Nikon D500 Review, A Wildlife Photographer's Perspective

everyone Steve from backcountry gallery here and today I thought we'd review the new Nikon d 500 however before we begin I'd like to thank my newsletter subscribers who helped shape this video while putting this together I asked them what they would like to see in this review and I had a ton of great responses so a big thank you for all the help and ideas oh and if you'd like to join that email newsletter you can do so at my site just head on over there and sign right up so I've taken all the most common questions as well as a healthy dose of what I like and a little bit that I don't like about the camera and put all of that into this review oh and I've also made a point of mentioning how I personally have the camera set up as we go along I had a lot of requests for that there's also a page for this review on my website that I'll be adding to as time goes on right now it just details how have the camera set up but I'm sure I'm going to be adding to it that link will be in the YouTube description for this video if you want to check it out also note that this review is more of a practical field review from the perspective of a wildlife photographer than a number crunching technical review personally I'm more interested in results than stats and finally this isn't just me grabbing a couple hundred shots and throwing a review together I was lucky enough to have this camera on the first day it was available and I immediately took it on a field trip to Florida for birds and at the Smoky Mountains for some bear after 6,000 images I'm ready to share my initial thoughts about how it performs in the real world so let's go ahead and get started controls and layout I have to say I really like the layout and control options with the D 500 well it's different than any Nikon I've used before it really didn't take long to feel right at home with everything I especially like the new location for the ISO button and the little joystick on the back is a welcome addition and actually much better than the one on my d4 the new tilt screen is also an interesting feature although I have yet to actually use it for a photography I think it's going to come in really handy though the next time I want to get I level with a frog or what I'm doing macros general I'm also getting used to the touchscreen although the truth is at first I get forgetting to use the touch features to review my images when I was out in the field I guess I'm just too used to the old way however once I slowly got myself into the habit of using it for image review I have to say I really liked it a quick double tap and it zooms into the image at 100% but of course you can pinch and zoom as well and giving the photos a quick flick to scroll sure beats the heck out of using the buttons it may seem gimmicky at first but you know give it a chance and I think it'll really grow on you I know I was surprised this camera is also loaded with customizable buttons many of which are far more customizable than in the past this has opened up lots of new ways to configure the camera for your individual style of shooting for example my two most used AF modes on this camera our group AF in single point AF however I still use some of the other modes so flipping through all of them when I quickly need a change is really a hassle well not anymore for example because of these new customization options I can now set my preview button to temporarily switch to a different AF mode when pressed so let's say I'm doing action shots and I'm in group AF I'm going along just fine but maybe the action stops or the animal gets into heavy cover where I need single point AF instead of pressing the mode button and cycling through until I get to single point AF I just press and hold my preview button and the cameras in single point AF mode until I release it once released it goes back to the mode I was using before in this example group AF pretty sweet huh and that's only one of the choices for the preview button there are a ton of choices at your fingertips in the function button AF on button and sub selector also offer a similar amount of choices I have to say I'm also really enjoying the new viewfinder magnification is greater than the D 7200 and well it's not as expansive as what you'd see when looking at a full-frame camera it's still very nice the body itself is comfortable to work with and it fits in my hands much better than the D 7200 did as far as size the camera is between the D 7200 and the D a tenant's eyes for me I think it's about the perfect size large enough to comfortably hold yet compact enough to take anywhere although I admittedly like a larger camera body so take that for what it's worth I also purchased the grip for it but it wasn't available yet when I was on my trip now that I have it I certainly won't go back I've always liked a grip on my camera as expected the grip works well and I'm glad to have it I hate doing verticals without it actually I also really like that the button layout is well matched to the camera this certainly isn't the case with every camera and grip but with the D 500 going from horizontal to vertical is seamless as far as my fingers and their placement is concerned on the camera and the feel is about the same with all the buttons too so that's really nice autofocus okay this is where I was the most impressed the AF system in this camera has been just fantastic Mikey prayed us through the roof and attracts like a