The Silver Adventurer

In October of 2022, the National Park Service reversed a previous policy that was allowing social media videographers, including YouTube creators, filming rights in national parks without a permit. Under the current policies, permits will be required for all video filming in a national park, even by an individual using a phone, if the video is subject to monetization.

I’ve checked on a number of national parks, and the permitting application fee, which must be paid simply to ask for a permit, ranges from $50 to $250. Generally, that will be the only fee for one or two people using hand-held equipment or a single modest-sized tripod. Anything more than that, including lighting, props, and perhaps even models, could result in higher fees.

There does not appear to be a fee for still photography used on a monetized social media site, even if the photographs are later turned into a video.

I strongly recommend that anyone planning to shoot monetized social videos in national parks inquire to the NPS or the specific park, and get the current policy in writing before posting any videos taken in the parks.

In my YouTube video “Incident Report: A Leopard and Cubs, a Kill up a Tree, and Hyena” I document a complex set of interactions that center around a common theme, which is a female predator with cubs tries to feed her family in the face of the cubs’ carelessness and a persistent competitor. The “Tengile Female” leopard has two young cubs and has killed an impala to feed herself and them. She took the kill up a tree, which leopards normally do if they expect it to attract lions or hyena, and we joined the sighting when the leopard family was already up the tree and feeding.

We drove in, with some difficulty given that the tree was on the bank of the Sand river and the brush was heavy. We’d just arrived and I’d gotten some video, but the angle was difficult and our ranger decided to reposition, to drive down the bank onto the sandy part of the Sand riverbed. It was to be a quick move and I made a mistake, keeping my camera in my GorillaPod and locking the ballhead to prevent it banging around. Yes, I know, I should have taken it out and hand-held it to be ready in case something happened, but I didn’t.

Just as we’d stopped, before in fact the vehicle had even settled, one of the cubs destabilized the kill and it fell. There was a hyena below, an old one with a limp that we’d seen before, and she made a grab for the kill. The female leopard jumped down, grabbed the kill, and jumped up to the lowest branch, simply because the kill was heavy, and the hyena missed.

For the moment. The branch was dead and brittle, and it broke. The female leopard and the kill fell to the ground again, and the female again grabbed the kill and made for the next branch up, but the hyena managed to grab a bite of the hindquarters that took off the tail and surrounding meat. The leopards managed to settle down a bit to feed.

It turned out that the “kill tree” was almost opposite our room on the other bank of the Sand, so when we got back we tried to find it with binoculars. As we watched, we saw some elephants moving right to left along the far bank, somewhere near the kill tree. One elephant moved quickly forward, trumpeting, and we saw he was chasing the hyena! The elephant stayed there, trumpeting occasionally, for as long as we could watch.

The next morning we got out early and returned to the tree, to find the leopards still there with the kill. We’d not been there long when the cubs’ antics knocked the kill out of the tree the second time, and again, the old lame hyena was there to try to grab some. The long-suffering mom got it back in the tree. This time the hyena got lucky because some pieces fell off and she was able to get a bite.

Mom was obviously disgusted at this point. She growled and cuffed the responsible cub, and interposed herself between the cub and the kill, to prevent him from knocking it down again. At one point, the cub tried to tunnel under his mother to get to the kill, but she held him away. Eventually the two cubs retreated and mom got to feed!

One of the most interesting sets of interactions we had on our trip happened at Nxabega Tented Camp in Botswana. Lions are, of course, pride animals. There’s a dominant male or a “coalition” of brothers, multiple females, and cubs. Often there are several females in the pride who are pregnant and give birth about the same time. Litter sizes are typically two or three cubs, and if multiple females have young cubs at the same time it’s common for them to share babysitting and even nursing duty.

We encountered one pride headed by a single male, where two females (one older and experienced, and one young and maybe even a first-time mom) had cubs at nearly the same time. The older one had a litter of two, a common size, but the younger one had five cubs! When we first encountered them, the older female had the babysitting duty, and as you can see in Incident Report: Two Lionesses with Seven Cubs, she’s not all that happy nursing seven cubs in total, perhaps especially so because only two of them are hers. Lion cubs always want to eat, it seems, so every time a mom tries to sit or rest, they’re on her. Since a lion doesn’t have seven teats, there’s competition among cubs that raises the noise level and irritation quotient considerably.

