Nikon Z 9 Live Panel Discussion: Photography

[Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] man does that sound really good ladies and gentlemen welcome to this very special z9 introduction program on z9 launch day my name is mike corrado i work in nikon pro services and i've been working with nikon for over 38 years and we are here to talk to you about the z9 camera that we have just introduced we have put together a series of shoots with very talented photographers and filmmakers and over the next two hours we're going to go delve into these shoots the creative the performance of the camera some of the features of the camera and we're going to have just a really great conversation over the next two hours so the first hour we're going to dedicate to still and we've got some amazing photographers here with us for this hour let me start by introducing mr joe mcnally commercial journalist photographer joe welcome to the program thank you for having me thank you and we had a great shoot recently and uh we're going to talk about that uh and see the end result from that i think we used the word fun a lot fun fun was great right hey listen i went from colorado 14 000 feet to the flat desert and open desert with you so it was a great transition um an incredible sports photographer who i've been inspired by for many many years jen potheiser welcome to the program thanks for having me you are you are way too kind mike thanks thanks for having me i've been following your photography for many many years and i think the word versatility comes to mind and uh and i can't wait to talk to you about your experiences with z9 now the person to my left look at that smile the most handsome man awarded the most handsome man in the world well deserved well deserved mr matthew jordan smith welcome to the program matthew good to be here man how are you doing from tokyo um we have worked together for decades now right yes i've known most of you for quite a while and this is going to be a great conversation uh matthew you took the camera to task first and we're going to talk about your shoot as we go i love that a commercial portrait photographer correct is that the way you would define yourself and we're going to see how you put the z9 to the test but before we move forward uh none of this makes sense unless you have somebody here to talk technical and explain some of the depth of the features now when i fire off the camera the z9 is far more than just the frame rate and speeds and we're going to talk to mark crews who is one of the most technical people at nikon who delves into the manuals learns the camera as they grow as as we learn more features he delves into that and he can explain it all to us mark crews welcome to the program thank you excited i can't wait for everybody to see your stuff but before we get there uh mark i want to turn to you first and really for those of you tuning in you've seen a lot of content so far we want to talk to them about what's so special about the xe9 what makes this camera a flagship nikon mirrorless camera well i think the word you said right there flagship is what makes it special for the last couple of years since we've come out with the z platform everybody's been wondering when are we going to come out with a flagship for the mirrorless and when we thought about that prospect of coming out with a flagship we really have to take into consideration where we are now and that was with the d6 being the flagship there's a lot of expectation for professional photographers that require those type of fast speeds you know a very reliable autofocus that something in the z format can deliver we know it can deliver in terms of the optics and the image quality i think what people have been waiting for is really the autofocus system to surpass what the d6 does or even just get up to d6 levels and we've done that we've done that with this camera so we can confidently say that this is now not only the flagship of the mirrorless platform but actually the flagship of the entire nikon portfolio of cameras including the d6 it surpasses that camera in so many respects when we thought about the design of the camera you know it was important to make it familiar and make it appropriate for that professional photographer so um you know we looked at the overall body design and found that it was important to include the integrated vertical grip so to make it familiar to those photographers that need that robustness to it so we've taken all the cue points from dslr know-how over the years what we've learned over mirrorless technology in the last two years and combined it into one camera that suits not only the sports and photo journalists which we normally target but is also looking at wedding and commercial and portrait photographers because unlike previous flagships this has a very high resolution and what we'll talk about later with another panel it has top grade video specs so if you ask me what makes it so special it's the combination of all those things which is unusual for us for a flagship camera usually it's targeting one segment um but now we are actually targeting several different segments all in the best camera that we've ever launched there's something very unique about this camera that's unique to the industry it is now a full ground up electronic camera meaning there is no shutter mechanism in this camera talk to everybody about the importance of that and how is that possible yeah it's going to be shocking i know when i was told the first time that this was not going to have a mechanical shutter that uh it was uh my eyes uh i went bug-eyed when the engineer told me and but it didn't take me very long to understand why we don't have it and the reason why is because it was really attributed to the stack sensor that's really the technological hurdle that we've now overcome it has to do with something called scan scan speed from top to bottom of the sensor so we have a very good speed going right from left to right and scanning the sensor but from top to bottom it's typically very slow until now with the stacked cmos sensor we've overcome that you know all that technical jargon aside we now have electronic shutter speeds that mimic that of a mechanical shutter so any distortion or banding that you would normally get with electronic shutters has been minimized so much so that we frankly don't need a mechanical or not there yes yes really press it hard to find it yeah and it opens up many more advantages we can be operate completely silently we don't have uh mechanical uh variations in terms of the timing and the consistency and then we also have things like going up to very fast shutter speeds like 1 32 000 of a second which a mechanical shutter simply could not do many advantages and one last advantages i will say is that for people coming over from mechanical shutters there's no more black out