de vues deviennent moins simples, la dynamique du capteur n’est pas tout-à-fait au rendez-vous : on crame plus facilement les hautes lumières de manière irrécupérable, et il est bien malaisé de « récupérer » les basses lumières sans créer un bruit numérique quand même un peu gênant. C’est vrai à la sensibilité de base de 200 ISO (encore un point en retrait par rapport aux 64 ISO du D810), et ça l’est encore plus quand il faut monter dans les tours du fait d’un éclairement plus limité.

Belle lumière de ¾ arrière: résultat impeccable (Fuji X-Pro 2, 23mm f/1.4)

Lumière sur l'avant de l'appareil: c’est encore très bien, mais il ne faut pas se louper sur l'exposition car ce sera plus difficile à récupérer... (Fuji X-Pro 2, 23mm f/1.4)

Plein contrejour, soleil dans le cadre: quasiment aucune marge de manœuvre! (Fuji X-Pro 2, 23mm f/1.4)

Le bokeh reste d’excellente qualité, et le point reste très facile à contrôler en manuel avec le focus peaking (Fuji X-Pro 2, 23mm f/1.4)

Rayon utilisation des objectifs, peu de reproches à faire, les bagues de mise au point des Fujinon sont quasiment parfaites, même si elles ne font, somme toute, que commander un moteur électronique qui fait varier le point. On jurerait presque qu’il s’agit de bagues mécaniques, surtout sur les objectifs dotés de butées, comme le 14mm f/1.4. Toutefois, reproche endémique, la bague des diaphragmes est presque sur toutes les optiques beaucoup trop facile à dérégler, l’encliquetage devrait être nettement plus prononcé.

Au final, aurais-je fait mieux à Amsterdam avec le D810 ? Oui, sans aucun doute, lorsque j’ai dû photographier à contrejour ou dans des situations de dynamique étendue. Les limitations du capteur Fuji (qui, soulignons-le quand même) demeure malgré tout d’(un excellent niveau) doivent-elles nous conduire à limiter nos prises de vues, et à ne pas déclencher lorsque l’éclairement est trop difficile ? Probablement, et même si c’est dans des cas assez rares, il est ennuyeux de ne pas pouvoir se reposer dans quasiment n’importe quelle situation sur les capacités du capteur, lorsqu’on a laissé à la maison un boîtier qui sait le faire.

Et avec les possibilités encore nettement accrues du D850 (que j’achèterai certainement d’ici quelques mois lorsque les éventuels plâtres auront été essuyés…), cet argument prendra encore davantage de poids.