Young cubs are typically kept separate for a while, then introduced to the pride in general and the pride male(s) in particular. The younger lioness decided, while we were watching her and the cubs, to make the introduction herself. Imagine the male, who is usually at best tolerant of cubs, suddenly faced with seven yelping youngsters. It doesn’t go well, and the lioness and cubs are forced to beat a retreat. Interestingly, the older lioness, without any cubs, was tolerated by the male.

One of the most appropriately named rivers we’ve seen in Africa is the Sand River, which runs through some of the private reserves west of Kruger National Park in South Africa. We’ve probably had over a dozen multi-day safaris in that area where we saw the Sand, and sand is what it usually is. Sometimes there’s enough water to support some reed beds, but often it’s totally dry.

In May 2022 when we visited Tengile River Lodge on the Sand River, we were amazed to see a lot of water was flowing. This drew elephants to the Sand to drink, something we didn’t usually see, and any time you have an elephant family doing something, there’s likely to be an interesting and funny episode.

The video Incident Report: Elephants Drink at the Usually Dry Sand River records what we saw when a family of elephants, including a tiny baby, visited the Sand to drink. It’s an example of why you need to be watchful even in your room while in Africa, because we were on our deck when the herd approached the water, cameras at the ready. The room was far enough from the river to require I film with the Z7II and a 50-500mm lens at full zoom for part of the video.

Baby elephants seem to be amazed at their trunks, to the point where they not only can’t use it effectively, they’re not entirely sure it’s a part of them. Elephants don’t drink by sucking the water up and swallowing, trunks are noses and they can’t drink through them any more than we can sniff up water and not end up with a major cough. What they do is suck water into the trunk, then squirt it out into their mouth. This isn’t intuitively obvious to the babies, though, and they’ll often try to drink like a horse or cow, putting their head down to the water. Elephants don’t have the neck for that, of course, and so the babies often end up falling, which is what happened in the video!

Elephants are one of the Big Five so they’re a target for most who go on safari, and they’re common in many areas of Africa, but many people don’t pay much attention to the antics of the babies, and as I’ve said, many don’t expect to see anything from their rooms. Don’t be one of the many; there’s a lot of fun things you’ll see!

A lot of African safari time is spent driving around looking, listening, and (yes) smelling for something. Kills, not surprisingly, have a pretty distinct odor, particularly if they’ve been there a while. However, predators don’t kill to add to the olfactory experience, they want to eat, so you usually don’t have a lot of stuff left over, and you can’t smell it at too much of a distance. Thus, when we smelled a kill on a drive, we looped around looking for evidence. We didn’t find anything and our rangers and tracker discussed what that meant. Nothing local to the small meant either there was nothing but perhaps some fluid left, or that it was big and further away. We didn’t hear hyenas or see vultures so it was a question-mark…for the moment.

The next day, we were astonished to come upon a dead hippo. We were nowhere near the water, and the hippo carcass was almost completely intact. It appeared to our experts that the hippo had died of natural causes, and when it did it’s legs gave out and it simply collapsed onto its stomach. This covered the part of the carcass that predators could access easily; hippo hide is very tough. Hyenas were trying to feed, with some focusing on soft facial parts and others trying to reach the tender skin under the animal.

What surprised us was that a pack of wild dogs then came along. Wild dogs are hunters, meaning that they very rarely scavenge, and we believed at first that this was just another example of two highly competitive predators trying to tweak each other’s noses. Even when a few dogs tried to grab a scrap off the carcass, we thought it was just to rile the hyenas. Not so.

The video Incident Report: Wild Dog and Hyena Fight over Hippo Carcass shows what happened when the wild dogs decided that there was just way too much food there to ignore. Early on the dogs were kept away because there were too many hyenas, but even a big pack of hyenas can’t eat a hippo, and so eventually the hyenas slunk off to sleep off their feeding, leaving only two to guard the carcass. They’d managed to dig a tunnel down to the soft part of the hippo, and when the dogs approached, one of the hyenas actually laid down in the tunnel to guard it. In another interaction, a wild dog and a hyena actually snarled and bit at each other while each had its head in the skull remains of the hippo!

Most guests didn’t see all the action here, and probably the big reason was the smell. Nobody can describe just how bad a large carcass smells, and this was one where some people had to put something over their nose and mouth. Then there was the dust and the flies. It was not a pleasant situation, but if you want to see wildlife action you have to put up with a lot of things, including smells.