in the viewfinder or the live view screen this is something new that we call real live view technology and it's going to allow you to see the picture that you take and not have the blackouts you'll actually see it in real time this is really how we've been able to surpass what the d6 and any of our cameras have done in the past is the secret is really that stacked cmos sensor the camera's got a speed seven xspeed seven basically touches all avenues of the camera every area that you've just spoken about talk about that how that plays into the frame rates of the camera yeah so that opens up a lot of doors because you know when we're using utilizing these fast cf express type b cards we can now maximize them and we've only hit about 14 frames per second at our top cameras up until now now we've unlocked 20 frames per second in raw and we can shoot that for you know not five seconds not seven or eight seconds we can shoot that for 50 seconds and i've even pushed it past that so you know you can shoot a thousand frames if you want maybe it's not entirely practical but the point is you'll never outrun the buffer um we've also allowed this camera to unlock 30 frames per second and that's not 30 frames per second at you know 20 megapixels that's 30 frames per second at 45.7 megapixels which is unusual for this type of flagship camera because typically we we prioritize speed high iso we've come to a point now with the sensors and the xp technology where we can get the speed we can get the resolution with new compression technologies with our with our raw format um and then lastly we have a 120 frame per second i'm not talking about video i'm actually talking about stills we have a stills mode for 11 megapixels which i think we were mentioning you know that's higher resolution from dslrs back in the day and we can do that 120 frames per second full auto focus full auto exposure during that time and basically catch invisible moments something we've never been able to do in any of our cameras so we're really that's a big wow factor for this camera i got to turn to you guys and say mark's talked about a lot of stuff and you guys now had a chance to experience the camera joe let me start with you what does all of that mean to you as a photographer well here's the thing as a photographer out here in the world you know you're used to a lot of ongoing technology new cameras all the time and it's wonderful it's nice you look at some of the new technology okay well that would be cool to have i see that improvement okay but they're incremental changes this camera is a game changer this camera is a leap you know it's not um just a you know a minute by minute sort of improvement this just puts us into the future you know joe you and i have spoken too to mark's point about not only having the commercial quality at a high megapixel count 45.7 but then to have the speeds to do the journalistic work you do that requires speeds and gen for you in sports and matthew few even in the studio um talk about that because we you even said that this may be your one only camera body you need to take out now oh it already is i mean i can't wait for you you know you can get one soon can i have that one come on you know um no i i'm a jack-of-all-trades kind of uh assignment photographer i've done news and sports and and fashion and beauty and and celebrity and the the the path of a general assignment photographer and i've rarely had a camera in the digital realm that addresses all those needs you know i've always felt a little schizophrenic on assignments i have this camera if for heavy duty action i have this camera for studio etc this camera is for everything yeah and a lot of different types of people jen the speeds feeds and speeds frame rates how important to the moments in the sports photography you create i i think uh jumping off of what mark said and what and what you said joe and and encompassing the speed there's a lot of wow factor here um it is the the feel of the d6 but so much so much more it is in fact a game changer the the speed uh one of the shoots that i did uh i was shooting stills and when we went back and looked at the take the subjects thought that i had switched to video it is just that fast and that sharp it is a lot of fun you know the word of the day has been unstoppable that's what we're coming out with with this camera i think unstoppable confidence feeling great we talk about this being able to have fun on shoots again to me i found this with every iteration and change of cameras that the more technology comes the more fun it becomes for us because we can really concentrate on the subjects now speed is important to you matthew even though you're in the studio we're going to talk about all your individual assignments but matthew talk about how important it is to have something like iaf and we're going to dig deep into the autofocus system next but how important is that for you and what was your first impression i mean it's everything for me you think about being in studio and taking portraits and maybe you think about being like one frame at a time but for portraiture also there are things that happen in the moment and you want to capture it and this camera speaks to that i mean it screams to that i can get all those moments in the moment and i love that we also talk often about using a 1.2 lens yes and a 1.4 lens and in the studio at times it's just not really sticking with the eye or with the subject yeah it's been it's been talked more in the past but in depth about your particular shots but how important is that to you as a studio photographer movement for me it changes everything to be able to shoot at you know a wide open aperture if i want that and and capture the moment with confidence in every frame that makes you feel like oh it's fun again it's actually fun in a new way yeah well everyone here on the panel has a passion for photography every one of us mark is not just technical he's a great artist as well and i like mark get the camera months before you guys because we start to evaluate and we start to see where the system goes and we start thinking about the stress tests on this camera that we can take this camera into environments for me and i've got a few shots here that we're going to roll through but the auto focus is what caught me right away i picked the most erratic bird on the beach a common turn i actually have footage from the video if you guys want to show that where you see the focus points immediately out of the cave following the birds it transitions to another bird so quickly and follows that other bird with different patterns whether it grabs the whole wings the bodies or the eyes of the bird the eye detect for birds here is phenomenal and i found like such a great experience to me and at that point what happens is the level of confidence goes up the take goes up i got 99 percent of