Why I Moved From Nikon to Sony

in my last question and answer video i touched a little bit on why i started using sony gear over my nikon gear and there were actually a lot of people who responded and said they would like to hear more about that so that's what this video is if you're looking for my regular like story driven videos where we go out into the world of nature and i kind of take you with me that's not what this is going to be this is going to be me just highlighting some key points in my journey or transformation from using nikon to sony um so if you're not interested in that this video won't be for you it's going to be me just sitting here talking but a lot of people actually asked for that content there will be some pictures here and there just to illustrate some points on some of the key moments that pushed me into sony and away from nikon so my first experience with a sony mirrorless camera was an a7r iii i had a client that came with me to shoot landscapes in colorado and he brought an a7r iii and he let me play around with it a little bit while we were up high in the mountains shooting some landscapes and i thought it was pretty neat um but it didn't really grab my attention at all i just thought it was interesting to see the newer tech and be able to shoot like a really long shutter speed and see the effect live in the viewfinder that was kind of interesting but again i kind of it didn't seem to handle anything fast moving and i was doing a lot of fast-moving birds at the time so i didn't pay much attention to it my second experience with a sony camera also came from a client of mine when i was doing a workshop i had a gentleman come from hong kong and he was in the transition period of moving from nikon to sony so he brought his nikon gear which was a d850 and a 500 f4 i think and he brought a sony a9 with this tiny little 100 to 400 lens and i kind of joke about this guy and say he was really a sony spy um he was coming to introduce me to the world of sony but he came with me and we did five day workshop had a great time and there were a few key moments in that workshop that made me take interest in sony one of those moments was the two of us were working together he he wanted to actually have me shooting my nikon and him shooting his sony and then we could compare it would help him determine if he was making the right decision by abandoning or selling his nikon gear and moving over to the sony stuff so one of the situations we found ourselves in there was a bird that's called a blue gray nap catcher it's a tiny little bird about that big and these little birds buzz around and hop all through the trees really quickly but we found one that was just sitting out in the open on a branch and it wasn't doing anything it was like kind of a rare experience to find these birds not moving around so we both stood side by side we set our cameras up with the same shutter speed the same aperture the same iso and the idea was to see who could get the bird when it lifted off of the branch and so we both sat there and waited we waited we waited we waited we waited i waited he waited i noticed i was getting a little tired he wasn't because he had this tiny little sony and i had my d850 with this giant nikon lens the bird finally went boom flew off and i fired away he fired away 100 confident that my d850 images were gonna blow away his little teeny sony a9 with this tiny little lens and being that it was a dslr to review the images on the back of the screen and bright sunlight is a little challenging so i'm looking at the back of the screen trying my best to to look at that glare and if you use these cameras you know it's hard to to see the back screen so hard in fact that a company has made a third-party loop that you can put on the back of the screen so that you can see it because it's almost impossible to see the thing in daylight so i looked at the back of the screen and my first shot was the bird had left its wings were closed and its feet were tucked in i was a little disappointed i didn't get the shot that i wanted my client said oh check mine out and he brought the camera his camera he handed me the camera and i started looking at the rear screen and he said no you can review the images in the viewfinder in the evf i was like what he goes yeah here let me show you and he he hit the playback button and i put the camera to my eye and there was this blue grey nat catcher and it was like i was looking at it in high definition like like an ipad or an iphone perfectly lit screen and it was absolutely amazing just to be able to see it in the evf clearly in the middle of the day was like oh that's pretty cool but the key takeaway was he got the shot with the bird's wings out its little talons were just leaving the stick and at that moment i realized that nine frames versus nine frames per second which was the d850 versus 20 frames per second which was the sony a9 was a huge leap and before that moment i had always just considered the 20 frames per second to be more of what they would call a spray and pray you just hope that you get one shot out of the 20 but i didn't know because i didn't shoot sony that when you shoot the sony systems you get a lot of the shots in focus and in reality it's much more than that the a9 or the higher frame rate allows you to capture images that people are that are