In my post on the baby elephant nursing by our room at Nxabega Tented Camp, I mentioned that you never know how habituated elephants and others animals might be, and how they might react. In Incident Report: 24 Hours of Elephant Charges, we see an example of just how true this is, and how scary interactions might be.

Botswana’s Okavango Delta floods annually not because of local rain, but because of rain in the mountains of Angola to the west, which flow into the Delta. The timing and amount of the rain, and the timing and size of the annual flooding, vary. In late May of 2022, the floods were a bit late. Elephants wander in from the Kalahari desert to the southwest, and these elephants don’t see people as often as those who stay in the Delta area or to the north. That means they can be a bit more testy, and in a single 24-hour period we had two examples of this, one funny and the other not so much. Teen-aged elephants likely precipitated both.

The first encounter came when a group of elephants that included juveniles, calves, and adult females moved from drinking at an open-water area to the nearby road, which we happened to be on. The teens saw a baboon troop and decided to torment them, rushing into some palmetto bushes and trumpeting as the baboons screamed. The adults couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, but they did see us, and they started to get a bit concerned. There were three groups; mothers and calves mostly on the road ahead, teens to the right torturing baboons, and another group of females to the left.

At one point, presumably chasing a baboon, one of the teens burst into the clear to our right, trumpeting. This alarmed all the elephants, and they displayed a little and then charged us. When this happened, every elephant did the same, but we were well back from them and they didn’t seem all that serious. In fact, it was funny to see a whole elephant family, including calves, charge. We simply backed up and they settled down.

The following morning we had an almost-repeat of the incident. Key word is “almost”. We had a different family with teens, adults with calves, and other ellies. There were no baboons, but the teens still ran off to the right and got into mischief, trumpeting and getting everyone riled up. You could see the females with the calves were getting a bit more upset than usual. Anticipating some action given what had happened the day before, I had my smaller Nikon Z6 with a 24-105 lens in hand because it made it easier to get onto something quickly.

That turned out to be good because the matriarch charged, and this one was no joke. Our vehicle was closer to her this time, and there were three groups of elephants and a termite mound. Our ranger had to pick a path that wouldn’t take us into any of those things, and then move quickly. Our tracker was sitting in the usual seat on the front bumper, and he had to hold on for dear life because there was no time to get him in. The elephant chased us as we drove as fast as possible, trumpeting her anger.

One of the two rangers we had said his heart was in his mouth for that one, and my wife said that it was one of the few times she was frightened. It’s very hard to say how serious this ellie was; when they really intend to hit a vehicle they tend to have their ears back and their trunk tucked under, but they can do that at the last minute. We were told that elephants kill more safari travelers than any other African animal, and there was a recent episode where one charged and overturned a vehicle used by a group of rangers in training. You take wildlife seriously if you want to be safe.

Sometimes you don’t even need to be on a game drive to see something rare and interesting. We were in Nxabega Tented Camp in the Okavango Delta, and as usual we had asked for the most remote room in the camp. Yes, it’s a longer walk, particularly for senior citizens, but the remote rooms are the ones most likely to be visited by wildlife. We’d not been in the camp long when we realized that elephants often came past the room to feed on grass that was thriving as the Delta’s water level gradually rose.

One particularly fun and rare happening is documented in Incident Report: Baby Elephant Nurses by Our Room. We were sitting on the wood deck in front of the tent, elevated perhaps 18 inches from the ground, when we heard motion to the side of the tent. Looking through the screen into the room, we could also see out the side screen, and there was a female elephant moving there, obviously looking for food. She was going to come alongside the deck.

An elephant isn’t going to jump up onto an elevated deck, and we were told that if one came along, we were fine as long as we stayed six feet or so from the edge so their trunks couldn’t reach. We watched, being quiet and still, as the female elephant came out alongside the deck, and we could see she had a tiny baby with her. She stopped to feed perhaps ten or twelve feet from the deck, and as she did, the baby moved in and started to nurse! We could actually hear the suckling, and you can hear it in the video as well. After a bit of time, the mother moved off with the baby. We had to call the lodge and tell them we’d be late for lunch, because while you’re safe in your tent or on your deck with elephants around, you are definitely not safe on the ground with them, and they were in the area for a bit of time.