sniper also I'm making these comparisons based on my experience with my D for my da ten and my D 7200 first off initial acquisition seems to be greatly improved especially with group AF in the past I've been able to ping quite a few missed opportunities on the cameras inability to get an initial lock on a subject and there's nothing more frustrating than seeing your AF point on your subject as the camera struggles to get a lock well that's just not the case anymore the D 500 has an uncanny way of picking out my subjects even against tricky backgrounds group AF seems particularly adept at this but I think it's better across the board at least compared to my other cameras in the vast majority of cases when I have my AF area on the subject the camera instantly locked on and stayed locked on plus the other side of this coin is that when I made a mistake on my end and lose tracking I can correct and the camera would require focus almost instantly and very nearly every time that just wasn't the case in the past my other Nikon's at least not at this level not only is initial acquisition improved but tracking is also the truth is the camera very seldom loses a lock most of the time if an AF lock is lost it's because I made a mistake this tracking is simply tenacious once it gets a lock it does not want to let go as for AF modes everything seems to work better than it did in previous cameras with similar modes for birds in flight I experimented with d25 group 3d and single AF overall I found myself gravitating towards group AF for flight shots of small to medium sized birds it just seemed to have a higher keeper rate for me d25 work well - and would probably be a better choice in situations where you need a more precise AF location I tried 3d and while it has been improved you can still get fooled with my subjects and backgrounds are too similar in color it's also more erratic so you never know if it's going to focus on an eye a body a wing or what I have a feeling it probably works better with people than it does with wildlife single-point continues to work well however I did notice that it seems slightly harder to use for flight shots than with my older cameras this may be due to the smaller size of the AF points in the new camera or I may have just been having an off day it also didn't seem quite as quick to get the initial lock on his group AF was that said actual focus speed on a stationary target was the same as far as I could tell with my basic tests in any event group AF ended up being my go-to for most of my action work on this trip and single point was my default for stationary subjects as time goes on and I become more accustomed to the AF system that may change another question that I've seen a lot is how does the camera do with low-light AF for this I tested one of the toughest subjects I know black bears and low-light that situation has been a challenge and sometimes of impossibility for every nikon AF system I've ever used well it turns out that the D 500 is actually better but still not perfect in really low light against the flat black fur of a bear even the D 500 can struggle but hey it's still better than any of my other cameras I've used so you know I'll take it that said just as soon as there's the least little bit of contrast to get a bite on the D 500 comes right back in to its own as for non black bear subjects in low-light it did better than I expected at every circumstance the truth is the camera can continue to lock on to subjects reliably well past the point I would stop shooting due to climbing is OS but a little bit more on that later also I have to say I absolutely loved the fact that the AF points are spread out from one side of the screen to the other I use my AF points for composition moving them around to try to keep focus on the eye this new layout makes it much easier to do so without the need to constantly focus and recompose and the joystick on the back makes moving from point to point very intuitive the new layout also has 153 AF points instead of the old setup with 51 AF points note that only 55 user selectable the rest are in between those points and used with the various tracking modes in practice this works great it allows you to quickly move your AF area around and still be able to place your point where you like it in the composition speaking of which the points are smaller so the dynamic area AF numbers have changed instead of d9 D 21 and D 51 we now have D 25 D 72 and D 153 respectively the D 25 and D 72 areas cover approximately the same area in the viewfinder is the old d 9 and D 21 areas did and of course the D 153 option covers the entire autofocus area personally if I'm using one of the dynamic modes it's usually D 25 sometimes D 72 there's also been some changes to the focus tracking with lock-on options we now have 5 settings from quick to delayed I used to shut this off completely because the older cameras would occasionally lose focus and pick up on the background when that happened the delay would cause the camera to hesitate when I tried to regain the focus I'd often just miss the shot well tracking has improved so much that that's not as big of a problem as it was in the past in fact having the lock-on engage allows me a split second to regain focus if I happen to wander off the target currently I like mine set at 2 for the birds and flight shots I've been doing but certainly test yours to see what works best for you the other new part of the setting is subject motion so