I have received my new Nikon Z8 camera and have been setting it up and testing it. This morning, although it was an overcast day with rain expected, I spent an hour or so out in a local park.
The camera has a feature that lights up the viewfinder, making it much easier to see the scene in low light, like I was experiencing this morning. But something wasn’t working right. I would look into the view finder, take a few shots, and then the viewfinder would go dark.
My first assumption was that there was some sort of issue that would need repair. I took a lot of photographs, around 400. This kept happening. It’s possible to change the level of brightness in the viewfinder, so I tried the auto setting and then several different manuel brightness levels.
Nothing fix the problem.
I begin to wonder if it might be affecting my photos, so I looked back through a number of them. Some were OK and some were quite dark, unusable.
It was a pattern of light, dark, light photos. That seemed familiar. Cameras have a feature that permits what is called bracketing: a series of photographs with different exposures, to help with scenes that have a wide dynamic range, beyond the cameras capabilities.
I rarely use that feature but was aware of it.
I checked.
Somehow, in all the fiddling I have done with the camera, I set my brand new Nikon Z8 camera to bracketing mode. That means 2/3 of the photos I took this morning have improper exposures.
How I managed to do that will have to remain a mystery.
Why it took me that long to figure out what was going on … well, I explained that in the title.
The camera has a feature that lights up the viewfinder, making it much easier to see the scene in low light, like I was experiencing this morning. But something wasn’t working right. I would look into the view finder, take a few shots, and then the viewfinder would go dark.
My first assumption was that there was some sort of issue that would need repair. I took a lot of photographs, around 400. This kept happening. It’s possible to change the level of brightness in the viewfinder, so I tried the auto setting and then several different manuel brightness levels.
Nothing fix the problem.
I begin to wonder if it might be affecting my photos, so I looked back through a number of them. Some were OK and some were quite dark, unusable.
It was a pattern of light, dark, light photos. That seemed familiar. Cameras have a feature that permits what is called bracketing: a series of photographs with different exposures, to help with scenes that have a wide dynamic range, beyond the cameras capabilities.
I rarely use that feature but was aware of it.
I checked.
Somehow, in all the fiddling I have done with the camera, I set my brand new Nikon Z8 camera to bracketing mode. That means 2/3 of the photos I took this morning have improper exposures.
How I managed to do that will have to remain a mystery.
Why it took me that long to figure out what was going on … well, I explained that in the title.
