New Z8 questions

[bgelfand]

It could be an intermittent hardware problem with the grip or the connection between the grip and the body.. Do you have access to another grip? If so, try the other grip. If that solves the problem, send the grip to Nikon for repair. If it does not solve the problem, try the grip on another body, if you can. If that solves the problem, send the grip and the body to Nikon for repair.

[mike_halliwell]

11 hours ago, ilkka_nissila said:

The most common mode seems to be that both left-right and up-down cause the scrolling of images

Sounds like a bad-connection in the UP/DOWN...LEFT/RIGHT controller. Like it's registering simultaneous commands to do the opposite function, thus the error message. 

I'd try a different grip first.  🤞

EDIT. I don't fancy the idea of bugs on this occasion as it would seem (?) you're the only sufferer, the internet is a great amplifier of even rare problems.🤔

Edited August 1, 2023 by mike_halliwell

[ilkka_nissila]

29 minutes ago, mike_halliwell said:

Sounds like a bad-connection in the UP/DOWN...LEFT/RIGHT controller. Like it's registering simultaneous commands to do the opposite function, thus the error message. 

I'd try a different grip first.  🤞

EDIT. I don't fancy the idea of bugs on this occasion as it would seem (?) you're the only sufferer, the internet is a great amplifier of even rare problems.🤔

Most people seem to buy the Z8 because they don't want the vertical grip of the Z9 so there isn't much in terms of online user reports of the grip. I need the grip when I shoot longer lenses vertically (which is a lot) but also want to remove it for some situations such as gimbal use and landscape photography.

 

It doesn't seem like a connection problem as the changed behavior happens immediately after shooting intensively and reviewing the images right after. Once I wait a bit, it always resorts to both L-R and U-D scrolling across images. If I shoot intensively then play back, then it goes into the state of the camera doesn't allow this function error message. It seems to me that the programming of the communication between the grip and camera is incorrect and how the grip's multi-controller's commands are interpreted by the camera depends on the processing load of the camera. But I could of course be wrong. 

 

I don't have another grip to test, but Nikon might. I'll wait and see what their testing comes up with.

Edited August 1, 2023 by ilkka_nissila

[ilkka_nissila]

Contact problem seems unlikely because when the played back picture is zoomed in, the vertical grip's multi-controller scrolls the zoomed-in cropped image in all directions correctly. In shooting mode it also correctly moves the focus area around.So the controller works correctly in shooting mode, in zoomed-in playback mode but not in full image playback mode where switching between playback info modes is not available (and there is occasional variation in behavior that only affects the full image playback mode but not zoomed-in playback nor focus area control shooting mode which always work correctly).

Edited August 1, 2023 by ilkka_nissila

[ilkka_nissila]

On 8/1/2023 at 4:03 PM, ilkka_nissila said:

Contact problem seems unlikely because when the played back picture is zoomed in, the vertical grip's multi-controller scrolls the zoomed-in cropped image in all directions correctly. In shooting mode it also correctly moves the focus area around.So the controller works correctly in shooting mode, in zoomed-in playback mode but not in full image playback mode where switching between playback info modes is not available (and there is occasional variation in behavior that only affects the full image playback mode but not zoomed-in playback nor focus area control shooting mode which always work correctly).

I think I figured out what is going on.

 

The MB-N12 manual states that the multi-selector for vertical shooting performs the same functions as the multi-selector on the camera. In fact on the Z8 and MB-N12 it behavers like the sub-selector on the camera and not the multi-selector. On the D850 and D6, the sub-selector for vertical shooting does mirror the camera's multi-selector correctly.

 

The sub-selector has slightly different functionality than the multi-selector on the camera body itself in playback (full image review) mode. In this case one axis on the sub-selector switches between first images of bursts and the other axis switches between individual consequtive frames. What caused the error message is that the camera had not (apparently) written out the burst fully to the cards yet or at least had not processed the data enough to figure out the first frame and be able to switch between first frames when requested from the sub-selector (which is mirrored by the multi-selector for vertical shooting, which is not how it should be but appears to be doing).

 

Now that I understand what the camera is doing, I can work with this. It's a bug and not consistent with the MB-N12's manual but it is a survivable bug in that it won't bother me that much as long as it behaves in a predictable way. (I know one another user online who has the grip and also stated that the sub-selector for vertical shooting does not mirror the functionality of the camera's multi-selector which is consistent with my camera and grip, so it's not an intermittent contact problem.)

