Last month I did some travel for work and decided to bring along the new Nikon Z7 instead of my Leica M10. Â The M10 usually comes along on any kind of trip where the focus is work and not photography, If I get an afternoon free to walk the city I’m in, the M10 with the 50mm lens comes out of the bottom of my travel backpack and I wander. These excursions provide most of the travel images I’ve published over the years. My standing joke is that no matter where I travel in the world, I come back with the same images of cracked walls, asphalt and alleys. I actually have conventional travel shots which I’ve posted from time to time, but most of them are iPhone images and more likely to end up quickly sent to Instagram where I am of course @jjvornov.
I bought the Z-7 to replace my D850. The D850 was my photographic expedition camera as it was much more flexible using wide to telephoto lense, for example shooting landscapes from a tripod. I could get shots with  the 14mm zoom of the Nikon that are impossible with the 50mm lens and a hand held Leica. The z7 with the 24-70mm f4 zoom is about the same weight as the M10, so I thought it might work as a more flexible travel camera with wider angle, a bit longer reach and optical stabilization in a lightweight package, certainly better than the D850 with the 24-120 f4 zoom that I’ve used over the last two years.
In a few hours walking around San Francisco, I captured a few nice images and got to know the camera better. These cameras are complicated and I use a very small fraction of their capabilities. In truth, the buttons and menus get in the way, even as I learn what settings need to be changed when. And of course there’s the risk that a setting is changed at one point, forgetting to change it back, and having unexpected responses from the camera.
The 24-70 lens is good as a travel zoom but it’s not as impressive as the 50mm f1.8 that I used with earlier outings with the camera. Renderings are a little flat compared to the 24-120 f4 F mount lens used on the D850 as a midrange zoom. That whole kit was way bigger and way heavier. I’m hoping the wide angle zoom that’s coming soon will prove to be an outstanding lens that I can use in combination with the really nice 50mm. I’ll note that I find the RAW conversions by Nikon’s own Capture NX-D to be better in detail and contrast that those by Capture One, which serves as my cataloging software these days.
So for my city walks, I’ll be sticking to the Leica M10.