shooting lower frame rates can't it's impossible so the a9 is capturing moments in between what the d850 or say like the d500 are catching and his just happened to be that glorious moment like that so that made me think for a while and kind of i carried my d850 around with me that that afternoon and then kind of approached him and said hey can i try your a9 and he's like yeah sure and he had the a9 unbeknownst to me he had it set up to shoot completely silent so i'm walking around this place where all these birds are and i'm pressing the shutter button and i i can't even really tell it's taking a picture there's no there's no blackout there's no mirror there's no anything other than some little squares here and there appearing on the viewfinder i didn't even know i was taking a picture and i just was kind of like ah that's kind of a weird experience and i handed it back to him i picked him up the next morning to go on our workshop again for the following day and he mark said mark how many pictures do you think you took with my a9 yesterday when you were just walking around i saw i don't know a dozen or so and he kind of laughed he said you took about 700. and i was like whoa yeah i have it completely set up silent so that you can't hear anything and again to me i was like wow and he goes but i also have it set up in a way to where there's not too much feedback so you don't know what's going on you can change all that you can customize it to have an experience that you like whatever you want to see in the viewfinder you can make it appear there and you can add sound to it if you want but the idea of shooting completely silent was very appealing to me because there's been a few times when i've been with birds pretty close and had the d850 or the d500 and that bat clap has scared him away so the idea of shooting completely silent i was like oh that's really interesting again so this kind of planted the seed in my mind that i needed to spend more time with the sony a9 in particular and around that same time nikon came out with the 500 pf this tiny little prime lens and because i was already in the nikon ecosystem i decided to invest some money in that lens i think it was thirty five hundred dollars if i remember correctly and the lens was almost impossible to find but at the time i was part of nikon's professional service or nps so i could order it and get priority so i did just that i ordered it through the nps got the lens i was so happy i went out with it immediately the day it arrived and i started shooting with it and i noticed quickly that it was a fantastic lens on anything that wasn't moving and the images were perfect they looked sharp they looked clear but anytime something moved i mean even just did this stationary flapped its wings the entire picture was a blurry mess and i couldn't quite figure it out they would if i had a bird that would fly anything that moved in the image was blurry it didn't matter what my shutter speed was didn't matter what my aperture was didn't matter any setting anything that moved and that lens produced a blurry image on my d850 so i immediately took it off and said okay there's something wrong with my d850 put it on my d500 same results so after about two days of nothing but frustration trying to figure out what was causing the lens to do this i gave up and i returned the lens thinking in my mind that this lens is defective there's something wrong if it only produces sharp images on still objects so kind of bad luck now that i think about it for nikon because when i returned that lens i said you know what i have this 3 500 set aside and at the time it was it was around the holiday sony had just lowered the price on the a9 to 3 500 i was like this is perfect i'm going to try out the a9 and i'm gonna have to buy one of these lenses the 100 to 400 but i called my friend abe at b h abe if you're watching you're one of the coolest guys ever thanks for doing what you did and what you do so i called my friend abe and i said abe i want to borrow the a9 and the 100 to 400. and he was kind of hesitant and i was like what's wrong just don't do this to me i said don't do what to you because if you shoot sony you're going to love sony and i shoot nikon and i don't want to have to pay for all of the sony girl i don't want to switch i was like what no i just want to try it out so he kind of had the foresight to know where this was going and into the future um being that he worked at b h i think he's probably seen this happen many times before so i borrowed it around the holidays i got the a9 and went out my very first day and i was shooting alongside a bunch of my friends who were all shooting nikon and we were in a situation where there were these birds there were forester turns and they were flying over water and they would just dump down in the water they'd pick up a minnow and then they would fly away with the a9 i was able to capture almost every single shot that i couldn't capture before with my nikon these little birds were so fast and so erratic this little camera like just locked focus on him immediately all around the water and i was like this is this is unbelievable so at this point i'm really into the sony system enjoying shooting it and enjoying the results but i'm still not 100 sold yet because it's new anytime you have a new camera or a new system with new lenses