Well I have made it back from Africa Trip Seven, and I think I’ve learned some important things on my ever-favorite topic of cameras. The short story is that the Nikon D500 with the Sigma 50-500mm lens turns out to be just about the perfect camera for safaris.
This particular trip involved two camps in Kenya (Ol Donyo, near Amboseli, and Olare Mara Kimpinski in the Masai Mara) and two in South Africa (Leadwood, in Sabi Sands, and Jabulani in the Kapama reserve northwest of Kruger). I’ll review these camps in another post. We also stayed for four days in Cape Town at the Queen Victoria. The weather on the trip was drier and colder than usual for Africa; we’d been to all these geographies before at about the same time of year, and we were surprised by the difference.
Animal sightings on this trip were the very best we’ve had in Africa, which of course means that any camera issues had the potential of messing up a good thing. If you’ve followed my photographic sagas, you know that I have been experimenting with the best camera for safari use. I’ve had great shots with the combination of the Nikon 1, an FT1 adapter, and a long telephoto lens (the new Nikon 80-400 and the Sigma 50-500) but there were issues with the precision of autofocus, particularly in low-contrast situations or where the subject was smaller than the focus square. The Nikon 1 also has limited ISO capabilities, and so I decided to try the D500. With the 50-500 and its 1.5 crop factor, this gave me a 75-750mm equivalent, and the camera was supposed to have the best autofocus of any of the enthusiast models and good noise performance as well. As a safety measure, I also had the Nikon D750 (full-frame) and the Nikon 80-400mm lens.
I didn’t need it. I shot about a thousand pictures with the D750, but primarily because I wanted some images at the highest possible resolution for printing. I think I could have taken them all with the D500 and been quite happy. This new model is simply amazing, and I want to outline what I think the key benefits are for a wildlife shooter.
At the high level, the big difference with the D500 is autofocus. The engine is extremely fast and accurate, to the point where I got shots that I would never have believed to be possible at all, and surely wouldn’t have worked even with the D750. What’s good about it is manifest in the auto-area mode, which is so accurate that it even often picked out the correct subject in a messy field and was able to pick up and track flying birds, even small ones.
One specific example shows the benefit. We were birding in the Western Cape and a capped wheatear was displaying for a mate. This is about the size of a large-ish sparrow, and this one was jumping up from a fence post about 50 feet from us. I was able to pick the bird up in the air using auto-area focusing and track it for multiple shots during its display—all of them were in focus.
Auto-area isn’t perfect even on the D500; a very small subject or a lot of clutter can fool it. Switching focus models isn’t a major issue with any Nikon but it’s not instant—unless you take advantage of another D500 feature and assign a feature button to switch focus modes. You had assignable feature buttons on the D750 but not to switch focus modes at a push. With the D500 you can make at least the top feature button into a switch-me-to-9-point button, which gives you a center focus point and some tracking in all directions. With this I could hit a specific and small focus target if auto-area picked the wrong thing, and do it in a push.
Another very helpful feature of the assignable buttons is the ability to set spot metering at a push. Birds and other critters are often backlit and you don’t have the option of asking them to reposition themselves. Spot metering will usually get you a serviceable exposure in these situations, again just by pushing a button. This makes it possible to quickly address backlit critters, which would be much more difficult if you had to change metering mode on the fly using the conventional approach.
I did have some D500 issues, both of which have been mentioned online. One was the “Card Error” problem and the other a seeming tendency to overexpose some shots.
On the Card Error, I never had an issue writing to the card but when I tried to delete the last image shot, I sometimes got the message that the card was bad. I was shooting to the XQD shot, but I think the problem really comes from the fact that when you delete the last XQD image the camera then displays the first image on the SDXC slot, which is where the online reports say the problem arises. UHS-II cards apparently have an issue, and Nikon has a temporary fix in place for it in a firmware update, which I’ve downloaded but not tried. I only had the problem rarely, so it will take some time to see if it was fixed. In any event, turning off the camera and popping the card out then re-seating it cures the problem.
The exposure thing is a bit murkier. I noticed that in some situations the camera would overexpose images by about .7 to 1 stop, but it wasn’t consistent. It doesn’t seem to be matrix metering because I switched to spot and center-weighted and they did the same thing. I just set exposure compensation and that resolved it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a firmware update for this in the future.
Frankly none of this matters to me. The camera did such an amazing job and the problems were so easily resolved that I won’t hesitate to recommend the D500 and in fact on future trips where I have stringent weight limits, I’ll probably make this my only camera. I’m also seriously considering selling off my Nikon 80-400 AF-S since it doesn’t add anything significant to my capabilities. The same for the Sigma 180 Macro I have; I can get close shots with the D500 and the 50-500. There does seem to be a clear value to the Nikon 17-55mm I have, even though it’s a DX lens, because it becomes a 25.5-82.5mm on the D750, a nice complement to the 50-500 which is 75-750mm on the D500. My Nikon 1 10-30mm gives me 27-81mm but with only 10MP and at a lower ISO.
I’ll keep you advised of my views as I process all the shots!