I have recently updated my camera from the Nikon D810 SLR to a Mirrorless Nikon Z6II. I have been using the Z6II with the NIKKOR Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 lens for all the wildlife images in the Gallery below.
There is always a learning curve with any new camera and I am also finding this with the Nikon Z6II. Some of the camera settings I have used for these captures are as follows, with the settings saved to U3, U3 effectively becomes my wildlife/bird settings.
Settings
- Camera in Silent Mode.
- Release Mode – Continuous H (extended).
- AF-area mode – Wide area AF (S).
- Metering – Center-weighted metering.
- Focus Mode – AF-S.
- Shutter – 1/1250 sec.
- Aperture f/9. Could use an aperture of f/6.3 to lower the ISO but feel that the lens may be a little sharper stopped down one one stop.
- ISO set to Auto.
- DISP button – Set to show the embeded Histogram to check the exposure.
I have found in general that these camera settings give excellent focus and exposure for the birds and wildlife which I love photographing. The only problem which I have encountered to date with this camera is with some of the very tiny birds, the camera does sometimes have some difficulty in focossing and selecting the focus spot between the bird or some of the foreground or background branches and twigs. This problen was evident in some of the images which I tried to capture of the tiny brown honeyeater, these birds have a body length of only 120-160mm. I did find that with the small brown honeyeaters if I switched the camera to crop mode which gives a larger image in the viewfinder than the camera did tend to focus a little better by selecting the bird, but by doing this we do degrade the image by effectively cropping out lots of pixels. The best solution for some of the smaller birds such as the brown honeyeaters would be to use a longer lens, or even use a 1.4 times teleconverter on the 180-600mm lens.
Gallery
