Most of you reading this have had your photos taken, or even have taken photos yourselves. This can be easily attributed to the fact that functional cameras are easy to get ones hands on for the past decade, as companies in our day and age have a beautiful and fascinating hobby of fusing image sensors to anything that can have a battery within it, alongside a Bluetooth speaker and an LED flashlight for good measure. As a result, cameras can be seen anywhere, from fairly obvious places such as phones and laptops, to less obvious places like television sets and microwave ovens. I have been informed that even the walls are equipped with cameras these days.
However, “the action of capturing rays of light to form an image” is hardly comparable to “the art of capturing moments in time to form an immortal memory” (or a similarly pretentious sentence). Photography is an art you have to do sincerely, and not as some cheap party trick you pull out, while demonstrating your new glass brick purchased on twenty installments. It involves a close bond between the photographer and their rig, be it a large box with bellows with 4×5 inch sheets coated with silver halide emulsions, or a small box with buttons and a 23.6×25.7mm silicon chip covered with a Bayer filter.
As the title suggests, I now own one of the latter, as I do not have the will or strength to haul around three-kilograms of equipment, nor do I have any patience or appreciation necessary for the process of film development. I gladly prefer the convenience and coddling modern technology gives us, and my previous experiences with analog photography involve pondering over the lifeless corpses of multiple cameras with obliterated battery compartments (some by corrosion and others by the brittle nature of aged plastic). As for why I chose this camera in particular, or why I even bought a camera at all? I had a college tour last month, and two weeks before it, my father randomly asked if wanted one; I do not know what exactly prompted him to do so, but I refuse to look gift horses in the mouth. After spending a month with it, I am absolutely certain when I say this: I do not have a shred of buyer’s remorse.
Enough foreword. Let’s talk about the camera itself. What I have is the Nikon Z50II + NIKKOR Z DX 18-140MM F/3.5-6.3 VR kit, which comes with the camera body, a “standard zoom” lens as per the website, a neck strap (AN-DC29), a USB-C cable (UC-E25), a battery (EN-EL25A), a battery charger (MH-32), and the necessary paperwork. Other than that, I got a SanDisk Extreme PRO 128GB V60 UHS-II SDXC card and a NiSi S+ Ultra Slim PRO MC UV 62mm ultraviolet filter.
These are a few images I have taken around the house, all unedited JPEGs. It’s necessary to keep in mind these were taken with effectively zero-prior experience in photography. The second you take even an absolutely amateurish image on a real camera, you suddenly start noticing how detailed and sharp all the images are.
These ones are from the tour I mentioned, and during this time I slowly figured out how to shoot better, and how to manually adjust ISO, aperture and shutter speed to make the shots look better.
Since I really don’t have much of an idea what else to write in this post, I’m ending it here. Overall, it’s a great camera for a beginner if you can afford it. I would personally recommend it.