Approaching the Scene 151: Nikon Please Fix This Z Camera Depth of Field Problem!

today i'm going to show you exactly what i'm talking about with my frustrations with depth of field preview and nikon z cameras and show you why i really hope that they fix that not just in future cameras but in firmware for all the z cameras [Music] well hey there hudson here welcome to my studio uh fun stuff to talk about today really addressing some questions that i've gotten from earlier videos and in some earlier office hours sessions that i've done with some of you out in the community i want to thank everyone in the community for liking sharing subscribing to these videos it makes a huge difference and i don't take any of you for granted i really want to thank everyone who's been subscribing newly and this topic may be completely new to some of you who've signed up in the last couple of years so it's going to be a fun one and i think i've figured out a way to show really in a better way than i've done before exactly what i'm talking about with this depth of field preview problem and i'm going to showcase it both with my old d850 which i am about uh to send off to mpb to to sell just because i'm not using it and then i'll show you with the with the new z72 we'll kind of go back and forth i want to invite anyone uh to my office hours on june 22nd rick woody david will all be there taking your questions and going through submitted images that you people out in the community give to us for our long exposure gallery so take your best long exposure shot one image run to hudsonhenry.com office hours you can submit that image and submit a question for discussion we're going to be talking about long exposure neutral density filters some of that kind of fun stuff shortly after that i'm taking off on a trip to new york for for my brother-in-law's birthday and just to spend a little time in the city which it's been forever and i'm really looking forward to it all right so i want to talk about depth of field and just so everybody has a heads up there's a chaptered out table of contents you can run through the chapters along the bottom row of this video like all the other latest videos that i've done and i also have links to everything i'm talking about videos that i reference gear whatever if you click on the video's title or show more you'll see in the full video description along with a chaptered out table of contents with time codes that you can click on all right so so i got my my uh d850 set up here and i'm in live view and i'm actually i'm gonna record i've got kind of a fun way i'm shooting that out through an atomos ninja 5 recorder and back in through it's long and complicated but through a through a switcher that's coming in like a webcam to my computer and i'm able to show you what's on the back screen of my d850 in its live view mode so you can see i've got my water bottle over here and i've got my nikon z72 and right now i'm going to work with the d850 i have probably one of my favorite lenses ever made in the world one of the f lenses i can't see getting rid of anytime soon the the 105 millimeter 1.4 it has a really shallow depth of field and there's a technique i used since dslrs came out with live view that's very similar to how a large format photographer would get under the hood and use a loop on the ground glass to examine really closely magnified whether or not the foreground of their scene is in focus the background of their scene is in focus and they could work through tilting and and through focusing and stopping down to get everything that they wanted out in the landscape in focus or if they're working in a macro environment making sure that all the parts of their macro scene are in focus or a still life to make sure that what they want is in focus and what they don't want in focus is in focus a really really precision method of getting exactly the focus that you're looking for and you know the ability to zoom in on the live view when live view came out on dslrs was like cheating to me as a landscape photographer and i'll show you what i'm talking about so i got my d850 right here and i'm going to just show you what i'm looking at through it right now you know i'm at 1.4 not very much as in focus maybe the front element of my nikon 50 1.8 s lens that's mounted on the z72 you know if i just wanted to focus on my water bottle you know i could i could go ahead and move my focus point you can see that little red square out over the hawaiian islands here i've got a kawaii sticker and i could hit autofocus boom now my bottle is focused and my camera is even more out of focus well one of the neat things with the dslr is let's say you want to use a little aperture to stop down and and get a little bit more in focus as i stop down you'll see that the live view previews what the image is going to look like at my final aperture so as i stop down here it continues right through f9 f11 things are getting sharper and sharper now that nikon symbol is starting to look like it's more in focus i can run over here and say you know is it really in focus zoom in well it's not really is it let's see at f11 if i move my focus ring a little more towards infinity can i split the difference that that aperture is getting me get that nikon looking a little bit more in focus and still keep my water bottle in focus that's not too bad not too bad at all you know it wasn't in focus picking one of them to focus on but because of the fact that when you're increasing your aperture your depth of field your apparent depth of field moves out away from your focus point and moves towards you from the focus point you're able to kind of move that focus point into the scene to capture everything in