those images tax sharp jen you had mentioned that earlier in conversations with me about just every picture seems sharp and and again you wish for perfection but um you know i i was able to create my own story in a series of birds but mark let's delve into the af a bit what makes this af so special outside of its speed its accuracy and picking up everything yeah well that's uh that's one half of it it's the speed and accuracy of tracking something going away or coming to you what makes it more remarkable is subject detection so when we talk about subject detection typically in the past we've had face and eye detection as well as dogs and cats now we actually have nine different subjects that this can detect which includes birds now great for the birding community it can even narrow it down to the bird's eye but we have an assortment of different vehicles planes trains cars bikes motorbikes that it can detect and what that means is that rather than selecting a box that box can expand and change shape to your subject if it can detect it so that gives you a level of accuracy and a freedom to allow the autofocus system to detect that subject and allow you to worry about more composition and not so much keeping track of the focus which kind of takes your concentration away from what you're doing and that's kind of powered by something called a deep learning technology which is in the development process of the auto focusing system that's really what allows this to come to life this deep learning coupled with the stack cmos sensor and the xp technology all those combined to give us this reliable autofocus which as i said before actually surpasses the reliability of the d6 so that's the special thing for this subject detection and and the speed of tracking as you just saw with your bird examples absolutely i think the one grand slam home run to me was bringing 3d tracking back into our flagship z9 talk about 3d tracking how important that is i think everybody that knows the nikon format is going to be really excited about that that's something that we tried to mimic with subject tracking in the first iterations of z6 and z7 but it wasn't until this camera right now where we actually have 3d tracking a lot of people are going to love that and know about that especially sports photographers that use that feature it's basically a box that will lock on historically in the past to color and tracks it around the frame in a d6 or a d5 it would be relegated to the center now we can go pretty much all the way to the edges of the frame and what's new with this is not just a box that's tracking your subject it is coupled we've layered on top of that subject detection so whereas 3d tracking in a dslr would only be a box now you can have that detect animals vehicles people eyes even the smallest eyes we've ever had being able to be detected in a camera can be layered on top of 3d tracking so as long as it's within the radius of that square it'll actually change shape of that box and put priority to the eye which you know portrait photographers even if you're in the studio might even prefer because you can have the flexibility of locking on that box and then having it divert to an eye once it detects the subject well i consider myself the ultimate bird nerd next to one of my former colleagues lindsay silverman who is the birdman of long island right now and the one thing and i shot a series of pictures that we have to share the bird's individual i leave all the automation on i let the camera find the bird finds the bird's eyes finds a bird's body and the tracking is just amazing i also found too though within group shots where there are multiple birds i have the freedom to turn it all off and that's the beauty because remember we can go down to the very basics of single point focus if we want to so there are a whole bunch of other focus modes we can't get into right now but you as a photographer have the freedom to do what you want you guys feel that way jen talk to me about the autofocus experience it is total freedom and uh fun seems to be another word of the day it's the freedom to have fun when you know that your your camera is helping you along to get that auto focus with the eye detection the confidence that every frame of that 120 frames per second are going to be tack sharp it just allows you to shoot in a different way it allows you to think in a different way and joe you and i are in the desert with one of your subjects which is a dancer a theatrical person from las vegas talk about your first experiences when you went from the commercial side of your shoot to this dancer and how you dealt with autofocus what did you do and what was your experience well that i wanted you know somebody athletic somebody who could really move out in the desert i wanted to challenge the camera you know and so we did a lot of stuff with him where he's he's very fluid and beautiful to watch but he's coming right at the camera so the the the plane of focus is changing every second you know or fewer than a second you know and the camera i picked him up okay fine it picks him up and is tracking him but i introduced the extra detail of having him unexpectedly jump during the middle of his run and i really wanted to see what would happen in past autofocus situations if you want a group or something his lead leg comes up it might grab that leg but the camera was relentless that could be another word of the day you know the camera was relentless we got unstoppable we got fun we got relentless let's keep going okay the box that you're talking about here this af box that narrows down to the eye occasionally spreads out to the face just had him in absolute fashion at the end of the day i don't think i had a single unsharp frame and we did like 10 12 runs he's coming across the desert and he's super small the camera picks him up he jumps and using and then you know i could and then he was you know um but the thing is at the end of the day you have a hundred percent usable take and that's hugely important because we face it as photographers right now we're in an era of tight budgets fast turnaround clients demand sophisticated results and they demand them quick it's none of this like oh i can go back i can do a reshoot or extend your time frame out there in the desert for more days there's no opportunity to do that so an efficient camera like this is huge because your take is a hundred percent usable and we were we shot in a lot of backlit situations i did with the birds but you did with your dancer you know up against sunset what i found the box still found the eye in the shade still found the person when the head spun around because mark right it it boxes out the head it boxes out the torso it knows to look for these different distinguishable things correct that's correct yeah if it if the a person is too small in the frame to detect that eye it will