far I've kept mine between erratic and steady however I could totally see going for erratic for something that's not as predictable as the types of birds I've been photographing in flight what about the new AF fine-tuning feature well I have to say I don't like it nearly as much as some of the other new stuff when I was in Florida I met up with my friend Michael tapes the inventor of lens align we were talking about the new camera and long story short ended up going to his place and using the lens align system to dial in my 300 PF lens on the D 500 so let's just say I'm completely confident with the plus 2 adjustment we came up with after all it was done by the guy who invented lens align oh and when I tested in the field sure enough boatloads of tax sharp images after I returned from my trip I decided to see if the AF fine-tune feature worked as well as lens align the procedure is pretty simple put the camera into Live View make sure the AF point is centered and then focus the image once you have the image perfectly focused holding the AF mode button and the video record button at the same time a screen will come up just click OK now go to your AF fine-tune menu and you'll see that a value has been entered for the lens pretty sweet huh well not so fast I did this multiple times and the readings were all across the board the range was from minus 4 to plus 6 and I've heard of people getting even Wilder swings than that so in the end I'm just not sure how useful it is and in fact I think it actually has potential to do more harm than good personally I'm going to stick with lens aligned I've been using it for years and it's a much more controlled precise way of testing and determining the optimum tuning value for a lens and with a high pixel density sensor like this your lenses really do need to be as spot-on as possible auto fine-tuning aside in my opinion if you want just one reason to upgrade to the D 500 it would be the AF system I'm absolutely thrilled with it I think it's safe to say it's a really nice step up from the very best that Nikon had to offer just last year shutter frames per second and buffer now another thing I really like about the D 500 is the shutter it's not super silent like the d810 but it's quieter than the D 7200 and certainly quieter than the d4 I've actually scared animals off with the d4 before and I don't think that's going to be a problem with the D 500 least it hasn't been yet oh and it also has a couple of quiet modes but honestly they don't seem that much softer to me just slower as for mere blackout it's not terrible at full speed but you know I'd always like to see it a bit less than it is speaking of speed I love the ten frames per second this body delivers so many times people misunderstand why frames per second is so important in short it's not about spraying and praying it's about getting more options from each burst 10 frames per second gives you more perfect wingbeats more perfect glances more perfect splashes in short more perfect moments and I'm glad to have it it's not that cameras with slower frames per second can't deliver incredible action shots it's that the faster cameras deliver more of them which brings me to the buffer I've had a lot of questions regarding the performance both with xqd cards and SD cards so I did some basic testing with my SanDisk Extreme Pro card I was able to get 45 images before the buffer began to chug in all honesty that should be enough for pretty much everybody using this camera probably 95% of people I personally have yet to knock off 45 in a row in the field now xqd cards are another story with my Lexar 2930 3x card in there I was able to pop off 200 shots that's not the whole story the reason it stopped at 200 shots is the camera won't go beyond that the 200 shot limit is presumably so you don't kill your camera if you leave it on and stick it in your bag and the shutter button gets depressed however there's something cool that no one else seems to mention if you hit that 200 mark and then take your finger off for just a second or two you can go right on shooting check this out in this clip I'm about to hit the buffer there it is I take my finger off for a second and there you go I'm pounding away again frame after frame basically with a fast XQD card you have an unlimited buffer in the D 500 sensor performance next let's look at sensor performance first off I'd like to say I'm really liking the files I've seen from this camera they look a lot like what I get for my da 10 in terms of color and they seem almost as malleable and post one thing I did notice that I want to pass on to Lightroom users though I personally have been liking the camera neutral setting better than the Adobe standard profile normally I kind of go back and forth between them but I just don't like Adobe's profile for this camera this time around it seems to add which contrasts seems to rob it of some color too so take a look at that when you're in there what about dynamic range well nikon did really good here at iso 100 it beats the d5 by over stop and this is less than a stop behind both the da ten and d750 at ISO 800 above it's less than half a stop from either the d750 or the da 10 and starts trailing behind the d5 which knocks out everyone above ISO 2500 so in short dynamic range isn't an issue with this camera in fact here are a couple examples this image was on my first evening with the camera and I have the exposure set wrong looking at the file in the back of the camera