We’ve had many interesting sightings from our rooms over time, and others seem to have generally missed out, even those in adjacent rooms. If you love wildlife find out what rooms are the most-visited and ask for them, and also find out what the lodge recommends regarding being out on your deck when something comes along. These animals are not tame, they’re just accustomed to people, but how accustomed they are and how they’ll react is always hard to predict.

One of the changes I made between my last pre-COVID African adventure and my first after COVID was focusing on videography rather than on photography to record our travels and sightings. Shooting video radically reduces the time and effort required to post something from the trip on my YouTube Channel (which I hope you’ll subscribe to!), and I decided to create a group of quickly done videos to record some of the most interesting and exciting things we saw. I’ve called them “Incident Reports”, and my intention is to post a short description of each report here on my Silver Adventurer blog to provide some background to each.

The first such report was “Incident Report: Two Wild Dog Kills, Hyenas, and a Leopard!” and it was one of the most exciting and complex wildlife interaction we’ve ever had. It was also one of the very first encounters we had on our May-June 2022 trip, so let’s explain it a bit.

Any time you find the African wild dog moving, in fact any time you find any predator moving, you can expect something to happen. We saw evidence of wild dogs hunting not long after we’d left the Tengile River Lodge, and we followed them as quickly and closely as we could. Wild dogs are a lot smaller than Land Cruisers, though, and much faster in brush, so we arrived at the kill site just as the dogs had taken the impala down. Another vehicle got lucky and was there at the time of the takedown, but they said they’d not really seen any more than we did.

Wild dog packs of ten or more, a fairly common size, will dismember a kill in less than a minute, and that’s what happened here. The dogs will compete with each other, but not really fight each other, but they’re always wary about their arch-enemies, the hyenas. They showed up almost immediately, drawn by the noise of the kill and by the fact that they tend to follow dogs on the hunt, so they’re typically not far away. One on one, a hyena is more than a match for a wild dog, and a large group of hyenas can drive even lions off a kill, but on this kill, the hyenas were outnumbered and the dogs held them off until there was nothing left but small scraps.

Our tracker said that the dogs liked to drink after eating, and he knew where to find the closest water, which of course the dogs also knew. This is a demonstration of how important it is to have skilled trackers on an adventure; we try to select ones known to be experienced, and we had the head tracker, rated as a Master, here. We went to the water hold, and sure enough the dogs were there. They’d already drunk their fill and were now playing a bit.

One impala isn’t enough to feed a pack, and so a few of the dogs were alert to noise nearby, which turned out to be another impala. A group of the dogs took it down, but it was in a ravine and we didn’t see the takedown (which is often pretty gruesome in any event!) We moved to that location and watched the dogs feeding and again fending off some hyenas successfully. When that kill had been consumed, we moved back to the water hole.

As we watched, we saw the dogs suddenly pick up their ears and move as a group to the left, into the brush. We heard a growling and the dogs yipping, and to our surprise we saw a big male leopard, who had apparently just wandered in for a drink. There were enough dogs to tree him, and keep them there, but the dogs lost interest and moved away. When they did, the leopard decided to make a break for it.

From his tree, he couldn’t see the hyenas in the area of the second kill, and he headed in that general direction. There were more than enough hyenas (about five) to tree the leopard again, this time closer to the second kill, and they kept him in the tree for a good half-hour until they also lost interest. Only one hyena remained when the leopard decided to come down, a younger one. The leopard faced him off with a snarl and made his escape.

This episode took about three hours. Other than our vehicle (we had a private vehicle), nobody stayed for the whole thing, and I don’t believe any were there at the end when the leopard came down the second time. The reason is that most safari-goers are chasing the Big Five or just ticking off animals, and they quickly move on to something else. That’s a bad idea, in my view. When predators are in motion, you stay around to see what will happen. We did, and had an incredible encounter.

We finally completed our twelfth trip to Africa, after COVID delays and flight issues resolved themselves. We ended up being in four camps for a total of 28 safari days, and we absolutely loved the trip. It offered us a number of lessons, and I’ll share them with you here.

Our trip included 10 days at AndBeyond’s Tengile camp, then 7 at Tswalu Kalahari, and six each at AndBeyond Nxabega and Sandibe. The trip was so long because we had to combine camps from multiple trips, interrupted by COVID. We loved all the camps; we’d been to all but Nxabega before. Staying for so long at each gives us a chance to really take advantage of the special benefits of these locations, and to get familiar with the wildlife opportunities and best places and things to see.