revert to the face the head and even the torso so that's one of the cool things that we developed in the deep learning engineering the amazing thing to me too was when the dancer was going profile in low light right it still found him it couldn't see the full eye but it still found even this piece of the eye exactly exactly so i was i was just thrilled you know when he was doing the side jumps he had to recollect himself it wasn't a continuous motion so i was able to punch into my lcd and i was like you know it's it's addictive isn't it i was stuck i want to do another one because i want to see that the camera just did what i thought it did and it does so now i have double of what i wanted before and and as photographers we're always trying to see what we can get away with and push the boundaries and i think that's what is so exciting about this because you just think about things differently that oh well i never thought i could do this before let's now try it because everything works so it should just keep working and it and it did you hit it on the head like it opens the door for you to like do other things and you have this freedom now where before you like trying to focus on if you're getting it in focus and now you're free to be free to compose it and have more fun and get in the moment it's a great thing yeah and and your subjects can have that same freedom and fun because you're not asking them to stand on a little piece of gaffer tape or stay in this zone and and you don't have to look at your camera to see if it's in focus it's they can be in their zone and and we can be in our zone and and you just make pretty pictures yeah and i agree with what you said before joe time is money and to know you've got it you move on you know when you're partitioning your day exactly you have to be really efficient in the field nowadays as a photographer and this camera is going to be a huge partner in that majorly so matthew yes you one of the first people on the block to get to test drive stress test the z9 we spoke about it you came up with some concepts and ideas we're going to look at a few of your pictures now beautiful i really want to delve into the details of your creative where your mind goes with this we give you some of the specs like the resolution which to me is even more enhanced with dx crop because as a bird photographer with 45.7 megapixels to be able to go to dx crop and have a close to 6 000 pixel file at 300 dpi is a pretty nice thing it extends your abilities but now we're in the studio with you i want you to go back on how important autofocus is for you but the camera's not just about autofocus talk about the quality talk about the color talk about everything that comes out of the shoot you've done so set up the shoot and let's look at some of your pictures all right cool in studio i want everything i want clarity i want color i want resolution i want a sharp picture at a wide open aperture and this camera can give me that you know so for my shoot i want to have fun i want to go in there with people who could move a lot i think you know staying still in studio was like 1950. i want to move because life moves fast i need a camera can move with me as well so i found some great performers i found a freestyle footballer i found a salsa dancer and i found a samurai sounds interesting it was well i've seen the picture so i know it's interesting but ordinarily you shoot a samurai with long lens right yeah exactly exactly but this girl's fantastic she was just incredible in every single way oh so first first image yeah let's jump to the first image guys can we put the first image this is the baller right not exactly what i expected i thought soccer or something like that but it's not really soccer it's a combination of art move the ball motion talk about this yes like talk a little bit about the auto focus as you're you're seeing it happen what was your so this guy he's this is freestyle football which is it's not like a football that we know in the states it's like a different ball and he's like basically doing like uh you know was it like just just dancing with the ball or like doing uh you know rapping with a ball it's just him free keeping this ball going and he's i'm shooting him uh he's jumping up and down like joe was saying before about the guy jumping he's jumping he's on the ground and no matter where he went it focused on his eye i'm shooting a 50 millimeter lens um wide open and it kept up 50 millimeter 1.2 yes and that goes back to our point about one point having a very narrow depth of field to work in so critical sharpness on the eyes becomes ridiculously important to you super super cool but even in the sense of this baller of just even just the model turning around fast on a set has got to be important as it is like his eyes are on the ball the entire time so his face is to the side a lot no problem his eyes are in focus the entire time talk a little bit about this salsa dance i love this picture i love the energy of the picture and the movement you always capture that as joe continually talks to us about the moment it clicks the moments so you're in the studio and you have music so you have this sound going on and we're all feeling it and you can't fake that stuff you know so here she is she's in the vibe of the music she's moving i can capture that whole process where i focus on just her eye and then the rest kind of falls away it's like that feeling i love this stuff when you're looking at these images on the computer for the first time you're zooming into a hundred hundred two hundred percent what you're feeling in the quality of the file and the color well what you expected beyond what i expected in the past i'm used to shooting and looking for the ones that are in focus because sometimes you don't get them all in focus especially at one point too not with this camera i mean every frame is in focus i'm like oh wow so now i have confidence to just go and look for the great frame and not worry about okay is that one so i love that shot is it in focus that goes away and also too i mean it's so beautiful because she's in the moment and you can let her stay in the moment you don't have to constrain her you know you're just rolling and it's it it shows in the picture it shows absolutely i'm like okay do that again you have to worry about that again that whole thing oh do it again it's gone yeah talk about the samurai let's throw up the samurai photos now i i feel like your passion emotion every time we bring this up that beautiful smile that i love so much gets bigger and bigger uh i love these images in the movement here talk about now i have always wanted to do this and be honest in the past i've tried and you know it's impossible to really get them in focus and shoot wide open all the time because as a as a samurai sword fighter it's moving fast and i have her in a kimono and