I was absolutely sure I blew the highlights however turns out that even with the exposure this far off the camera didn't actually clip the highlights in RAW and I was able to recover the shots in Lightroom here's one with the opposite problem as you can see it's over two stops underexposed but just a quick adjustment of the exposure slider in Lightroom and it comes right back the camera is actually ISO invariant and other tests have shown that you can actually pull an image back that's up to five stops underexposed and end up with a noise level that's nearly identical to what it would have been had you set the ISO in the camera to the equivalent setting in other words let's say you're shooting manual mode at one two thousand of a second at f/4 and the proper ISO for your light level is ISO 3200 but you accidentally had your camera set at ISO 100 a five stop difference you shoot a few shots and you catch your error and readjust your ISO to 3200 for the rest of the shoot when you get back to your computer you can actually pull those underexposed shots up by five stops and end up with about the same noise level and quality as the properly exposed image pretty sweet the benefit here is that if you're in a situation with this camera we're blowing highlights is a concern you can allow the camera to underexpose a bit and know that you can pull the file up to the proper exposure when you get back to your computer speaking of ISO how good is it anyway well let's put it this way it's fantastic for a crop sensor but it's still the performance of a crop sensor now I know there are people on the internet saying that this camera is as good as or better than its full-frame counterparts but it just isn't the case at least not for RAW files figure this camera about to stop behind the current crop of Nikon full frame bodies from my field experience it seems like it might be just a touch better than the D 7200 but if it is I mean we're only talking a third of a stop in fact when looking at images side by side with the D 7200 file down sample to D 500 size they really are neck-and-neck personally I'll cap mine out at ISO $4,000 ain't noisy files very well most of my subjects have a lot of fur feathers and that detail gets obscured by too much noise now I've seen images with less detailed subjects that looked really good at ISO 6400 from this camera but beyond that everything starts to look too noisy at least to me however the D 500 seems to be able to capture a ton of detail and the noise pattern is very easy to work with I use noise reduction software on most of my files and the files take noise reduction really really well if you have a sharp image I love topaz D noise it seems like I can clean up D 500 files pretty easily while maintaining really good detail by the way along the lines of sensor performance I want to mention white balance really quick I know it's not a big concern for Raw shooters but the JPEG crowd will love to hear this I think it's noticeably improved over night cons past offerings in the past I often found myself switching white balance or at least noticing it wasn't right when I looked on the back of the camera with this camera it just seems to get it right most of the time at least for the type of images I've been doing so far other concerns I've seen and received messages from people asking about a few common concerns with this camera so let's take a look at those batteries it seems like most third-party batteries are not working in the D 500 now all of my Nikon batteries have been just fine even some of the older ones now I also did hear from a few people having issues with older Nikon batteries particularly the lithium-ion o1 units I have a few of those and I haven't had any problems yet so if you have an older Nikon battery I'd say just be aware there may be an issue using it there's also a lot of reports about battery drain now I shot over 2,000 images on a very productive morning out on a boat in Florida and I did it all with just a single battery most of the time it seems like I was getting around a thousand twelve hundred shots or so before I wanted to change so I must have jumped a lot less on the boat or something I did however experienced a strange drain on my battery when I wasn't using the camera but it was left on since the camera is Wi-Fi enabled I ended up putting it into airplane mode and I haven't had the problem since so I don't know maybe that was all it was sharpness another concern I see is about sharpness now based on the images I've captured I don't think it's a problem at all it's not an issue with my particular camera body anyway I have a feeling that a lot of the sharpness problems stem from people trying to do action shots when they're not used to doing them with a DX camera the type pixel density will demand a much better technique and usually higher shutter speeds than what you may be used to if you're coming from a full-frame camera keep in mind that this is like shooting a 48 megapixel full-frame sensor so it's going to demand a higher level of technical proficiency to get the most out of it for birds in flight I'm often trying to shoot between one thirty two hundred and one five thousandth of a second you can get away with lower speed sometimes bathing's slower than two thousand of a second and you'll be really starting to fight motion blur of course for more stationary subjects slower shutter speeds are just fine personally I'm completely happy with the level of sharpness I'm seeing