First Outing with the D7500

Nikon D7500, Nikkor 85/1.8G

I took a short hike Sunday afternoon to clear my head after attending a Visitation for a friend's late wife. I don't deal well with events like that, so I needed some time in my own head. Hiked for 1km or so and shoot around 100 shots of woodlands and nature details. 

Overall shooting the D7500 was like a visit with an old friend, it just worked pretty much exactly as I remembered. I have a lot of experience with older Nikon DSLR's and it's not that different from my Z bodies either. 

One good thing is I finally solved my Bracketing Burst issue on the Nikons. Turns out that I'd forgotten about how Nikon bracketing interacts with drive mode and setting Continuous advance gets you Bracketing Burst. That means I can just put this on a user setting for the Z7 (which sets drive mode on a button), but for the Zfc (no user modes) and the D7500 (physical drive mode selector) I will need to remember this as it solves a major annoyance for me.

There's a couple things about the D7500 that remind me of some of what we've lost in going to the Z bodies. The BKT button and AF/MF switch/button on the left, the 2-button format shortcut and full ability to override crop modes (the D7500 actually has a 1.3x crop mode option to get down to an m43-esque crop level of about 2x from Full Frame, but unlike the D7100 and D7200, this does not also come with a speed bump, the D7500 is always an 8fps body). Sometimes I do feel like Nikon over-simplified some things in Z and I just cannot figure out why the 45MP bodies in particular lose 1.2x crop as an option as well as the ability to force non-DX crop with DX CPU lenses. 

I do miss IBIS though, even the shot above is just a touch soft due to lack of IBIS. I have adjusted my auto-ISO minimum shutter speed to bias a bit faster as a result. 

One thing this does make me think of is that maybe a D850 might make sense as an addition to the kit in the future. It would give me a fast, 45MP FX/19.5MP DX body in the best DSLR Nikon ever made, and new it costs between a Z5ii and a Zf right now (and that probably will continue to slowly drop until they finally disappear). There's a lot of great value available in DSLR's and DSLR lenses right now as people continue to sell them off to go mirrorless. Is mirrorless kit better? In most regards yes, but in a lot of cases right now the cost and benefit ratio is off when you can buy last-gen DSLR pro glass cheap (and it works on your mirrorless cameras too in most cases).