she has her sword and she's fighting you know and she's moving fast i've got to be careful number one because i'm going kind of close to her but that knife is sharp yeah well this is actually a one that's not sharp thank god but go with me on this the knife is razor sharp super sharp super sharp danger man it's dangerous dangerous situation great camera to capture the danger roll with me in the moment i mean you see her kimono is flying and she's moving she's throwing her uh her blade around it was easy for me to get these images in sharp focus you know and shoot at wide wide open at one point too i love the color you've created especially in this frame it's so beautiful i mean you had to have had this in your mind of all these elements coming together the flow of the fabric her intense look a little less of the dangerous sword in there somewhere but yeah now she brought this extra this is these are fans or in japan uh sensu and she's taking the fan and she's moving all this fabric is flowing in front of her face but still at one point too as the fan comes around her eye pops out bam it's beautiful i mean all of these frames are sharp if you guys want me to show 100 pictures i could have because they're all sharp and you're seeing the movement look at her look at her kimono here as she you know finishes the the process of swinging her sword and you see that that curve of her kimono that's the heavy come on so she's gotta really swing it fast to get that thing to move and she does here i love this shoot you can't wait to shoot it again well yeah you hopefully you will get a few and and bring them on we want to see what you create distract him i'll grab it i have i have this all censored so i know exactly where it goes when it goes uh actually that marked the kensington lock all right um you can actually secure the camera remotely so i can lock it away from you guys um but just your overall impression after you had this shoot just oh man i was in love with this camera i mean it brings fun back into photography and you have this freedom you have this confidence going into any situation and get you a shot it opens the door for you to stop thinking about stuff and worrying do you have the shot in focus that you love they're all going to be sharp and in focus now you can be more creative and that's cool get more out of shoot yeah definitely speaking of fun we had lots of unstoppable and the person who has coined the fun in all of this um jen you had a series of shoots that you put together that meet your world and stress test the camera what happened tell us about the shoots we're gonna run some of your pictures as well yeah so uh it was a summer of tennis it was right around us open tennis tournament and we had had been shooting there on hard courts and said let's uh let's see what this camera can do on red clay we we wanted something durable and we we wanted to feel that energy and that movement uh so we we found some red clay courts and and brought the camera there and uh you know this is a one of our athletes coming in for a short drop shot and he started at the baseline and you know joe you said this before with your dancer he is running towards me running towards me and every single frame tac sharp and because there is no blackout in the sensor you're seeing it and as you're as you're shooting you're just like my mind is saying like wow it's really doing this and and it did it um it it really allows you to think differently so you know that you have this shot and then you say okay well we have the movement coming towards us let's see what the lateral movement can do this at a 120 frames a second i mean you you feel every every grain of of uh clay coming up and and you feel that that energy um you see the dust flying off the ball and and then you know you have that and then you get a little greedy and you say well well what else can i do so uh i i lie down on my back and i shoot with the 105 and the the racket swings across his body and the camera stays tack sharp on his eye that's not something i would have ever even dreamed of doing and it's fun to make pictures like that that you didn't think that you could ever do because previously it would have been okay stand there i'm gonna get my focus now swing and don't move and there's no way that that energy feels the same as this energy this is you know he is in the zone just like i'm in the zone and that's a that's a fun partnership two things coming together that's amazing yeah no it's three it's it's uh me as the photographer the camera and the subject and everyone does what they're supposed to do so we we did tennis and then then we went and did some boxing super super low light and you can barely see the the athlete's eye and somehow the camera can see it and it's staying yeah magic everything that mark explained before mark the magician that's that's what we're coining as our as our phrase that's good um so uh it it just locked on her eyes and and you know there's 30 frames a second at this incredible movement and then there is the beauty in knowing that i can use the same camera and uh get an action shot again he's weaving and bobbing here um stays locked on his eyes the the heavy bag comes in front of him it it stays rock solid sharp it's amazing and then i know that i can just go to a portrait without without switching bodies without thinking i'm not going to have the resolution it is seamless and when you're tight on budgets when you're tight on time all of those things add up and it's it's all in this amazing little package that that just fits right in your hand like a d6 does yeah that versatility is so key whether it's for professionals or people serious into photography i think anybody loves d850 loves d5 or d6 are going to melt perfectly into this camera at least that's the way i felt because i shot a bit of tennis too what i loved is going super low to the ground focusing through the nets and it still picked up the face obstructions have always been something the technology mark crews we've always had something called focus tracking with lock-on right now you add iaf and the ability for the camera to recognize the scene uh that's pretty amazing isn't it yeah yeah it adds a different dimension of reliability as everyone has said so that's pretty exciting very very cool and and just going back to the tennis knowing that you can be silent i mean that is that is priceless in any in really in any situation whether it is uh documentary sports portraits um that again is just another level of confidence that you have and that's that's part of the beauty of the technology and all of this because as much as i love the d6 to be able to have the features and benefits of speeds of framing rates to have the focus capabilities as mark mentioned off the sensor to be able to do different things and photographing birds and the birds are flying off in a pair up