As recently as early 2022, it would have required five COVID tests, most of them the more expensive and hard-to-schedule PCR tests. By the time we left in early May, the only remaining test needed for fully vaccinated people was the rapid antibody test to return to the US (since then, this requirement has been removed).

This relates to the first lesson, which is that the major safari camps in Africa are taking COVID extremely seriously, even now as governments have largely lifted their restrictions. The majority of the staff in each were fully vaccinated, and even when that was the cast, they still practiced masking and sanitation procedures when the staff came into guest contact. You can ask your ranger and tracker to mask in the vehicles, but since we are both fully vaccinated (2 mRNA plus two boosters), we had a private vehicle so there was no exposure to other guests, and the vehicles are fully open, we didn’t ask them. We hugged those we were friendly with and nobody got COVID, and we felt comfortable throughout.

Second, the camp experience, including dining, seems back to normal. The food was great everywhere and all the camps were very solicitous of our dining requirements. They’ve started to reinstate dining outdoors in a boma (outdoor barbecue setting), but they keep guests well separated since in many cases they’re less vaccinated (and less inclined to take masking seriously) than the staff.

As I noted above, we had a private vehicle so we didn’t come into close contacts with most of the guests. We did, in some camps, have conversations with some at mealtime, but in most cases we stayed fairly well separated. Where we were confident about the vaccination status of the people, we got more friendly. If you share a vehicle, which most safarigoers do, you’ll have to decide what to do based on the collective view and the policy of the camps.

Third, our wildlife experiences on the trip were literally unparalleled, and even the ranger/tracker teams we had said they’d rarely if ever had as much action and interest. I think a big part of this is the fact that we didn’t have an agenda for each drive. Many people will chase specific animals or interactions, and that can create major issues even in a private vehicle. The problem is that wildlife isn’t tied to a location, and often nobody knows where that lion, leopard, or pack of wild dogs is at the moment. We told our rangers to go where they believed we’d have the best experience overall, and they did. We’re also birders, so there is always something to see and enjoy, and taking time to watch birds often leads to happening onto (or into) action of another sort!

One thing that became clear as we moved through our adventure is that getting an early start is critical. We were almost always the first vehicle to depart, morning and afternoon, often the last to return, and we usually packed breakfast rather than waiting to eat before departing or returning early. As a result, we were often the vehicle who happened on the best stuff as it was developing, rather than competing with others to see something another group had discovered. In many cases, we were the only people to see some of the most exciting interactions, because we were there when they happened and others were still in the camp.

Now on to my favorite topic, photography and videography!

This was the first African safari trip where my goal was to shoot video rather than to take pictures, though I did take photos too. I strongly recommend that others who face this transition in media do even more pre-trip familiarization than I did. For the first two or three days, I struggled a bit with the setup, and I missed some things I wish I’d caught. I did a lot better later in the trip.

My primary technical recommendation for those who want to take videos of safari action is use back-button focus, with continuous focus (AF-C in Nikon terms) as the setting. This lets you thumb the AE/AF button on the back when you need to refocus either video or photos, and you can let off the button when the subject is at a constant distance. This eliminates the need to switch between AF-C and AF-S for photos, and it lets you avoid constant focus-hunting, with visible and audio artifacts, for video.

Video takes up a lot of card storage. I took a 1 TB card for my Nikon Z7II and four 128 GB cards for the Nikon Z6, and I shot most of the latter and filled more than half the terabyte card, even though I changed my frame rate to reduce storage. I’ve found that posting and viewing video at the “studio” rate of 24 frames per second is fine, so that’s where I ended up. I shot 4K even though I post to my YouTube channel in HD (1920×1080), which gives me some latitude to zoom in video post-processing (Davinci Resolve Studio 17) and the ability to crop-stabilize if needed. I had planned to take advantage of the Z7II’s ability to shoot 4K at 60 fps for selective slow motion, but unfortunately Nikon Z cameras don’t give you an accurate measure of remaining capacity on a card, so I changed to avoid running out of space.