it's like you take a step backwards because there's a learning curve so i was in that learning curve phase so it was still hard to convince me to always shoot the sony over my nikon but that first day was quite interesting and i still didn't really understand that i had live exposure in the viewfinder so when you're any setting you make in the camera you see before you take the picture so you see it in the viewfinder live and that's actually one of the key benefits to using mirrorless in my opinion i didn't understand that at that time so i was at this point torin i would take out one nikon body and one sony and i at this point i had to prove to myself and i had to prove the sony to myself so i started taking it to all of my favorite places and shooting all the stuff that i had already shot with my nikon so that i could compare the two i had one instance where i went to a lake where there were some purple gallinules and these purple galanos are amazing little birds and i had the sony in my hand i made a video on this i've probably made videos on some of these things i've already told so you might already be familiar with some of these things but i made a video on this this purple gallinule had gone way out into some lily pads and it had cut the flower off of the lily pad and it had this lily flower in its mouth it was just a bud it wasn't a flower yet and it came flying right at me and i just pulled this little tiny camera up kept the bird in the middle of the frame and fired away and had about 50 shots of him coming right at me in focus and i i actually kept one i'll put it over the screen here it was one of my favorite pictures of the purple gallany i had the d850 with me at that moment and i said there's no way this little bird is ever gonna do this again but i'm gonna sit here and wait and try to get it with my d850 and sure enough that little purple gallon yield marched way out into the lily pads grabbed another one and came flying right at me and i tried to shoot it with a d850 and the results were abysmal compared to the sony a9 so this kind of swayed me a little bit further but i was kind of anchored in the nikon ecosystem because i had this big nikon prime lens and i really loved the results i got from that lens the sony 100 to 400 i wasn't getting quite as good results i think image quality wise as the prime and i don't think i should because you're talking a big prime lens versus a smaller telephoto zoom um fast forward some more time i had another key moment with my sony gear where i went to one of my favorite places we're now into the summer time i had already purchased the sony a9 and the 100 to 400 at this point i was i knew i wanted to have it and play with it but i wasn't fully shooting it all the time so we're in the summer in the summer the birds slow down but i went to one of my favorite places in hopes of shooting some osprey the osprey weren't doing anything and across the way on the north side of this park where i was i could see all of these tents on the beach and i knew from past experience those tents and all the noise i was hearing meant there was a surfing competition i said ah why not there's no birds i might as well go check out what this little camera can do with all of these surfers and as i got down to the beach this was like a real deal big deal surfing competition all these professional photographers lined up with their nikons they had 600 f4s on tripods these big beasts of cameras and they were anchored in the sand and they were lined up like this and they were all stuck in one spot basically and here i was with this tiny little a9 and i could literally hold this camera in the 100 to 400 lens in one hand and i was dancing around all of these people all these all these other photographers who were anchored in place taking shots of every photographer i could squat down between their legs i could go under their tripod i go one-handed like this and i'm grabbing pictures like crazy and every single one of them looks absolutely fantastic i'm thinking oh now i see the other side of the coin this tiny little camera is so quick to respond in my hands because it's so small and in its response of the camera itself is like a camera that's if a camera was alive it's like a camera that drank five pots of coffee it's super responsive to everything it's fast and everything it does i left the beach and i went to a tide pool in the same area just to see if there was any kind of bird action happening and there was a sandbar about knee-deep and on to my left there was one snowy egret i wasn't really paying much attention to them i had the camera at my hip with my right hand on the camera and another snowy egret when i wasn't paying attention came in on the left and started to attack this other one that was sitting on the sandbar and i literally grabbed this little sony a9 in one hand pulled it up to my eye and fired away and got some of the coolest bird pictures still in my mind to date i got these snowy egrets fighting and i'll overlay my favorite shot here on the screen because i don't know if i've ever shared that in a video so that was one-handed and in a matter of 10 seconds if that this happened had i had my nikon gear i would have never gotten that shot i knew that because the nikon gear was bigger and it was heavier and it took a little bit to lift it and heft it up to my face