It’s been just over a year since I decided to protect my finances from inflation with some “sensible” investments. Stocks? Real estate? No – my limited imagination always came back to the idea of a new camera. In the end, I bought a mirrorless body for the first time, the Nikon Z9.
What unexpected surprises has the switch to a mirrorless system brought me? Am I glad I switched? That’s what this article is about.
The Sound of Silence
You may remember the big marketing claims made when mirrorless cameras were first introduced. A lot of attention was paid to weight savings and size reduction. Without a mirror, cameras would be smaller, lenses could be lighter, and bread would sell for cheaper. Well, when I was shooting a wedding with a Nikon Z 50mm f/1.2 lens, I wasn’t so sure of those marketing claims.
But there is an advantage of mirrorless cameras that has proven more useful to me than the marketing claimed – pressing the shutter button and hearing the sound of silence (not that of Simon and Garfunkel). It’s only now, if I go back and shoot with a DSLR, that I realize how much noise they make.
A friend and I were photographing and filming the very strange behavior of a certain jay recently. (I’ll publish that story for you soon.) As soon as I started filming, my friend began shooting with his Nikon D500. And then my video became unusable – or at least, my audio. It sounded like a busy tailor shop rather than a forest after sunset.
On the other hand, my Nikon Z9’s 20 FPS is as quiet as an owl’s flight. It has been unexpectedly nice not to disturb my fellow photographers, and more importantly, the animals I’m photographing.
Where’s Its Eye?
I imagine this question is probably echoing through my camera’s circuitry when I press the AF-ON button. With all my previous cameras, I had to puzzle over this question myself. Luckily, I have a degree in biology, which made my eye search a lot easier. But it is one thing to recognise an eye and quite another to focus on it. You know how it goes.
Although I sometimes want to send my Z9 back to school for a refresher course in animal anatomy, most of the time, it does a great job here. I think the ability to autofocus on the eye is one of the greatest strengths of modern mirrorless cameras, not matched even by the newest DSLRs like the Nikon D6.
I’ll put it this way – the joystick on my D500 stopped working after years of frenetically sweeping the focus point across the viewfinder. With the Z9, I predict a much longer life for this control. My brain can spend more energy on the visual side of photography and less on the “eye spy” side of focusing.
Coated Like a Cake
That’s how I often returned from my photographic expeditions. Only, instead of the classic coating of sugar and frosting, I am usually coated in dust and mud, thanks to lying on the ground to capture animals from their eye level.
Even the best DSLRs had better autofocus in the viewfinder and worse autofocus via live view on the rear LCD screen. On most (all?) mirrorless cameras, however, the viewfinder and LCD are identical in focus performance.
I remember photographing a Mandarin Duck last year. To get my D500 to water level, I had to put on waders and follow the duck into its element. If I wanted to photograph it through the viewfinder from a sloping bank, I likely would have slipped into the water on my chest like an Emperor Penguin. My friend, without waders, had no choice but to shoot from the bank using the tilting screen and live view. To this day, I can still hear his cursing caused by the frustration of not being able to focus.
Now it is 2023, and everything is different. When I photographed the Egyptian Geese family that you see below, I stayed comfortably on shore. I tilted up the rear display, and I could compose and autofocus as well as if I had been looking through the viewfinder.
After a year of using this approach, I would find it difficult to go back, even to a DSLR that has a tilting LCD. For something like landscape photography, it would not matter. But for photographing birds, not having to keep my eye glued to the viewfinder has opened up possibilities that were much more complicated with a DSLR. And I can return home less coated in mud.
There are pros and cons to every camera switch, and certainly other things (good and bad) that have stood out to me after a year of going mirrorless, but I have deliberately not exhausted the topic. I would love to hear your experiences switching, or not switching, to the mirrorless format, and why. Feel free to share your thoughts in the discussion below the article.