One thing you can do (besides buying a bigger card!) is to take advantage of the Z7II’s second SDXC slot and put in a U10 card, then set photos to be stored on that card rather than on the main CFexpress Type B. I never had any issues with the SDXC card keeping up with my photo shooting.

I had expected to be taking most video with the Z6, and overall that was true. I have a Sigma 24-105 Art lens mounted on the Z6, which gave me good range for close encounters. I used the Z7II with the Sigma 50-500 for longer shots, but sometimes there was just too much action to switch cameras even though I tried to have both ready. While we were moving I kept the Z7II in hand to grab a shot if needed, and I set either photo or video mode depending on whether we had an expectation of action or not; video if yes, photo if no.

The experts recommend video be shot at a shutter speed no more than 2x frame rate, which would have been 1/50 second. I didn’t follow that; I used 1/120 almost exclusively and went lower if light levels were low. That slow a shutter meant shooting at f16 to f22, which at least gave more depth of field and made it easier to maintain focus on moving subjects.

In the AndBeyond Tengile River Lodge and Tswalu Kalahari, I used a GorillaPod to offer a stable camera platform if the position of the critters was suitable, but animals don’t pay any attention to your positioning challenges. It was often necessary to hand-hold and brace as much as possible. In Botswana, because of the bumpy ride, they cover the vehicle bars with padding, and the GorillaPod won’t grip solidly, so I didn’t use it.

We asked all the camps to remove the roof of our vehicles, which they did. This was because the bars that hold up the canvas tops will interfere with panning for moving subjects, either blocking the camera or just getting in the way. Botswana requires the full steel frame of the top be kept on, and so I had considerable trouble with panning in both Botswana camps. Videos of land critters weren’t too bad; you could see the vehicle frame but it didn’t impact focus. Birds in flight were a problem because the bars broken focus lock on the bird in many cases, or blocked part of the view in the picture.

OK, it was a great trip and I got some good pictures and videos, but what would I do differently? Here’s my list.

First and foremost, take more cards. I’m going to get a 2 TB card for the Z7II and move the 1 TB card to the Z6. I want to be able to video without fearing I’m going to run out of capacity before the end of a trip.

Second, use DX mode for Z6 video when I have time to set it up and I need more reach. If I set the Z6 for DX (crop frame) shooting and then crop 2x from 4K to HD in Resolve, I have the equivalent of 315mm, which is probably enough to reduce my need to shoot video with the Z7II. It’s a LOT easier to hold the Z6 for action shooting than the Z7II.

Third, I need a better strategy for stabilizing the camera when shooting something with the Z7II. 500mm is too long a zoom to hand-hold without some bracing strategy. The GorillaPod works if the position of the animal/vehicle is favorable. I’m not sure what can be done if it isn’t other than what I tried, which was to lean over and use my elbows! Beanbags and clamps, like the GorillaPod, are limiting in that you can only use them where there’s a bar or something to put them on.

Finally, video is very different than pictures, and you need to think differently when shooting it. I think I made progress in this area on the trip, but I think there’s more progress to be made. Some is technique; when do you change focus, when do you try manual focus versus hitting the back-button, and should you change the size of the focus area? I generally used Wide-Area AF (Large) because it lets you pick up birds and larger things, but that works best for photos. For video, you may need a smaller focus area to avoid focusing on something other than the intended subject.

The nice thing about adventure travel is that you identify a lot of things you need to do better, and if you’re addicted to it, you know there are other trips coming that will give you that chance!

I’ve had a couple of months to play with my Z6 and Z7 II, which have replaced my D750 and D500, respectively, and I wanted to share my views at this point. Recall that the motivation for the move was my decision to rely more on shooting video on adventure trips; the mirrorless cameras are better at that because they allow the viewfinder to be used in video shooting.

I’m using the Z6 with the Sigma 24-105 Art lens, and the standard setup is full-frame shooting at 4k24fps. In this mode, the lens equivalent focal length range is unchanged. By switching to DX format, I get an effective 36-158mm, and since I use/publish my videos on YouTube in HD mode, I have the ability to crop the video frame, giving me an effective doubling of focal length. That means the entire range available is 24-315, which is plenty for typical video shooting. I’ve also added an external microphone to improve audio recording and reduce or eliminate any noise created by the lens focusing.

On the Z7 II, I have the Sigma 50-500, and in video mode with the same use of DX and 4k cropping down to HD, I have the equivalent of 50-1500mm, which is fairly astonishing.