now maybe their little lens the 500 pf would have been different i don't know but i unfortunately had a bad copy so that didn't help me but anyways that was a key another key moment to me so now i i've had these these really aha moments and at this point i also started to understand i had this live exposure in the viewfinder and i could change all of my settings and get an exposure perfect almost every single time before i took the picture so now i'm really enjoying my sony gear and my nikon gear is starting to collect dust i'm going out every day with my sony because i'm comfortable with it i'm familiar with it i'm loving the results i'm getting so many more shots that i had gotten before and i went to a sony event in oregon called condo and this was a really cool sony event where they have everything sony gear every camera piece that exists and you can go into this big area it's like i called it the library and i made a video about this too you can go in there and say i want to try this lens this lens and this body this body this and you can try anything that sony makes and i love to try and shoot macro and i say try because in my opinion shooting macro on a dslr was extremely challenging i could never really tell where the depth of field was it was just always kind of a struggle and it made it not so much fun so i knew sony had a macro lens that was actually a little bit older and i wanted to try that macro lens so i asked could i borrow they said yes i slapped it on the a9 and i knew that on the a9 if i was in manual focus i could put a setting on to where i could see the plane of focus highlighted with peaking in the viewfinder i'm not talking on the rear screen because i know you can do that on some dslrs i'm talking in the viewfinder where you can see everything crystal clear and i knew that if i was going to shoot some macro that would come in really handy so i went and i found some flowers it had just rained some beautiful echinacea flowers that had these big water bubbles on them and i put it in manual focus and i could see my plane of focus and i i kind of leaned in on the flower like this and i made sure my plane of focus was dead center where i wanted it where this big water bubble was and i kind of leaned back just a hair and i fired the shutter and i leaned into the shot and in doing so with 20 frames per second as i leaned in the plane of focus went right over that tiny bubble and out of the 20 shots five in the middle were absolutely perfect and i did that in a matter of seconds so i started doing that all over the place with all kinds of flowers with bees with bugs and every single time i got shots that were just like oh my god this is incredible and it was it was absolutely amazing and it was fun that was starting to become a key thing for me it was fun to use this camera because i was getting confident with the camera and understanding it and it was helping me capture these great pictures and the really cool thing was i had shot this at if i remember right iso 5000 and i went back and i when i returned the lens i was so excited i actually talked to a sony rep and he explained to me what made that lens so so beautiful and i immediately ordered it and he took me into the back where they had this big printer set up and he said let's have that that picture you just took of that flower printed so you can see what it looks like in print you know just it's cool to have so i was like we can do that he's like of course we can do that so we hooked up i think wireless to i think it was an epsom printer because i don't think they would have a canon printer at a sony event so we hooked up to a wireless to an epson printer and they printed out this huge piece and there was this most beautiful picture i've ever taken a macro of a flower with this water bubble and it was just gorgeous even at 5 000 iso i didn't really even see any noise and it was just unbelievable and i had done it so fast so now i'm like 75 into sony and 25 into nikon i'm taking sony everywhere with me and i'm in love with all of the results that i'm getting but i'm still anchored into nikon because i have this big prime glass something that a lot of people i meet say i don't want to jump ship because i'm invested in this glass and i was in the same boat so i needed to know in my mind if that's indeed what was keeping me was it this big piece of prime glass that just checking to make sure i'm still recording my audio this is a long clip just if i was still into it because of this big piece of prime glass and there was only one way that i could answer that question and that was to use some sony prime glass so i was not far away from doing a workshop that i do almost every year in costa rica and this workshop would have me in 17 days in some of the most i would say stringent shooting conditions because you're constrained on light really really i don't know if you would say badly there's not a lot of light you're in a canopy so you're strained on light this would be the perfect example to test the sony gear with a prime lens because i had the nikon before the year before and i had all of the results and i could sit side by side and see what was better so but before i did this i had to convince myself that okay i'm going to costa rica is it a smart idea to just bring sony gear and leave my nikon at home so there was only one way