Time for Mirrorless

I wasn't completely happy with the shots I got in Motegi at the Japanese MotoGP. It could have been the fact that I wasn't feeling well during the trip, plus the fact that we were perpetually living on alcohol for 4 days straight so didn't have a steady hand.

Checking the shutter count of the D500 its now up over 216,000 actuations. Nikon advise for this camera it's good for 200k, so its getting up there and still going strong. I'd been looking at mirrorless for a couple of years now waiting for a D500 replacement in mirrorless - a Z500(Z90) but Nikon don't seem to interested in making one for some reason.

I'd been watching prices of the other mirrorless models for some time(2 years). Then in Nov24 I saw that Nikon was having a Yellow day sale. I kinda scoffed as the manufacturer sales can be pretty rubbish, then forgot about it. Strangely, the night of the sale I awoke at 1am and couldn't get back to sleep, so I went on facebook and saw the sale add, clicked on it and saw that the Z8 was on sale for $1000 cheaper than any other ON sales price. It was stupidly priced and I couldn't say no, so went online right then and bought it. Still not sure why my bank didn't block a 5K transaction at 1:30am in the morning haha but glad they didn't, this time.

Next morning I looked at what else was on sale, I also got the FTZII adaptor so I could use my F mount lenses on the new Z mount camera. I also saw the Z 180-600mm F5.6-6.3 VR was on sale at stupid prices. So I was like .....

I think I payed a couple of employee's wages that week. Next day the Z8 arrived in the post. That was quick, but the lense and FTZ adaptor was going to be a few weeks wait. Damn. A brand new camera I can't even use because I don't have a lense that fits it. Plenty of time to set it up at least. It will be my first Full Frame camera, my other cameras have been crop sensor APSC with smaller sensors. I'll be interested to see what ISO this can handle in comparison to my older camera.

Whilst waiting for the lense to turn up I also ordered some screen protectors and 3M Skins from Aliexpress to cover the camera. They turned up from overseas in a few days but had to wait for the lense to turn up before I can put them on.

Finally after about 3 weeks the lense arrived and I can now put the whole package together, stickers fitted up. Did the lense friday night when the girls were at church and the body on saturday night after about 8 whiskeys, not the best idea.

Geoff told me that I need to get down to Bondi beach with that lense....

So not wanting to get arrested on my first day I decided a more conservative approach. I'll get to the beach one day. Lets' make some use of these 45 mega pixels......

A visit to Parramatta Park Australia day for the balloon glow event, it's only 10 minutes from my house so winning there.

F4.5, 1/125, ISO8000

I took my eldest daughter to the Hunter Valley airshow in February they had some magnificent World War 2 fighter planes and a F-35 Lightning. It was a surprisingly good event, well organised great food, when one display finished another was starting, transport to and from the airport was well organised with minimal waiting and the F-35 Lightning was the icing on the cake. That thing was Fast, Loud and spectacular. Lucky it was only blasting our eardrums and not dropping bombs on us.

F4 Corsair

P51D Mustang

P40 Kittyhawk

P51D Mustang

Wirraway

Spitfire

Paul Bennet's stunt show

There's been many triumphs and many failures. The setup menus on this Mirrorless camera is humungous compared to the DSLR I'm used too and especially the focusing system. There are so many settings its not funny. I kind of wish it was more simple. Sometimes pointing and shooting with a phone is more enjoyable, until you see the images that is.

The cropping ability of the 45mega pixel sensor is huge. I've cropped several images at 100% and they are still amazing. You have to be super disciplined with your technic. There are still many failed images as I wasn't using the correct focusing mode or motion blur. It's a huge learning curve again, but when you get it right it's an enjoyable one. Low light focusing the Z8 struggles more than the DSLR so that's a challenge doing the night racing events, but I shot at 6400 ISO and it was better than the DSLR at 2000 so these modern cameras have come a long way in the last few years.

I went out ot SMSP last weekend for the PCRA Festival of Speed. Rick was mechanicing for one of his racing mates, so I decided to drop in and see him and take a few more racing shots.

Ricks mate took out the 250GP class, so maybe Rick didn't have to touch much on the bike. I decided to leave him alone as me talking and distracting him, I could see he was going to forget to do something up properly.

Ironic that I got to a 45mp sensor and then downsize the images to 1mb for this blog, doesn't make sense right. Yeah, that's life, life doesn't make sense sometimes. But I can make these into 25mb jpegs which is pretty huge.

I'm pretty happy so far where I'm at with the Z8, it's a good camera and I need to learn how to use it to if full potential. At the moment I'm the weakest link for not being able to get the images I want so it's always a work in progress to try and get the best images I can. Got ASBK coming up in 2 weeks so hope I can get some good images at that.