In photo mode, both the Z6 and Z7 II are full-frame, so there is no focal multiplier inherent in either camera. However, both are capable of shooting crop (DX) frame, offering the usual 1.5x multiplier. My experience suggests that if you have the card capacity, it’s better not to use DX mode for photos, because you can crop in post-processing and achieve the same multiplier, and FX frame while taking pictures gives you a much larger field of view. That’s helpful finding a subject in the viewfinder.

The big question for my Z7 II use is autofocus. Because this is the camera I use for bird and much of my wildlife photography (because it’s what I mount the versatile 50-500mm lens on), and because it replaces the D500 which had excellent autofocus, I needed to optimize focus on the Z7 II. I did some preliminary settings work based on visits to a local nature reserve, but the real test was a trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia, and it was a revelation.

First, I’d determined that I needed to set both the Z-cameras to back-button focus because in video mode, it’s important to keep the autofocus from hunting, which blurs the image slightly and also creates a noise that the microphone picks up. With back-button focus, pressing the shutter doesn’t focus the camera, only the AE/AF button does. With that setting, I can shoot videos and control exactly when the camera will refocus, and since videos are shot at a slow shutter speed and small lens opening, depth of field is great and hopefully refocusing won’t happen often. So in Acadia I had that mode set and got comfortable with it.

The Z-cameras go into an idle-power state when they’re not in use, and it takes a couple seconds for them to wake up, unlike DSLRs that are always ready to shoot unless you turn them off. With back-button focus, I found that I could hit the AE/AF button and wake the camera as I was bringing it up to my eye, which reduced the risk of missing a good shot.

The Z-cameras also have three customizable U-settings on the exposure dial, a feature the D500 didn’t have and that I loved on some other Nikons. I had decided to set everything to f9, 1/800 as a baseline, and so the differences between the U-settings would be the autofocus area and mode. I’d set U1 to be wide-area, continuous servo and U2 to be single-point single-servo, but on the first day I realized that the U2 setting was making it hard to get onto a bird quickly. I set U3 to be small-area and continuous servo, and found that made an enormous difference in being able to quickly pick up a bird.

There turned out to be an unexpected benefit to the combination of back-button focus and my U3 setting, too. If I had a problem focusing on a bird because of intervening branches/leaves, I could take my thumb off the AE/AF button and manually focus the lens without having it try to refocus when I hit the shutter button. Based on this, there’s no value to having single-servo focus, so I’m changing my U2 setting to continuous.

As far as performance of autofocus goes, U1 (wide-area) is best for birds in flight, and it seems to track well once it gets lock. U3 is best for birds in trees or on the ground, and it also seems to track; I got a picture of a Scarlet Tanager in flight because he took off as I shot, and the camera tracked him. U2 would be good for working through a lot of clutter, but I have another idea for U2 now.

The Z-cameras also support two models of focus peaking/peeking, both of which work only for manual focus. If you hit the zoom button, the camera will zoom to a closer view of the subject to facilitate focusing. Better yet, if you set up the correct option, it will mark in-focus elements with a rim of red, so you can see what you’ve got in focus. Both these features work well in my early test, so I’ve reprogrammed the U2 setting to manual focus and focus peaking.

How does this compare to the D500? It’s still a little hard to say because I’ve had years of shooting the D500, including multiple trips to Africa, so I have a lot of field experience. I’ve only had the one short trip with the Z-cameras. However, my impression is that if I manage the focus area settings properly, I’d get better results than I was getting with the D500, but many of the features (like back-button focus) were available on the D500 and I wasn’t using them. However, there’s a bit more involved in getting the settings right, work I’ve tried to simplify using the U-settings.

As far as image quality is concerned, the Z7 II is obviously better than either the D500 or D750. The 45 megapixel sensor makes a big difference, and I can crop images significantly (down to perhaps 10 megapixels total) without losing excessive resolution. Noise at high ISOs is acceptable, but ISO doesn’t go as high as with the D500. I’ve noticed that it’s difficult to process very high ISO images from the D500, so that may not matter much.

The jury is still out after Acadia. I’ll need more time under more varied conditions to rate the new Z cameras and compare them to Nikon DSLRs. I’ve got some Africa trips planned, so I should have an opportunity to get better data when they’re completed, and I’ll update my views then.