This weekend I had plenty of chances to venture out with my camera, but something which I don’t often try is night photography. So, I left my X100VI at home on Saturday evening, and ventured out with my Z5II and the 50 1.9
The walk around town was incredibly conventional; nothing special was going on and it wasn’t an extraordinarily pleasant evening weather-wise. But the moment the street lights come on and the sun goes down, everything starts to look different.
Nikon are trying to enter the Fujifilm wheelhouse lately, and have introduced their take on recipes. The Nikon Imaging Cloud has a selection of Nikon-backed custom looks, but you can also find a wealth of options online made by budding amateurs. I tried one on this occasion, called Modern Kodachrome. I found this on a facebook group where these recipes are shared, and it gave some interesting results. In the end though, I just stuck the camera on ‘vivid’ and edited the raw files in Lightroom.
The Z5II is a superb camera, and didn’t miss a beat. It’s lightweight, fast, has great autofocus and the low-light performance is phenomenal. To think it’s technically an ‘entry-level’ model is insane; a decade ago it would have been enough to make a professional photographer die happy. The best thing I noticed was the size; even with the 50 1.8, it was lightweight and easy to just handhold all night.
I’ll share the results below, I was pleased with what I came home with.
