What do you give the Sony photographer who has everything? A Nikon.

When I turned professional in 2013, I went through a succession of Nikon DSLRs: first the D800, then the D810 and finally the D850. They were good cameras, but I wanted something more. When the Sony ⍺1 came along, offering eye detection and 30 fps shooting, I took the mirrorless plunge—but now I’ve gone crawling back to Nikon! Why…?

To be fair, I’ve kept one of my Sony ⍺1s with 24-70mm and 70-200mm lenses, but I’ve traded in the other one and my 12-24mm, 400mm and 600mm lenses for a Nikon Z8 and a NIKKOR Z 600mm f/4 TC VR S lens.

Let’s look at all the pros and cons…

Benefits

Normally, mixing and matching cameras and lenses is impossible, so photographers are locked in to a particular brand and format (either DSLR or mirrorless). However, I’m lucky enough to be able to afford two camera bodies, so that gave me the chance to buy what I really wanted.

The Nikon Z8 and NIKKOR Z 600mm f/4 TC VR S lens are pretty similar to their Sony equivalents and share a number of basic features, but there are a few key differences.

Nikon Z8

One of the reasons I didn’t stick with Nikon when I went mirrorless was that the Z9 hadn’t yet come out. However, the recently released Z8 offers just about all the features of the Z9 in a smaller, lighter body that lets me wrap my little finger around it—unlike the Sony ⍺1!

The main benefit of the Z8 is pre-release capture. This lets you take pictures while you’re only half-pressing the shutter (or even the AF-ON button for back button focus). When you finally press the shutter fully, the frames temporarily stored in the camera’s buffer are written to the memory card.

Unlike on the Z9, it’s currently limited to JPEG format—although that may change in the next firmware update. However, the great benefit is that it acts like a time machine, enabling you to take action shots that your reflexes would never have been good enough to get.

The classic example is of a bird taking off. If you want to get the full sequence from beginning to end, it’s almost impossible—especially with smaller, faster birds. By the time you finally press the shutter, the bird will already have taken off and flapped its wings a couple of times. That means you end up missing the crucial first second, including the moment when the bird leaves the branch with its wings raised—which is one of my favourite poses.

There are workarounds. You can use the signs to try and guess when the bird is going to take off, or you can just keep shooting continuously until it does—which is what I do myself with little bee-eaters.

However, pre-release capture is the ideal solution as it doesn’t rely on guesswork or exhaust your memory card after a few minutes! Sometimes, birds can be very uncooperative, so it’s nice not to have to worry about how many frames you’re taking. Digital may be free in the sense that you don’t have to pay for film or processing, but it still takes an age to go through thousands of photos.

The other main benefit of the Z8 is the 3.2” 2.089k-dot two-way tilting touchscreen. If you’re holding Sony ⍺1 close to the ground, the smaller 3” 1.440k LCD is only really good for landscape shooting, so that’s an area where the Z8 has a big advantage.

The Z8 also has exceptional specs for video. I’m shooting more and more footage these days, and I’m learning the limitations of the ⍺1. For a start, the eye detection and tracking that make it such a great stills camera don’t work while you’re taking video, which is a huge disadvantage with moving subjects.

There’s nothing worse than watching the camera ‘hunt’ for focus. You can’t fix it in post, and it looks dreadful. By contrast, the Z8 offers an AF-F (full-time autofocus) mode that constantly tracks your subject around the frame, or you can use Back Button Focus in AF-C mode, which is what I ended up doing.

In addition, the 4K footage isn’t oversampled (as it can be on the Z8), so you don’t get such sharp detail. Yes, you could always shoot in 8K and downsample it, but who can be bothered to do that…?!

There are a few other slight benefits to the Z8 over the ⍺1:

• Colour depth of 26.3 vs 25.9

• Top LCD

• Focus bracketing

• Illuminated buttons

• Minimum focus sensitivity of EV -7.5 vs EV -4

• Image stabilisation up to 6 stops vs 5.5 stops

• Vehicle tracking

• Insect tracking

Surprisingly, there’s no GPS transceiver, so the Z8 can’t geotag photos. However, you can link it to your iPhone using the SnapBridge app. It’s simple to set up and works very well. In the old days of having two ⍺1 camera bodies, I couldn’t link both of them, so half my photos wouldn’t have location data!

NIKKOR Z 600mm f/4 TC VR S

The big benefit of the NIKKOR 600mm lens is that it has a built-in teleconverter (or extender). That means you can easily switch between 600mm and 840mm, which effectively turns one prime into two.

I had to give up my Nikon 800mm lens when I switched to Sony as the longest available lens was 600mm. However, my 600mm and 400mm lenses wouldn’t both fit in my camera bag, and it was a long time before I realised I could take the 400mm separately on flights as my ‘personal item’!

Having just one long lens makes travelling much easier and provides some of the flexibility of a superzoom when out in the field. You can obviously get away with not having a certain focal length in most situations, but there’s best and there’s second best…

The advantage of a built-in teleconverter is that it can be ‘tuned’ to the particular lens in question. That means you don’t have to put up with the compromises and trade-offs you get when using a separate teleconverter. My old 800mm had a bespoke 1.25x teleconverter that extended its focal length to 1000mm, but I never noticed any impact on the optical quality. It’s the same principle.

Disadvantages

There are obviously disadvantages to mixing and matching your equipment, both in terms of cameras and lenses.

Nikon Z8

The first downside is that you inevitably end up with one camera that’s second-best. In the case of the Z8, it loses out to the ⍺1 in a number of areas. The main one is the lower maximum frame rate of 20 fps (rather than 30 fps on the ⍺1), but there are many others:

• Sensor resolution of 45.7 MP vs 50 MP

• No presets on the main dial

• Viewfinder magnification of 0.8x vs 0.9x

• Viewfinder resolution of 3686.4k dots vs 9440k

• 493 focus points vs 759

• No gyroscopic stabilisation

• No lens breathing correction

• Maximum ISO of 25600 vs 32000

• Battery life of 330 shots v 530

• Weight of 910g vs 737g

• Dynamic range of 14.2 vs 14.5

• Low-light ISO of 2548 vs 3163

• No flash sync port

• No Ethernet port

In addition, there are inevitable problems with compatibility when you mix and match. The ⍺1 and Z8 use different memory cards and batteries, so you need to pack and carry double the amount of spares. I’ve also had to buy a card reader that holds CFexpress Type A and B cards. Wex told me that was impossible, but I managed to find one online—although I had to go to eBay to get it!

Finally, the controls and menus are different in the two cameras, so you need to be aware of which one you’re using when you change your settings. I’m a great believer in the two-second rule, which states that you have to be able to change your settings and take a picture in only two seconds, so that might be an issue for wildlife photographers like me…!

NIKKOR Z 600mm f/4 TC VR S

There are fewer issues with the lens than the camera, but the NIKKOR 600mm weighs slightly more than the Sony 600mm (3.26 kg vs 3.04 kg) and takes different filters.

Verdict

Like most people, I thought I was ‘locked in’ to one camera brand, but that wasn’t quite true. I noticed a few wildlife photographers mixing and matching their kit, such as Steve Perry and Tin Man Lee, and I realised that I could get the benefits of different brands by pairing my existing Sony ⍺1 with two wide-angle lenses and buying a Nikon Z8 to go with a new NIKKOR Z 600mm f/4 TC VR S lens.

There are certainly pros and cons to mixing and matching, but I’m looking forward to taking advantage of my new kit and seeing what it can do for my wildlife photography. If you can afford two camera bodies, you might want to do the same…!

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