apparent focus well enough to get a nice sharp looking print where i have the water bottle and the camera in focus at the same time you know stopping down to f11 is pretty good i can even watch it while i'm zoomed in and see the effects of stopping down to f14 i'm watching my top screen right now f16 and then zoom back over and see you know what does everything look like at f16 oh they're both nice sharp and in focus now that's something i can't do with autofocus it's literally like using a large format camera and using a loop to look at that ground glass when you're under a dark hood out in the landscape except it's quicker simpler and easier you know if i back back out now i've found my focus point that puts everything out there now the way the dslrs were wired if i hit the depth of field preview button under under my middle finger here in the front of the camera by the grip what happens is it opens the aperture wide up so that it doesn't have to amplify the light signal to get me a nice bright view in the back of the screen it'll show it at a lower iso without as much amplification a cleaner image it lets me see what it looks like wide open just for composition or maybe maybe you know getting one thing in focus it's easier to compose with that brighter view you can see it's getting dimmer as it stopped down so that is something that i used all the time particularly as a landscape photographer i get out in a scene with say a 24 or 28 or 35 millimeter lens composition and have some beautiful piece of the foreground that was really important to me to have in focus and the distant mountains and i could use this technique to figure out what aperture do i need and where do i need to place focus in order to get the foreground sharp and the background sharp at the same time macro photographers still like photographers landscape photographers people that are set up meticulously crafting their image on the tripod can use this technique to just nail it every time it's like cheating all right so that was possible with the d800 850 the d810 the d800 the d700 the d500 the d300 s that i had that our d300 i don't remember that had the live view was the first kind of really good live view camera that i had all right so i'm going to pause i'm going to switch these two cameras around and show you the problem with all of the z cameras to date with doing this all right and perhaps i should preface this you know i did tell you i'm i'm selling my 850 i am 100 i love working with the z cameras this is this one thing that just seems frustrating there there's there's workarounds i'll show you how i tend to work around it when i'm out in the field but it's just plain seems completely nonsensical that you can't do the same thing so i've swapped the 850 out with the z72 all right my my favorite camera that i work with these days i'm filming with the z62 which i also adore i've got my live view up i could easily easily do this through the viewfinder as the live view that's one thing that i love i wouldn't need to throw my reading glasses on if i'm not filming this i'd be just looking through my eye finder through the diopter adjustment i wouldn't need reading glasses but this is one of the many little things you know here's another i can just tap the screen and put the focus point wherever i want without focusing or shooting the the the the d850 you either shoot or it focuses or it's turned off this you can just locate the point which is really nice so i'm going to do just what we did before with the 850 i'm going to put it on that little section of the hawaii hawaiian islands there i can move it around a little bit make sure it's on a contrast point hit the auto focus on button my back button boom i'm locked in i'm focused same lens same position we just swapped the 850 in the in the z72 i'm using the ftc adapter here all right now you know obviously that nikon is nowhere near in focus let's stop down a little bit you can see it changing just like you did with the 850 except when you hit f5.6 suddenly it stops stopping down you get no effect in the viewfinder unless you hit the depth of field preview if i push the depth of field preview which i have remapped to the movie button in still mode then all of a sudden you know you get kind of a noisy look at what this is going to look like it's using some some iso you know ramping the iso to give you a look at whether or not things look sharp to you you know if you want to zoom in and say hmm is the nikon symbol actually in focus well i could tap put my cursor there i have a button the center of my d-pad is mapped to zoom in to wherever the focus point is to 100 just with the tap well you know another great thing with the z camera you know it's it's only showing it to me at f 5.6 despite the fact that i've dialed it to f11 if i try to hit depth of field preview it bumps me right back out to fit view there is no physically possible way in still mode with the z cameras to preview what your final aperture is going to look like zoomed in while you're in live view whether you're looking through the viewfinder or whether you're looking at the back display now let's just switch it up for a second and go to video you're not going to see all the exposure information in video video is going to send a clean kind of hdmi output but i'll talk through what i'm doing right now so you know it's trying to get a focus here let's let's open it up let's do the same exercise we were just doing i'm going to switch modes around a little bit i think it's in auto area autofocus and i want to i want to control focus just like i was i'm going to run through my settings really here and put it in the single point autofocus and yeah that ought to be fine all right so i'm