Surnatural Orchestra « PIC » – Festival CiRCA 2022
My Z9 arrived in time for me to start using it for the Festival CiRCa this year. My work with ‘cirque’ was the principal reason I purchased this camera body, and so I was keen to see how the much vaunted « 3D Tracking » actually worked in a real life situation.
It works
The photo above has taken at the end of sequence of dance by the artist, and as she lay on the rope, the auto-focus was glued to her face and the shot is sharp – can’t ask for more.
The up-side is that with a number of artists moving rapidly across the fiels of vision, once a single artist has been ‘chosen’ by pressing the AF-ON buttton, the camera happily follows like Super-Glue.
The down-side, and the only thing I have found from personal use, is that with circus companies insisting on less and less lighting for their spectacles, the auto-focus sometimes has a job to follow and loses the plot. For this I can’t blame the camera as the few situations where this has happened were in almost complete darkness. The shot above was lit by only two lights, with an exposure of 1/125s f/2.8 at 6400 ISO. Given the distance from the lens, the depth of field can’t have been more than a couple of centimetres.
In a well-lit environment I’m pretty confident that the camera would nail it more often than not, so for this at least, I’m not complaining!
What a beast! I could leave it at that, but I won’t.
The Z9 is physically no bigger than the Z6ll with the MB-N11 battery grip, but the fact that the extra grip format is part of the body actually makes it more comfortable to hold.
The battery door has a lock on it which prevents it opening (like it so often does on the Z6/Z7 ) and quite apart from the fact that it’s not as easy to open as on the Dn series DSLRs (D3, D4 etc.) it’s not something that’s going to be opened during a shoot, so this is fine by me.
The rubber surround for the eyepiece is now locked on, which is a small, but particularly usefull point in my opinion – after having lost a number of these things!
The playback button has migrated to the bottom right of the rear body – excellent move IMHO as I can now visualise a shot in the viewfinder without having to use two hands to 1: hold the camera and 2: press the button. This is particularly useful in a circus configuration as there are more often than not, a paying public sitting behind me who will be distracted if I take the camera away from my face to check an exposure.
The virtual horizon can now be attributed to any of the Fn buttons (and there are now 4 programmable Fn buttons, plus up to two more on certain lenses) – this used not to be the case on the Z6/Z7 and as I quite like to know if I’m ‘level’ this is a good thing.
The built-in GPS is a great idea (finally!) as while it’s not terribly useful in a concert hall, out and about doing landscape work it’s nice to think that the GPS data will at last be recorded without calling on external devices (And yes, I know Snapbridge sort of works by linking to a smartphone, but sometimes the GPS data shows a marked delay which means even after moving a certain distance, the inital coordinates are still being used.) Time will tell if this is more reliable.
Another blast from the past is the two-button card format, sadly lacking from the consumer grade camera bodies like the Z6/Z7 – this is vital, in my book, and such a pain to have to go through menus to do such a simple thing.
Going back to the original ‘Shooting Banks‘ (U1-U3 in the Z6/Z7 ) is also nice -although, despite my initial hesitations, I was actually getting used to being able to change setups simply by turning a dial rather than delving into menus… This can also be attributed to an Fn button, so changing banks is a piece of cake now.
The fact that the camera has no physical shutter makes it a very silent beast indeed – and adding a setting to cut all the external bleeps and indicators was a very good move for me at least. (I manage to achieve this on previous bodies, element by element – thankfully saved into a Un memory location) Well done – but it seems odd that they had to ‘include’ a shutter sound for people to select! I’m more than happy to have a silent camera.
And now there’s the 3D tracking / auto focus which is stunning – testing this is underway but it’s looking very promising. With quick and fast moving performers, this will hopefully come into it’s own. Watch this space.
One final thought regarding memory cards. CFexpress cards are actually cheaper and faster than their XQD equivalents due to licensing the format – the new format is also considerable faster to read and write to – so this is a good thing, however don’t be fooled by the REALLY cheap cards like PERGEAR as there’s a simple reason why they are so cheap – they are not as FAST. A quick comparison between two different manufacturers
The Kardashian family, you know the tribe with the combined intelligence of a felt hat, always manage to annoy me, in or out of the news.
So what has Kim « arse the size of Texas » Kardashian done that’s so note worthy recently? Farted? Her sisters would probably bottle that and make another billion…
Er…she went to a launch party for another one of the tribe who seem to be launching more cosmetics for sad, lost people who can’t decide for themselves.
And this is news? Well it seems to be for the Daily Mail – but then whenever has journalism ever got in the way of a few (identical) photos and mind boggling spelling mistakes?
When you think her step father actually had to change sex to escape the family, it really makes one wonder…
Unbeknown to these idiots there are actually far more important things going on in the world – a serious number of countries are having record droughts, and or wild fires. There’s a war going on in a place called Ukraine, and everyone everywhere seems to be striking for more cash.
But don’t worry, the spotlight will be dragged back onto these losers (sadly) and we’ll all be subject to more ridiculous goings-on.
As Kenny Everet (bless him) used to say « All in the best possible taste » – miss him – at least he had talent.
Quoted from Angela Levin in an article in the the Daily Mail.
Can’t anybody do something about this person? The only thing she seems to be good at is whining about how hard it is to be what she wanted from the outset – being married to a prince.
The entire world seems to owe her something, but I’m not sure what exactly, and frankly Angela Levins headline is the closest thing to the truth I’ve read in a while.
