Not a lot happening in Z-Land at the moment. I had hoped for a small morsel at NAB Show, but all we got was a brief video teaser about something Nikon had already teased (NIKKOR Z Cinema lenses are coming…). The next camera—I believe that is the Z30II—is still some ways off with a likely late summer, early fall launch. My impression is that the next introduction will be a lens, but I’m not sure which one that will be, let alone when.
Sure, the leisurely parade of Chinese lenses for the Z-mount continues. The two Viltrox EVO lenses launched at NAB Show being the latest, but every week brings another. Plus NikonUSA’s getting tariff money they spent back, so that might provoke some new instant rebates that we weren’t expecting. However, while the pollen is flying about, the camera industry currently is not, it remains on a ground stop.
I don’t see the situation getting better soon. In fact, with the Iran conflict still constipating the Hormuz, things almost certainly will get worse. Oil, helium, and other resources coming out of the Middle East may be at the bottom of the product food chain, but every entity between them and the tech companies is starting to go hungry. It seems like supply chain issues are now a chronic problem, not a one-time thing.
So what’s a Z User to do?
Well, use your existing Z gear. From bottom of the lineup to the top, the current products are darned good. And complicated, which means that this is a good time to dive deeper into understanding how to master them.
Today I’m going to start with lenses (see the accompanying article, as well).
Do you really know what your current lenses can and can’t do? Do you understand where they’re darned near perfect and where they are weaker? I see a lot of folk talking about their lenses casually and one dimensionally (e.g. central sharpness wide open), but not understanding the benefits that come from paying attention to all attributes of a lens. In particular:
- Do you understand how the lens performs from center to corner at all apertures? Photographing is 100% about decision making on the photographer’s part, and data is what you use to help make decisions. If you don’t know the data, how can you optimize your decisions?
- Do you know whether the lens corrections remove all vignetting, distortion, and chromatic aberration, or whether you need to do some additional processing? Related: do you know how to entirely remove lens corrections to see and use the actual data? And if you did that, would that change the way you view the lens? (Corners can be highly impacted by lens corrections, especially on wide angle lenses, and not necessarily all in favorable ways.)
- Have you considered how the lens works at different distances? Some lenses do their best work at shorter focus distances, and are worse at longer ones. Other lenses are great when they’re used nearer infinity, but start to show significant weaknesses at closer distances. I often have people ask “when should I use X prime versus Y zoom?” Well, this is one of those things that might determine that. If the zoom is weaker at closer distances than the prime (typical), you use the prime. If both are reasonably close at distance, it doesn’t matter which one you use.
- What triggers flare with your lens? Some lenses produce bad flare characteristics with certain positions and types of light in the frame (typically edges). And are those flare colored ghosts complicated or is the change more of just a veiling glare? I completely avoid using certain lenses in certain conditions because of my answers to these questions.
- Can your lens produce good sun stars? What aperture is best for that? While not an effect you always want, sometimes you do.
The list of questions you can ask can go on near infinitely. You need to determine just how deep you go with your lens examination. But you really need to examine the differing results your lens can produce as much as you can. That comes from experimenation and testing. So I guess the overriding question here is “how much have you tested your lens?” Should you do more? Probably.
You can certainly read my reviews and get a sense of the above, but seeing it yourself is the ultimate data, as only you can say whether an attribute really renders at a level of concern for your work.
So take your lens(es) out for a thorough exam this weekend. Give it (them) a fuller workout than you’ve been doing in casual photography. Spend some pixel-peeping time trying to evaluate whether or not things you find in the results are truly important to you.