in the upper left corner but 90 percent coverage on the horizontal and vertical of this camera mark gives us so much coverage at coverage and i'm i'm literally seeing them and i'm picking it up and i'm creating a frame with a ton of negative space but i'm doing it intentionally and the camera's still focusing exactly where i want it to be we go back to that word confidence because now i can create and i know you guys have done that really well now joe i i i went through 35 days of travel on the road from cape cod through colorado back to new york into seattle back up in the mountains at 14 000 feet in colorado with christie odom and then i come back to sea level with you in the desert right so christy abuses my body at 14 000 feet you abuse my body in the desert back to back it's our mission mike it's it's part of our mission you talk to me all the time about being a generalist in photography and photojournalist but sports action great meets commercial quality you put together a shoot of your own we're going to see some of those pictures let's talk about your shoot experiences and how this all came together and what about the camera fit for your shoot sure i mean i i think i said earlier the camera covers the waterfront so i created really a two-pronged assignment where i have the athlete moving beautiful you know fashion motion and then we have this supersonic race car that looks like a missile on wheels this is 300 miles an hour right yeah it's it's up there i mean we had a you know ed was like hey how fast you want to go let's keep 120 ed the driver and he actually said when i get to 120 miles an hour he goes i'm just going into second gear ed it's enough it's a testimonial for speed you know it's enough so and we mounted car cameras on the car so that was not so much a test of the af because the car and the camera are moving together the athlete tested out the af what i really wanted out of the car was just something unusual and to explore the file we shot a lot in the late part of the day the richness of the file the detail and also the build factor no kidding mr durability mark cruz you'd love this the first run cameras naked remote mounted and this guy screams across 120 miles an hour we get to the cameras blasted with the dirt i mean you can write your name on the back but that's a confidence thing for you isn't it absolutely i mean as professional photographers across the board i mean you shoot sports jen i mean you're out there in the rain it doesn't matter what the you're out there right right there with me in the rain in the mud so this camera is not only rock solid it's got all the tech you could possibly imagine what was the last thing you said before the race car took off the very first time oh i'm glad these aren't my cameras yeah thank you very much whose lens was on thank you 24 70. at the same time i'm sorry um oh you were not sorry no i wasn't you wanted to push it again again and again and what i love joe is i love the problem solving let's let's talk about the dancer first the athlete will what a great figure certainly is is a very sculpted body talk about this let's show some of these pictures and then we'll go back to the race car but sure talk about will and what you wanted out of that and how did the camera work with you on that well he's he's a you know a triple threat right he's a dancer he's a performer he's an athlete and so i wanted him to just be himself in the desert he's got a great sense of motion and you know as you say sculpted body completely fit and can handle all sorts of physical challenges and here's i'm referring again as i said earlier his lead leg lots of the older iterations of autofocus would have focused on that leg here the autofocus target the box is right up at his eyes and the movement was unpredictable i didn't i wasn't out there saying jump he jumped whenever he wanted to and then so i'm shooting a 100 to 400 at 400 so i'm i'm adjusting my frame with him you know up and down and never once did the box waiver and i noticed too a lot of times you're shooting low angle how could we bypass any of this mr cruz can you talk a little bit about the very angle lcd and how it works yeah i mean the shot that you just saw right there it's a good segue to the fact that when we developed this body we paid a lot of attention to people that are shooting portrait orientation so we thought it was very appropriate to build in a vertical grip not just for the overall feel but having the separate trigger right there and addressing the needs for people to shoot in that way and get at different angles we've also introduced a new screen that is new for a flagship we've never really had you know d1 d up to d6 had an articulating screen in any respect now we not only have it tilt up and down in the horizontal direction but now there's a new feature where we can do it vertically as well so this will give you freedom if you don't want to look through the electronic viewfinder to frame things from a lower angle or a higher angle if you want using the screen so this is something that we're really happy about and as well the lack of blackout that we have with this system now whether it's the viewfinder or the screen because of a new processor and a new dual stream technology that we have in there but um it's it's peculiar for people that are used to the mechanical shutter because you can see you know i can imagine joe seeing that entire sequence leading up to him and being able to anticipate well actually you don't have to anticipate you just have to react to when the jump comes in in previous cameras you know the very fast frame rates would be a little bit staggered it would just be slightly in the past which makes it hard to do here you're reacting in real time as if you're looking through glass and prisms and optics but you're really looking through a very high resolution very bright electronic viewfinder and seeing it in real time rivaling the speed of light in optics so that's a real breakthrough for us yeah it's pretty amazing and uh to watch you utilize all of these tools and the lcd especially when you got low to the ground was amazing what i loved about being on shoot with you is though i was back off with an 800 millimeter five six and the z9 and you were with the 100 to 400 right so we were looking at different perspectives only you were going full res 20 frames per second raw i was going at 120 frames per second at 11 megapixels now 11 megapixels is no slouch that is a printable file and in this day of the internet not only does it offer you more moments we talked about the moments in between a diver the tips of the fingers to the water the tennis ball coming off the racquet that spray of of of dirt that that happens on the impact but after a while i'm saying can you joe can you stop because now i have 6 000 pictures in 30 seconds and i'm going to have to edit all this