going to tap up here to set my focus point focus on it we're at 1.4 iso so i'm in video mode here you know you're not seeing everything i'm doing i've got a live histogram displaying on my camera back i can sort of see what the exposure looks like and as i stop down i'm at f2 f28 f4 f5.6 f8 f11 they know filmmakers need to see what their image looks like at the aperture that they're shooting and so they're letting filmmakers do that and you can even zoom in and see is that truly in focus it is truly in focus so the filmmaker doesn't have that limitation at all in video mode and one of the great things about these z cameras is they remember all the settings that you were using last in video mode versus still mode so if you were in manual mode and still moding you go down to 30 second exposure for the milky way and then you flip over to video mode and you're in a bright situation shooting at a thousandth of a second in manual mode when you flip back to still mode it remembers you're at 30 seconds when you flip back to video mode it remembers you were at a thousandth of a second so it isn't something that you can just flip back and forth in order to use the video mode to do this they're independent circuits essentially but it just goes to show that there's no reason on earth they couldn't let us do this in stills mode so you know i've had a lot of people ask me that do get what i'm talking about here why why is this limitation there and i think that the answer is they want lots of light coming into the lens to help with autofocus to make the autofocus fast and accurate fair enough when you flip into manual focus mode to finally craft that landscape image that macro image or the still life image you know somebody who's crafting an image and wants to check in detail at 100 whether or not at final aperture they've got their focus front to back they should let us do that there should be maybe it's a mode that you can switch maybe when you flip into manual focus mode all of a sudden it stops that limitation and behaves like the d850 where if or any of the old dslrs where if you hit the depth of field preview button it gives you a wide open clean view it's a switch back and forth there should at least be a setting to enable that for those who want it in the settings and i just would in i would entreat nike or nike i would entreat nikon to consider doing a firmware update to let the old cameras do that and certainly to let any new cameras that are released do that um you know i know a lot of you have talked to different nikon groups i've talked to mps they've talked to the engineers i know that nikon germany has talked so you know feel free to reach out to nikon with this concern i just really hope they'll change that because it will make our lives easier what i do right now when i wanna when i wanna focus and i wanna make sure that i've got it exactly like i want let's flip back into stills mode you know i'm here at f11 i i have depth of field preview mapped you know and i just kind of play around with it and i i work to get everything looking as balanced as i can in the full view it's about the best i can do i tend to focus about a third of the way in the scene like i did with film you know then i'll i'll work it you know let's say i go to f 16 and just kind of looking at it you know it looks pretty sharp nikon to water bottle i'll take my shot well this is a really real this is ridiculous i gotta turn the iso up sorry guys i'm going to turn back on sorry for that absence there for a second we got to ramp our iso up let's go to say 1600 and then we'll we're going to go into the i menu really quick and turn on exposure delay mode because it's off right now let's give it a second exposure delay so i don't shake it hitting the button and then i'm going to go ahead capture that image hit playback and then i can zoom in to just check and that's what i wind up doing i wind up fine tuning using my focusing adjustments on the lens and tweaking it back and tweaking it forward a little bit it's kind of like in the old school days before i had the live view you know if you know what you're doing you can still hone it in and use it and i find so many things about this camera easier to use and much more enjoyable that you know i don't look back i don't grab the d850 just because it can do that but i would really like it if nikon would address that so you know reach out to nikon tell them to make a great product better and hopefully again they don't continue with this limitation into future bodies all right everybody thanks so much for watching i hope you'll really strongly consider signing up for my office hours june 22nd submit those long exposure images we're going to go through them talk about them talk about long exposures take your questions submit those questions hudsonhere.com officehours if you guys have any gear needs hit me up with questions anytime i'm easy to reach you can hit me up in the questions on youtube you can email me and i've always got links to all the gear i use at hudsonhenry.com ats links alright everybody thanks so much for watching i hope everyone is staying safe feeling a little bit more freedom this summer for those of us in the northern hemisphere uh just uh breathing a little bit easier stay safe be creative we'll see you next week

Channel: Hudson Henry Photography

Views: 10,394

Rating: 4.9656358 out of 5

Keywords: Nikon, Z7, Z6, mirrorless, lesson, education, training, how to, gear, photography class, digital photography, depth of field, f5.6, aperture, live view, Approaching The Scene, Hudson Henry, z6ii, z7ii, z5, z50, D850, DSLR, focus, problem

Id: mmlZVvK2RME

Length: 17min 43sec (1063 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021