for my particular camera and my files seem to need very little in the way of post-processing sharpening in fact I've been turning sharpening down when I'm using my web sharpening actions if that tells you anything recommendations finally I want to pass along my recommendations I had a ton of people asking me about the D 500 versus well about every other Nikon ever made since it would take hours to go through all those comparisons I'm going to leave you with some guidelines first off for DX shooters if you're debating between this and maybe something like a D 7200 it really comes down to performance sensor wise both cameras seem fairly evenly matched across the board with the D 7200 ring a slight advantage in resolution so if you're doing action of some sort you need better low-light AF performance need a deeper buffer or if there's any other aspect of the D 500 that you feel will help you get the type of shots you're after then the D 500 makes sense on the other hand if you're doing more static images portraits posed wildlife landscape and really don't shoot much action then the D 7200 is probably a better choice oh and I mean don't get me wrong the D 7200 can also do action I have plenty of shots to prove it but it just doesn't get you the keeper rate on those type of shots that the D 500 does I mean make no mistake the D 500 is an absolute major upgrade in this department of course there's also the ergonomics of the camera I like to lay out the feel the customization options and the size of the D 500 far better than the D 7200 but that's just my personal opinion the D 500 also has better weather sealing which may be important to some shooters and so it's not an easy decision and in the end I think you should let the types of photos you make help guide you to the camera that seems best suited for your needs the other question is along the lines of should I get the D 500 or a full-frame body I'll tell you straight up all things being equal I will always pick the full-frame option over the crop body full-frame sensors are about a stop better and ISO performance and I'd like to have that improvement whenever I can plus there's usually slightly better dynamic range color preservation and higher ISOs etc so all things being equal I'll go full frame the problem is things aren't always equal are they first off let's look at effective focal lengths if I just don't have enough lens for a full frame body to get the crop I want I'll switch to DX every time I know you can still crop a full-frame body but I'm not getting nearly the number of pixels in that crop I can for my D 500 think of it this way if I was shooting a D 5 and had to crop my image to the DX area my final image would be just over 9 megapixels versus the D 500 is nearly 21 even against the da 10 it would be 16 versus 21 so the D 500 is still putting more pixels on my ducks plus there's the size factor when I go hiking with my gear my typical setup is now my D 500 and 300 PF with a 1/4 teleconverter in my pocket in terms of full frame field of view that's like having a 450 millimeter f4 lens without a teleconverter and a 630 millimeter lens with one attached and it all fits in the palm of my hand and is totally hand hold of all two in order to get that kind of reach for my full frame gear I need this setup and it's not nearly as much fun to hike with and then there's performance so many times people get caught up with the sensor itself but the truth is if some limitation in your camera is preventing you from getting the shot it really doesn't matter how great your sensor is does it the D 500 is far superior to all but the pro level bodies in every performance respect at least at the time of this video better AF across-the-board faster frame rate deeper buffer better layout and organ on extraction better control customization and on and on if I'm shooting action and have the choice between my da 10 and the D 500 the D 500 is going to win every time it's simply going to help me capture images that the d810 is going to miss heck the frame rate alone gives me twice as many opportunities per burst to capture a magic moment so in the end you need to pick the right tool for the job my kit now consists of a da 10 a D 500 and a D 5 for wildlife I anticipate using the D 5 and D 500 equally and leveraging the advantage of each camera as the situation dictates of course there's more to getting great wildlife images than just the gear you have to have the know-how as well and that's where my ebook secrets to studying wildlife photography comes in its 290 pages that teach you all of my very best tips tricks and techniques for putting award-winning images on your memory cards check it out at my site and join the thousands of others who are already putting the advice to work each time they're out in the field shooting also make sure you stop by my site and sign up for my free email newsletter so you never miss a video or an article and of course I'd love it if you'd subscribe to my youtube channel thanks so much for watching and have a great day you

Channel: Steve Perry

Views: 559,970

Keywords: photography tips, photography help, Backcountry Gallery, Steve Perry, nature photography, nikon d500, nikon d500 review, wildlife photography, wildlife nikon d500, birds with nikon d500, nikon d500 specs, review of nikon d500, nikon d500 for wildlife, d500, d500 for wildlife, d500 action

Id: ComPpr0bniM

Length: 25min 27sec (1527 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 01 2016