stuff but what was beautiful about that is when you did do sequences with big strobe when i was doing 120 frames a second will goes up into the leap looks like a little movie like you said before you're shooting a movie and as if we stitch all these together the moment joe decided to shoot the picture the flash goes off in those flash pictures and now i know where joe's genius is now if i can figure out in between 120 frames a second which one that was and and how to do that that would be great but um we did several runs and it just seemed to me i mean tell me if you got this in your camera it just didn't miss it didn't miss to make it sound so easy but it didn't yeah that's the thing i mean what mark just said is very it's the first time matthew john you you know like we've never had a moment with a subject where there was no blackout right i mean my whole my whole career has always been like this in between moment that you feel like you might miss it it's important in the studio human emotion it's important in sports and so a net you never lose track of it you're you're you're watching all this in front of you and you're able to capture it and you're confident that it's being captured sharp i mean it doesn't get better can we bring that last picture of will jumping up now this is a very intentional shot this is where we talk about the strobe shooting maybe one frame at a time this is what your vision is talk to us about how you set this up well you used the word genius uh relative to me which is ill-advised because this is this is um being dumbstruck basically because i was actually setting up in the other direction and i looked at the sunset and i was like maybe i should shoot this way you know and we quickly the flash is being handheld and we just quickly segued and i had no time to adjust anything i mean the sun is dropping like a stone and again he's profiled to me in darkness and the af is on the eye yeah incredible it's it it's hard to describe and of course i used the word magic before but mark you know a lot of engineering goes into this and you mentioned deep learning before and how important that is and i think that you put all that together with some of the best engineers on the planet and and this is what you come up with and to me anything that makes our lives easier so we can continue to try different creative things is is the most amazing so joe joe gets an idea fastest car lots of color flames smoke sun okay how do all those things come together what were some of the challenges when you were trying to do this because after that first pass i think we realized some challenges at 130 miles an hour yep um talk about this aspect of the shoot talk about this photo it is brilliant well i've seen way too many apocalyptic movies first of all let me just say and so uh ed has this amazing car we have a great relationship super guy he said yeah come on out we'll do it he has the ability to fire flames out of his exhaust tubes and he also has these three steel um shafts basically at the at the back end of the car that hold his parachutes and so we got rid of the parachutes and we put smoke canisters in there that are electrically wired to a steering wheel so we're towing the car now the camera is physically on the car i'm hitting it with the nikon remote switch and the camera's firing strobes are in the cockpit and there's a a big flash behind the car that's being pushed on a cart and my assistance god bless them you know casey and kyle are pushing this cart and keeping the distance relative to the car so the strobe value stays the same and then i'm on the back of the pick out pickup going fire i felt you know i felt like i was in a science fiction movie it was it was it was fun you know it was fun so um so yeah so all of those elements as a photographer here's the thing you're doing a juggle a massive juggle in your head with all these elements i've got fading sun i've got exposure i've got you know the flames i'm thinking about shutter speed and how fast we can go i'm towing this car all that sort of stuff so that's on your head what goes out of your head is the camera technology i know the camera is taking care of itself you know it's doing its job as jen said one of the finest moments to me during those times was after every little run we'd reset but you'd run over to the camera you'd flip up the screen and to hear you just get more and more excited as we went and the sun kept coming down it's like everything started to come together as it was supposed to you know for that end result shot you were looking for so quality you look at the stuff in the computer all looks great on the screen all looks great to everybody here on you know in the two-dimensional form we're presenting it what do you see you know when you're looking through your computer zooming in for the very first time with this stuff just amazing quality i mean depth of of you know feeling emotion saturation color there's tremendous i don't know if the last picture can be brought up where there's motion in the in the on the desert floor there is being illuminated by the fire if you notice everything else falls off into shadow so the camera is getting its arms around very strong highlight flames etc and very deep shadow and holding everything all through the file now there are other moments where we tracked the car at the fast frame rates where you were using 3d tracking and such what was that experience like again i never lost sight of the car dropped the cursor on the car and he basically came by as he gave us a haircut basically with his car and um the camera never never dropped a test with me everything on the chute was safe right everybody was all safe absolutely everything was certified we did it all the right way we had permits we had a pyrotechnic specialist on the set kept everything safe and the result was a wonderful shoot and the beauty of all this is i'm going to say it the genius and joe mcnally putting all these elements together even creating that movement with a car that's being towed as opposed to that 150 mile an hour car to create the shot that everybody wants to get right yeah it's kind of old school really um you know if you shoot at a quarter of a second and towing a car at two miles an hour it looks like it's going 100 miles an hour you know old school meets new technology absolutely i mean this camera is a beautiful combination of everything we've learned with the highest technology available and the most amazing thing is within this one hour segment we can't get to everything but mark i want to bring up a couple of points and if you could take us a little bit further form factor of the battery how important is that well it gave us something that uh d6 users like you gen were looking for is the longevity of the battery life um so the great thing about it is is that we're using the enel 18 series so people that