I have been obsessing a little over sharpness recently. While my most used lens is not the sharpest (at the moment that’s the Nikon Z 180mm-600mm f5.6-6.3), I have some obtained some very sharp results with it in good light. I go on about the challenges of shooting fast moving subjects in poor light blah…

Ansel is fantastic photo editing software which is a recent discovery for me. It is a fork of Darktable, and is similar in many ways, but, the UI has been considerably simplified. The maintainer has removed many of the duplicate modules and the result is a far simpler and easier to use version of Darktable.…

A couple of happy accidents yesterday.

While I need to be mindful of metering, after a number of BIF sessions with Wide Area Large and a lot of shots in focus, I was blown away. The AF was picking up the bird well, I was amazed. This was also the longest I have spent in one spot, close to 90 minutes,…

This morning I missed a lot of opportunities and missed shots, all because I did not alter my settings more frequently or dramatically enough. I consider the photography I do at the moment as training or practice, and like training for something (like a long ride or a run), so I can be ready for…

Yesterday I got the opportunity to photograph Kererū that were sitting beyond the canopy in decent light. It was quite the revelation, and it gave me a boost in terms of my confidence. Shooting in the light with slower targets made for a pleasant change, with much higher keeper rates than I’ve had recently, and…

In the rumour-hype-cycle of the just announced Nikon Z6III, I had written off the 7III as impossible and unnecessary. The idea was that the Z8 made the Z7III redundant. Well, that was until I thought about the pricing and realised there is space in the lineup for a new 7 series, at least in terms…

The pricing for the camera body is A LOT more than I was expecting. In NZ the launch price is $5,200, which is way above my expectation that it would be closer to $4,000. The current NZ prices are: This makes me think much harder about what I need. If I wasn’t into working on…

I’ve been avoiding capturing birds in flight and my lack of practice cost me a chance to capture a Kārearea today. While leaving Zealandia I heard the Kārearea overheard, and sure enough there it was. My attempts to capture it were thwarted by several mistakes in my technique: I switched to Auto-Area AF and continued…

Today while shooting at Zealandia there were several brief instances where I could not acquire focus when it seemed the conditions, while challenging, should have allowed it. The first occurrence was when the battery was low. After that I suspected it could have been due to the buffer being full. The other odd thing that…