Llyn Llech Owain Country Park – My First Nikon Z6ii Outing

After some lovely weather, today of all days turned out to be cold, and mostly overcast. However, it made a good testing ground for my first major outing with my new Nikon Z6ii camera. I had no doubt that it would perform well, but I did struggle in a few areas, which is my fault, and I have learned from them. Here is the story of the day.

A large group of us braved the cold temperatures of a cold January Tuesday morning, and as we started the day, a couple of members headed for the nearest bird hide, will the majority of the group headed around the grand lake on a circular route, ending at the bird hide, where the rest of us had a chance to capture some birds also.

Of course, the biggest thing for me today was using my new Nikon Z6ii, along with two lenses that I chose for the day, the Nikkor 70-300mm AF-S lens for landscapes and wildlife, and the Nikkor AF-S 14-24mm for landscape and architecture. I decided to shoot manual today (with auto-ISO), to have full control of the shutter speed, keeping it at around 1/800-1/1000 for birds with the 70-300mm lens.

I edited the images in Darktable, where I found them to be extremely malleable. Editing these images was such a huge joy compared to the Fujifilm files I have been editing for the last 6 years or so. There is something about that extra dynamic range that just means you have more flexibly and tonal control over your photos. And this is after just my first proper day out with the camera! Edited raw files were then sent to ON1 Photo Raw 2024 Max, where I painted with light, to really bring out the images.

Here are my favourite images from the day, before I go into what I discovered from today’s first use with this amazing camera. Open images full screen to see them in their best quality.

As you can see, and as I noticed after being used to editing Fujifilm files for so long, the amount of detail that the images contain is insane compared to APS-C! The birds particularly, considering they were shot at 300mm and are largely quite large crops, are absolutely breathtaking! And that is with a day when conditions were not as good as I would have liked.

Autofocus was simply mind-blowing. I always thought the autofocus on the Fujifilm X-T3 was great, but the autofocus on the Z6ii was a whole new level altogether. It didn’t miss a bird shot, and these were primarily small, super-fast birds which landed for a split second.

The two things that I struggled with was the fact that there is no on-screen live highlight warnings to show that you may be clipping highlights, something that I can live with by using the histogram more, I just don’t find the histogram as quick to use as the instant representation of highlight warnings. Plus, over the last week since owning the Z6ii, whereas I lived in Aperture Priority on the Fuji, the Nikon just doesn’t seem to keep be as effective. I’m not sure why, but I’ve been getting extremely high ISO settings in that mode, while on the Fuji, the camera would always keep the exposure under control without raising the ISO too much (and yes, both minimum shutter speed, maximum shutter speed and corresponding apertures have been taken into consideration). Of course, Nikon and Fujifilm use different scales of ISO, so it could just be that.

And, talking of noise, yes, you do get noise on close inspection with the Z6ii at higher ISO levels, but it is in no way as distracting as it was on the Fujifilm. Although I never seen Fujifilm “worms”, the Nikon noise is much more… granular in look.

Anyway. I hope you have enjoyed this initial batch of images, and my little write-up. I would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you for reading.