are migrating to our mirrorless format from say a d6 or a d5 are going to be able to reutilize their existing batteries we're coming out with a new battery now that's the enel 18d so we're at the d version of it but we're getting the most shots that we can the great thing about it is without the mechanical shutter i think it consumes even less power so we can get thousands of shots far beyond the cipa rating but i mean it's it's great for video but it's great for stills too because everything here is electronic we're using a monitor we're using a high resolution evf so it's consuming a lot of power but the decision to go with a full body allows us to put a bigger battery in there which we wouldn't get if we were going with say a z6 or z7 chassis um with the same specs the the ability to have a bigger body gives us not only the vertical grip bigger battery better heat dissipation for when we're you know putting the memory card through its paces um but uh overall just good ergonomics i think that's what people that are using this for professionally are really demanding they want the backlit buttons we have that in there too and something that joe mentioned and just thinking about you know the photographers that we have on the table here is that um people that are used to d6s are used to probably d6 resolution or d5 resolution around 20 megapixels or so and i think it's important because when you guys are talking about detail rich files color um you're also looking at sharpness and that a lot has to do with resolution and being 45.7 megapixels people that are watching are probably thinking themselves well you're shooting 30 frames per second or 20 frames per second at full resolution what is that going to do to my hard drive space uh the great thing about the z9 is we've now instituted a new compression uh algorithm that can minimize that raw file to a third of the file size so what's great for the sports photographer if you're doing 20 frames per second in raw is that you don't get the 20 you don't get the 45 megapixel file size that typically comes with it we don't even have a an option here to go from 14 to bit to 12 bit we keep it at 14 bit yes so we keep that rich file in there and we don't even give you the option to go to raw medium or raw small it's always going to be raw large at 14 bit but with this new high efficiency algorithm we can get one third of the file size which is really important because i want people to understand that even though we're talking about speed and fast frame rates you also get the benefit of not having that expanded file size if you turn on the high efficiency raw and i got to tell you though with people's fear of compression with the raw file 14-bit even at the high efficiency mode to get over a thousand frames the quality these files as good as anything i've seen prior and that's where it all comes together in the science and the engineering the stuff that you can't put on a piece of paper it comes in the visual for where we go now i'm about to walk the tightrope i'm getting on the high dive board right now because i'm going to do something here that not many people love to do and that's going to make a change now you in the desert mr dirt thank you so much my dirty cameras i i've never been called that before so you guys can you come in on this what do you see in there what we've got now is a shutter mechanism but it's not the shutter right there's no shutter in this camera it is called the sensor shield mark take us away on the sensor shield and the importance people tend to forget their body caps a lot it seems to be a problem with photographers or if you work with joe guilty well we've always had the feedback from people why not use the shutter as a cover for the sensor when you're uh changing lenses we never actually adopted that uh philosophy because the physical shutter is your timing mechanism it has to be accurate to 1 8 000 of a second but because our sensor scan rate is so fast and we've eliminated the mechanical shutter we've now put in a sensor shield whose only job is really to protect the sensor and so we're not so conscious about it being nicked or anything like that because it's not a timing device anymore the timing device is the sensor so we put that sensor shield in there it gives you a lot of confidence uh changing lenses out in the field especially the type of people that are gonna get this either taking it to these dusty places and dirty places so it just gives the the camera that much more durability which is built to the same grades as a d6 it could even operate in colder temperatures now so build quality is tops for this camera or this is our flagship in terms of build quality yeah well you guys can learn so much more about the z9 go to nikonusa.com to the z9 homepage and you can start to discover more of this camera we got a lot of content coming your way uh parting words i'm going to start with you joe your experience with the camera overall can you sum that up real quick sure i'll go back to what i said at the very beginning of the program game changer absolute complete game changer jen definitely uh i'm stealing that game changer but after every one of these shoots that i've done it i just come away that it's fun and uh freedom to have fun is uh is a nice addition to being a game changer matthew freedom fun confidence builder this camera is everything wrapped into one i share that with you i know mark you probably share the same sentiments we can't thank you enough for spending time with us now we still have one more hour segment to come with filmmakers we've got corey rich christi odom jerry gionis who all produced incredible films and we're going to talk on the video side over the next hour we love the fact that you're here we want to see your pictures we think this is a camera not just for professionals but a lot of enthusiasts and people who love high-end performance are going to enjoy the z9 there's so much more technology to talk about but again there's a lot of content that you can go see on the website bts videos that were created on some of the shoots and certainly all of this great end result we thank you for spending this time with us thank you guys uh for being on the panel and sharing your insights thanks for having us and your energy in all of this i think we have so much more to come the tough part for you guys now you got to wait for the delivery of the camera which is very short from now before you get your hands on it again and mark and i get to go home with them so it is one of the go ahead it's one of the benefits but thank you for spending time with us and stay tuned we're going to come back with the next segment in video performance of the z9

Channel: Nikon USA

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Id: GGIVwmGPP80

Length: 57min 41sec (3461 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 28 2021