 

I explained all of this to Nikon and hopefully they'll issue a firimware fix or revise the manual to reflect the actual behavior of the controls.

[ilkka_nissila]

I've come to the conclusion that the sound noise from the gimbal in an indoor environment (with music being recorded, e.g. a choir) is not trivial to clean up. In outdoor recordings the traffic and other sounds in a city made the gimbal motor sound not obvious when listening to the recording but in an indoor environment it was very obvious. I suspect it is transmitted mechanically through the arm I had set up to hold the microphone despite the shock and hopefully vibration absorbing mount. The microphone wasn't exactly very far from the gimbal, either, so transmission by air is possible even though it was a shotgun. I tried cleaning it up with Adobe Audition and noise reduction (process) and it worked for a good part of the recording but occasionally the gimbal motor noise showed up nonetheless. When I have used a tripod to hold the camera, both on-camera microphone and an audio recorded mounted using a clamp on one of the tripod legs has worked well and I've had very little noise pickup in those situations especially when I don't touch the camera much. A dedicated gimbal noise filter might be developed, but I am not sure when I'll have the time to work on that.

 

Other issues with the gimbal include arms getting tired when having to hold the camera over my head (to position the camera over other people and avoid line-of-sight issues) after 15 min my hands were trembling a bit. It's easier to hold the gimbal with arms and elbows tucked against my chest; in that case there has not been any significant problems holding it steady.  For a lot of things I prefer having the camera height at my chest level rather than eye level but sometimes a higher camera position is required. Overall I think the gimbal is best-suited for shots where I walk with the camera or otherwise purposefully move it, and it's best to use a tripod when there is no need to move the camera with the subject.

 

I shot my first situation where I needed high ISO (funeral in a dark church) with the Z8 and the images turned out fine, and nobody complained about the sound of my silent camera. 😉 But I ended up editing the images with a lot of layers and the TIFFs were around 600 MB in size, which is a bit much. I guess I need to figure out a way to do it in Lightroom and not obsess on details of the process.

Edited August 28, 2023 by ilkka_nissila

[mike_halliwell]

38 minutes ago, ilkka_nissila said:

editing the images with a lot of layers and the TIFFs were around 600 MB in size

What, each??

[ilkka_nissila]

1 hour ago, mike_halliwell said:

What, each??

Typicallly, yes, though not every image had the same number of layers, depending on what it needed the size would vary somewhat. I used Photoshop's new B&W Portrait Preset as it produced a rendering that I liked a lot and it does its thing by adding several layers which then resulted in a TIFF file over 600 MB in size. The problem I have with Lightroom's black and white conversion is that the way it works overrides the color temperature setting, it basically works similarly to an optical filter (e.g. green) used for film-based based black and white photography. But what I like to do is first adjust the colors of the image so that the faces are reasonably neutral and then apply a black and white conversion to the roughly color corrected image. I did it by first converting the image to a TIFF and then applying the black and white preset to that. In that case PS can't go back to the raw file to reset the white balance according to the filter and it has only the color bitmap image to work with. So I get the black and white images more to my liking by following this process. Additionally I used masks to make local adjustments to some of the images so I lighteded people a bit to keep the chandelier and the people closer to correct brightness. 

 

Next time I'll try to stay within Lightroom to be more efficient and only go into the multilayer editing for images that really benefit from it. Otherwise I can never finish my projects...

Edited August 28, 2023 by ilkka_nissila

[ilkka_nissila]

I got my first opportunity to try the Z8 on photographing figure skating today. A few good things and some not so good things showed up.

 

First, as long as the skaters are with face towards the camera and upright, and gliding, all is well, the Z8 detects the face and focuses on it without issue. However, when the skaters spin around, sometimes with face upside down, the Z8 subject detection seems to get very confused and will do just about anything but focus on the upside down face. Spectators in the background fine, male skater upright (holding the woman upside down) works great for the Z8, but no way is it going to focus on the lifted skater without placing strong restrictions on the focus area. No such problems with the D6 in custom group-area mode which tends to alternate between closest face and closest subject and never focuses on the background (unless that is the only thing under the focus rectangle). Also I found that the Z8 seems prioritises some skaters over others, in subject recognition mode; in pairs skating and ice dance this was my conclusion. So I have to do more work to get the camera to focus on my intended subject in situations where there is fast spinning and other than upright facial orientation. I can try dynamic area next, it doesn't feature subject detection.