She whines about a fire in her childs bedroom – which when researched, turns out to be a slightly smoking electic heater which was turned off and dealt with by palace slaves.
She has strong concerns about wasting natural ressources, and them proceeds to jet around the place in private aircraft, burning fuel at an astonishing rate.
It seems she was an actress at some point – most people have never seen the series she appeared in, or would want to, but this has put her in good stead to preach to people in her blog (‘The Itch’, or ‘Acne’ or something), on her podcasts etc. Interestingly the latest diatribe (from ‘Archetypes’ her Netflix money earner) has been almost universaly panned by the intelligent press.
Tomorrow, July the 26th, year of our lord 2022 I’ve been invited to participate in an Instameet at the Chateau of Cassaigne in the South West of France.
I’ve been invited by the tourist office at Condom who, from time to time, create little ‘experiences’ for their devoted (lol) followers/contributers – of which I am one. We shall have a tour of the Chateau, meet a local theatrical group, and watch a performance which will be staged infant of the château.
The reason I’m getting sticky knickers is that I’m finally going to meet photographic royalty (well, in these parts at least) !! Yes, one of the other people invited is no less than Matthiew Rhinestone – and if I quote from his Instagram profile, you’ll understand why he is such an important guest and that this is such an important occasion :
The original article was written for the Z9 but in fact can be applied to any of the Z6/7 series cameralink
Thom Hogan recently published a short response to people having problems with focussing in low-light – I think the article is worth reading – the link is above.
The interesting part is this: people very rarely play with the ‘Picture Control’ (Menu Camera, Set Picture Control) as, like me, they probably don’t understand what it does, despite Nikons explications.
Thom Hogan was trying to figure out why some of his readers seemed to have a lot more problems than him in focusing in low-light, and on further investigation came to the conclusion that this could be influenced by the Picture Control setting. He – possibly the only human to actually A: know what it means, and B: being someone who fiddles with EVERY setting (Thanx Thom) suggests moving from ‘Auto’ to ‘Neutral’ with an increased Sharpness value (default is 2) – I’m trying 6.
Remember to click OK after selecting your sharpness value, and if you want to store the values in one of the 3 presets, do that immediately afterwards or the setting will revert to the default.
A couple of times a year I visit a FLICKR feed of an English guy living in the Gers – principally to make myself feel better – it rarely fails.
My most recent visit coincided (it seems) with the uploading of an umpteenth « Home Video » which I’m sure is all very hi-tech and interesting blah blah blah – I don’t actually know as I was put off by the first 5 seconds of « lets look off camera to see what’s on my (badly positioned) monitor to see if the camera has actually started recording yet »
It would be wonderful, from a viewers point of view, if these prolific video makers were to discover EDITING SOFTWARE
In case you’re not yet aware, EDITING SOFTWARE allows one to cut the boring bits from a video (and yes, I realise, for some this would mean 98% of the film…) like « oh shit I’m going to sneeze » through the occasional fart, to « let’s look off camera… » etc. Get my drift?
Might be worth a try…this said, I’m pretty certain that most of these efforts are not aimed at an audience, per se, more an exercise in self flattery. Practice makes perfect…
The marathon Déclic has come and gone – great success, even if I say so myself (well, as it was I who organised pretty much everything, I think I’m allowed to pat myself on the shouler…)
51 people signed up, down on our usual 80+ but par for the course with the post-Covid situation etc. We had a lovely warm day, the participants enjoyed the food I had layed on – all in all a good year. The jury sits on the 1st of June – we’ll see what we can drag out of them this year…
Had a quick look over on FLICKR and noticed a chap who I used to know (over near St Clar in the Gers) has bought himself a Nikon Z7ll – now his FLICKR feed is overun with the same dross but of a slightly higher pixel density, and sadly no increase in visual quality, and it got me thinking – I asked myself why the 3 or four of his harem, sorry, followers seemed to think this bloke is the bees knees?
And then it dawned on me – and frankly I have to admit I’m sad that I didn’t think of doing the same thing myself – his pictures are in braille – his followers are BLIND! I had previously realised he must have been playing to a visually handicapped audience, but I hadn’t twigged the fundamental reason.
What a marvellous technique – and I really must congratulate DT for his perspicacity – people with physical handicaps really do get a rotten deal in the long run, and I think this is a wonderful initiative – well done!
…well to be honest, I actually look at the pictures – journalists for the Daily Mail don’t actually understand spelling or punctuation, or reality in fact so this is not a broad sheet that can be ‘read’.
‘Reading’ the Daily Mail is akin to skipping through the Beano – but frankly the Beano was more ‘real’ than a lot which is published in the ‘Mail…
At the moment of writing the Covid pandemic is not over, we have a war in Ukraine which looks like expanding outwards into Europe and the Daily Mail publish an article about an air-head called Kyley Jenner (one of the Kardashians it seems) who named her recently born son Wolf, but has now changed her mind.
Already things suggest that she, and the rest of her clan, have a similar number of brain cells to a golf ball, and are collectively as intelligent as a pea…
But what makes this SO interesting to the tabloid reading British public? I admit I was pissed when ‘Boris’ and his idiot government took the UK out of Europe – but I’m having second thoughts – I’m actually PLEASED I don’t count as one of the UK’s statistics – who wants to be involved with a group of bottom feeders that consider women with monumental arses more important/interesting/newsworthy than what is REALLY going on in the world around us?
