In my previous post I mentioned my love/hate relationship with the Nikon Z9 EVF. Having spent a busy morning photographing gannets at Muriwai I thought I would share one of the real advantages of the EVF.

Being blackout free with no perceptible lag, what you see is what the sensor sees. This makes tracking birds in flight a smooth and uninterupted experience. One of the frustrations with a DSLR was that if you saw a dramatic fast motion event in the viewfinder you knew that the sensor hadn’t captured it as the mirror was obstructing the sensor to reflect the image into the pentaprism and viewfinder. With the Nikon Z9 EVF if you see it there is an excellent chance that you’ve captured it at 20 fps.

This was clearly demonstrated by this sequence I shot at Muriwai. While tracking a gannet flying in to land I saw it take evasive action at a near collision and was confident that I had a sequence of images of the whole event. Reviewing the sequence the eye AF had tracked the incoming gannet perfectly with sharp focus on the eye through the sequence.

Maybe it’s time to reframe the love/hate to love with some minor reservations!

Photos with Nikon Z9 and Nikkor Z 100-400mm f4.5-5.6 VR S