 

When it does recognize the subject sometimes it still focuses on the other skater even though the subject indication box indicates having recognized the one that it didn't focus on. I am not sure what is going on here - perhaps the camera simply didn't have time to adjust focus even though it identified a different subject. 

 

So, no 99%+ in-focus rate this time.... I think it's quite likely Nikon's teaching material increases in volume and  covers more cases in the future. I would think gymnastics would present similar problems as pairs figure skating and ice dancing do, with regards to upside down faces and bent bodies. I will do more analysis when I have time to go through all the pictures. I am a little disappointed after having excellent luck photographing other types of events with the Z8. I'll post some pics next week. Alas, I shot a lot of pics today and it'll take some time to go through them. 

 

I had previously had problems with the Z 70-200/2.8 having too sensitive manual focus ring as when I unintentionally touched the ring it would go into manual focus override. I haven't had that problem with the F-mount version (FL E). I noticed that it's possible to swap the functions of the manual focus ring and control rings and then I could turn off the control ring (now manual focus ring) and use the physical control ring to do manual focus if needed. For this lens it seems to be necessary as I can't hold it without touching the MF ring by accident from time to time. I think it's a great lens but flawed in the position of the manual focus ring and its very high sensitivity to even the slightest touch. Anyway swapping the rings solved the problem but I am afraid the modified configuration may not work for other lenses that I have.

[mike_halliwell]

1 hour ago, ilkka_nissila said:

sometimes with face upside down

Maybe hold the camera the other way up?  🤣

Interestingly, it sees my cat's eyes upside down. 👍

[ilkka_nissila]

1 hour ago, mike_halliwell said:

Maybe hold the camera the other way up?  🤣

Interestingly, it sees my cat's eyes upside down. 👍

No, I suspect it uses the orientation sensor so I would need to cause a change in gravity to make it accept my upside down spinning subject's face.

 

What is positive is that the Z8 seems to love to work with my 200/2. I am getting really nice results from men's singles with it.

Edited October 7, 2023 by ilkka_nissila

[ShunCheung]

I think we'll need more AI in the cameras to detect faces that are upside down, e.g. skating, gymnastics ... and the ability to recognize individual faces so that you can program the camera to focus on a particular individual. For example, if you are photographing football (soccer), you can program your Z body to focus on Lionel Messi only in a crowd of players. Now, if we are talking about North American football where players wear a helmet with a "cage" to cover the face, individual face detection is going to be really challenging. But then, perhaps we can program the camera to follow a few particular jersey numbers or even player names on the jersey.

Perhaps in the Z9 version IV. 🙂

[ilkka_nissila]

2 hours ago, ShunCheung said:

I think we'll need more AI in the cameras to detect faces that are upside down, e.g. skating, gymnastics ... and the ability to recognize individual faces so that you can program the camera to focus on a particular individual. For example, if you are photographing football (soccer), you can program your Z body to focus on Lionel Messi only in a crowd of players. Now, if we are talking about North American football where players wear a helmet with a "cage" to cover the face, individual face detection is going to be really challenging. But then, perhaps we can program the camera to follow a few particular jersey numbers or even player names on the jersey.

Perhaps in the Z9 version IV. 🙂

If I'm not mistaken the Canon R3 can be told to follow a specific subject, and then it does its best to do so. 😉 It can also follow the subject which the photographer is looking at in the viewfinder, but I'm not completely convinced that that's how I'd like things to work.

 

I came to think that rather than using the orientation sensor, an alternative explanation to the behavior I noticed is that the camera expects the human subject to have certain features in order, ie. torso, neck, mouth, eyes etc. and if the skater is bent backwards then the order might no seem correct to the camera (although it is the same as normally, but the body is bent in an arc shape and in a two-dimensional image on a sensor it might seem that the order of the mouth and eyes is reversed. Anyway, I don't know how the subject-detection works in Nikon cameras but clearly there are some challenges and more work ahead for Nikon. 🙂 I imagine that in the next Olympics there might be a new camera with new subject-detection features. 🙂 Of course, there is the Z9 FW 4.1 but there might be a new camera also.

