For our weekend Wildlife Photography Masterclass in Otago, I borrowed a Nikon Z9 to see how it would play with my usual workhorse lens – the Nikkor 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6. Shooting with the new Z 800mm f/6.3 was great fun – but not the way I’d normally work (especially on a rolling boat out at sea!). So with a FTZ II and my old favourite, we headed out to sea on the Monarch. Scroll to the bottom for two quick videos!
Seabird photography is hands-down my happy place. Give me a rolling boat, salt spray and plenty of albatrosses any day. Conditions were a little bit chunder-inducing, but I kept my lunch down (cheese rolls from Horopito Cafe at Orokonui Ecosanctuary, another non-negotiable part of any trip), my lens up, and managed to blow through nearly 12000 images. Shooting at 20 frames a second may have to change the way I work, because it results in a huge increase in image sorting and processing time, especially with an ageing laptop. Capturing those split-seconds can be well worth it though, especially in a dynamic environment with birds going in every direction.
I think the images speak for themselves – the 80-400mm and the Z9 play well together, even with a bit of jitter in the viewfinder (the image stabilisation technology between lens and body don’t talk to each other perfectly). While the native Z lenses obviously work better (I’ve had a play with the Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6, which is a beautiful piece of glass), I’m perfectly happy with the performance of the older F mount 80-400mm. The sharpness isn’t quite as good, but that’s to be expected from an older lens, and I’ve been spoiled by using the crispy goodness of the 800mm so maybe my standards are a bit higher than they used to be for what is “good enough” in terms of critical sharpness – it all depends on the end-use of your images.
The toroa (albatrosses) definitely put on a show for us – mostly Buller’s (the first three and last two images), with a few White-capped (above image), and scattered northern and southern Royals, and of course a smattering of Cape petrels. It was a wild hour out on the rolling ocean, and while the conditions were challenging, we all came away with images we liked. The other thing I love about the 80-400mm lens, and why I’m not ready to trade it in just yet, is the wide end. 80mm sometimes comes in very handy for wildlife photography, especially when there’s albatrosses soaring by close enough to brush you with their wing feathers!
