I’ve read a lot of photography business books and Todd’s The Freelance Photographer’s Guide is top shelf! It’s a no-hold-bar account of what it takes to have a successful photography business. The one thing I appreciated is that the text is based on TODAY’s business model and not from five, ten, or more years ago. The industry has changed a whole lot and Todd is in the perfect place to see, react and take advantage of these changes and he shares so well all that he has learned, pros and cons to help us move our business in a positive direction. Incredibly well written, all points clearly presented, I highly recommend this book and that your read it a minimum of twice. It’s packed with what we need to know and execute!

The key to the speed of the Z 9 and its Expeed 7 dual-stream wizardry is the writing speed to the memory and the write speed of the memory. It’s needed for 20fps Raws or 120fps Jpegs stills and 125 minutes 8K video to work so seamlessly. The Z 9 has two CFexpress Type B / XQD or dual slots (do yourself a favor and go CFexpress!). Optimized for high-performance CFexpress Type B cards, the dual slots are independent so you can load them with a CFexpress and/or an XQD, different sizes or write speeds. If you want your Z 9 to deliver all the speeds Nikon reports in the Z 9 literature/instruction book, the ProGrade Cobalt 1700 MB/s cards should be inserted. These are the cards tested with and used to come up with all those amazing write speeds. Personally, I have the ProGrade Cobalt 650GB in slot 1 and the ProGrade Cobalt 325GB in slot 2. I have the slots set up Slot 2 as overflow when shooting still and Slot 2 for recording video. I have also shot with the 1TB ProGrade and the 512GB Delkin Black in the Z 9 flawlessly. Most cards work in the Z 9, only some deliver the blistering speeds. Hope this helps.

I was always a fan of the Nikkor 50f1.4AF. I recently sold it and thought I could live without it. Turns out, I couldn’t. I need a small, fast, normal lens so I reached out to Bedfords Camera and got myself the new Z40f2. It turns out, and it should be no surprise, to be a truly outstanding lens that I now take with me everywhere! Incredibly sharp, screaming fast AF, flat field, and nice DoF for the focal length, it’s simply a fun lens. Nikon doesn’t make a hood just for it so picked up a new HN-3 shade from Grays of London. With the tilt monitor of the Z 9 with the Z40f2 attached, I can play with Maggie with one hand and photograph her with the other. And no, I’m not fast enough to snatch her ball away from her but she knew that :-)

Just got off the phone with an old-time friend and great shooter. We were talking about our recent shooting with the new Z 9 and the images we were able to capture. We kept coming back to one word, confidence! Having confidence in our gear instilled confidence in ourselves making the photographic experience so much more enjoyable. Self-doubt doesn’t totally disappear but the confidence to move forward was just stronger. How do you gain confidence in your gear, especially when it’s brand new like the Z 9? We both played with and shot with the Z 9 prior to having a shoot that was on the books. Funny thing, we “played” with the body to the point we both had to recharge the battery, twice.
Part of this confidence-building was not just shooting and learning the Z 9, but using it with the different lenses we depend on for our craft. For example, I’m heading into Yellowstone for a couple of weeks and my primary lens will be the 180-400vr. I need to know how balanced is the Z 9 on the 180-400vr as I will be handholding most of the time. At the same time, I’ll be wearing gloves with this rig. How does all that work? Knowing these answers PRIOR to actually shooting for real builds confidence. And that confidence resonates in the viewfinder and the final photograph. It’s why I’ve referred to my camera kit as my bag of confidence. It goes much further than knowing just which button to push, but why and when. Confidence goes a long way!