Author: Richard

The new Z30 from Nikon is a great new vlogging camera from Nikon.

Many Nikon users are asking ‘what is this for’. Its not a camera for a lot of us, but with USB charging while in use, a flat video profile, 2 hours recording it hits a lot of the spots YouTube users want.

Its a little expensive I feel, but it is the same price as the equivalent Sony.

The two biggest let downs are, no sensor stabilisation; so your lens need VR or you use the digital stabilisation. Secondly, we lack the wide angle lens needed for selfie work.

I would love to see a camera like this with a corner EVF or add on EVF, for travel, ie a more rangefinder style, that I feel would also sell well.

Olympus and Nikon have been the leaders in new flash tech from the camera brands; but now as the camera market shrinks Nikon are now engaging with third parties to enhance their flash system support.

This has been an area that Leica have been lacking but I see now with the release of a new controller from Profoto they now have Leica support which will please quite a few people.

I am a huge fan of Profoto, yes its not cheap but your paying for the R&D and the licenses for the frequencies that Profoto use.

Last weekend I was at a local studio and I was not using my Profoto gear but their gear. I wasted a good half an hour getting their triggers to work correctly.

The fans of the cheaper Chinese studio flash systems will gleefully point out that their controllers have had power readout for a while and are cheaper, but us Profoto users who don’t use the A10 as their controller but have the older ProFoto controller will definitely upgrade and leave our old triggers as spares.

I have mentioned before that there is a lot of difference between different memory cards.

The SD cards, cheap but easy to break, and do fail on writes occasionally causing lost work. Note after you have downloaded the photos, and have backed them up, format the card in camera. Then before use format again. If the format takes longer then usually your likely to soon have issues.

CF cards use a different technology, are much more robust and are less likely to fail but still take precautions, and make a note of when you bought a card and how much it has been used. Refresh old cards, also it is often better to use a couple of smaller cards than one big card.

So the reason for this post is I see Delkin are about to release a new version of their Black series CFexpress card, which can write faster than a Nikon Z9 can write. So no more buffer issues if you like shooting at 20fps or more. I currently use Delkin Black CFexpress cards myself.

There is a new community resource opened near to us. An old smoke house that on the ground flour is a plain white brick well lit space, and a dark plain brick walled basement with no light.

Its available to hire for a nominal fee for local Yoga, Pilates groups, knitting and sewing clubs etc. It also makes an interesting space for photography.

So what to do, well I booked a local well known model Girl On Fire for the day and as well as shooting some local lifestyle shots for both are portfolios in coffee shops and around the local village, we spend a few hours seeing what we could produce in this space.

We had a lot of fun and created some great pictures, I’ll definitely be trying this out again.