to answer that question i hadn't touched my nikon gear in about two months i'm gonna go back out and shoot the nikon gear just to see how i feel so you have to understand i hadn't touched the nikon gear in about two months i had been shooting just the a9 and i was loving every second of it so i got my trusty d850 with my 500 f4 had a good day weather was perfect got out real early to shoot some osprey i brought that camera to my eye and fired away and the sound was so loud and so annoying and then in the viewfinder the mirror blackout flapping the entire time was like a slap in the face it was like a shock because i hadn't used it in so long and because before i had used the sony gear that's all i knew so i that was acceptable to me but now that i had used the sony stuff and it's blackout free there's none of the mirror flap there's none of the sound it was it was annoying to use it and it had felt it felt like i had stepped back in time about 10 years and i was just like oh yeah i'm definitely going to costa rica with just sony gear i have to do this for myself to to to set in my mind that it's this piece of glass that's keeping me into nikon so i contacted sony and asked them if i could borrow a lens and at the time i think at the time no i think they had the 600 f4 out but we were gonna go to costa rica so i asked if i could borrow their 428 because i thought i would need extra light with the 2 8. so we go to costa rica and i use the 4028 on the a9 and the a7 r4 and i never once took the teleconverter off of the 428 so i was shooting at 540 f4 the entire time in costa rica and the results i were getting were absolutely fantastic i mean they were just blowing my mind so when i came home it was a little i was a little nervous to compare because i had already in my mind determined that i knew i was getting better stuff so i loaded up my nikon stuff from the year before and my sony stuff from this year and the difference was night and day i had so much more acceptable shots that just looked better from the sony stuff than the nikon stuff now there is one thing to consider in that year-long span i learned a lot about photography and post-processing so i had become a better photographer but i think because of that it allowed me to harness the power of the sony stuff so because i understood stuff on a completely different level so now i knew for a fact the only reason i was shooting nikon was because i had this nikon glass and it was time for me to break into the wallet the safe whatever you want to say and fork over some cash for a big sony lens and i realized that when i was in costa rica i never once shot the lens at 2 8 i shot it at f4 with a telly the whole time and it would make more sense for me to buy the sony 600 f4 so when i came home i did and that was the final nail in the coffin that made me keep the nikon at home as soon as i got that sony 600 f4 in my hands there was no point in me picking up the nikon gear anymore that lens is absolutely fantastic um on every body that i've used it on of course it is i know a lot of people are gonna say what course it is it's a thirteen thousand dollar loons it should do all of this well of course it should and it should outperform any other lens that's cheaper that's just how this stuff works it is glorious and it's glorious matched on every sony camera that i've used so that was kind of long-winded but that is it from the beginning until up to now which now they have the special sauce you know they always will say like they'll joke around and say well this product is better because it's got the special sauce well now sony does they have a1 like the steak sauce they have the a1 and i've been using that for a total of two days and once again sony's products are transforming the way that i shoot stuff like birds with the a1 it's a matter of choosing the exact perfect moment of the birds wings that you want i've been shooting spoonbills and they'll come flying in and i'll get 30 or 40 shots every single one of them in perfect focus the light is gorgeous the color coming out of that camera straight out of camera i'm kind of scratching my head going i don't even know how this is possible it's so good but then you can pick the exact wing moment that you want so it's another transformation or another level up like i'd like to say it's like you leveled up congratulations you now have this sony a1 which is just so far in two days been unbelievable it's like they took the a9 and they doubled the resolution doubled the processing power made the color 100 times better and fed it like a whole case of mountain dew or coca-cola and it's just so fast and hyper-reactive it's unbelievable so there you go if you have any questions about anything i said leave them in the comments below maybe i can answer them in a question and answer video if you're still here listening to me babylon about this thanks for doing that if you found this helpful share it there's a lot of people that are in the position right now of wanting to move from one camera to the other um and they have asked me to share my thoughts and what made me do this and that's it thanks for watching

Channel: Mark Smith

Views: 45,675

Rating: 4.795126 out of 5

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Id: 0ruQVtSqnYo

Length: 26min 10sec (1570 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021