 

I am not very happy because I shot 400 GB of images today, and it'll take some time to go through them. And I was mostly shooting at 10 fps, not faster! So bad. Tomorrow I need to restrain myself if I want to avoid filling up my discs. But I have to say that the camera did a very good job focusing with the 200/2; I thought it might struggle because stuff is happening pretty fast on the ice and it does have shallow depth of field. Occasionally when the skater was spinning and turned away from the camera it would focus on the audience and then return to the skater in the next frame, which is understandable since I'm telling it to focus on faces within a part of the frame specified by the custom wide-area box, but I'd like it to stay on the subject a little longer so that it doesn't change focus between rotations unnecessarily. I guess there may be settings I can try to adjust. Technically it's not a blocked shot situation as there is nothing between the subject and the camera, but I could try to see if that setting changes the behavior. There is also the erratic/steady but it was already set to steady in my camera.

 

Anyway with the caveats mentioned it looks like the Z8 can shoot indoor sports quite well even with an adapted F-mount lens. I can't see any significant disadvantage to shooting with the 200/2 + FTZII + Z8, apart from the rather significant weight, of course, but one can get used to such things. 😉 There is no wobble or play in the adapter, it is a firm fit and probably there is more play when using this lens on an F-mount camera. Very good job Nikon on making a solid adapter (though with the earlier cameras such as Z6 II the focusing was a bit nervous (i.e. making constant sounds and adjustments) with many F-mount lenses, but this seems to have been fixed in the Z8; the lens still makes some sounds when focusing but not more than with a DSLR, and probably less). Tomorrow I may try the 300/2.8 to see how it fares in ladies' singles and if the Z8 can operate it as well as the 200.  

 

I think it's a bit of a shame that Nikon has discontinue so many F-mount lenses that don't have Z-mount equivalents, including the 200/2, the PF 300 & 500, the 105/1.4 etc. I am sure that this has to do with market demand, but perhaps if more people got to use these lenses with the Z8 or Z9, they'd not sell those lenses so quickly (or stop buying new ones). I suspect the initial disappointment with adapted lens performance (with the first Z cameras) was misplaced (blaming the adapter or the lens, when it was something that newer cameras could and would fix without having to change the lens or adapter). Of course, it's possible that Nikon will soon introduce equivalent Z lenses, or they might not. I think there is a rather big gap between 135mm and 400mm in primes. At least there is the 135mm coming soon. 🙂

Edited October 7, 2023 by ilkka_nissila

[mike_halliwell]

16 hours ago, ilkka_nissila said:

I think it's a bit of a shame that Nikon has discontinue so many F-mount lenses that don't have Z-mount equivalents, including the 200/2, the PF 300 & 500,

I'd add the lack of a tele macro too. A 1:1 300mm f4 would be nice.

The rumour of a 600mm f5.6 PF has resurfaced recently...🙂

My 300mm 2.8 VR behaves very nicely on my Z8 for BIFs.

16 hours ago, ilkka_nissila said:

Of course, there is the Z9 FW 4.1 but there might be a new camera also.

Early tests I did on Friday do seem to show that the Z9's Bird Mode does indeed work, and is definitely more 'sticky'. It also seems to find smaller birds better too.

[ilkka_nissila]

5 hours ago, mike_halliwell said:

I'd add the lack of a tele macro too. A 1:1 300mm f4 would be nice.

The rumour of a 600mm f5.6 PF has resurfaced recently...🙂

My 300mm 2.8 VR behaves very nicely on my Z8 for BIFs.

Early tests I did on Friday do seem to show that the Z9's Bird Mode does indeed work, and is definitely more 'sticky'. It also seems to find smaller birds better too.

I have read that the Z 100-400 focuses quite close and can be used for close-ups, but it's hard to tell from online posts how the resolution is as they are usually resized so that this doesn't show clearly.

The 105 MC is actually a fair bit longer (at 1:1) than the AF-S 105 mm Micro as it loses less focal length than its predecessors upon close focus. So the difference between the 105 MC and the 200 AF D Micro isn't quite as much as one might think looking at the focal lengths alone, but there is still a difference.

 

Edited October 8, 2023 by ilkka_nissila