okay so we've had an early onset winter this year and we've had cold
temperatures and snow and rain and sleet and out of the blue today it zipped
right up there to 55 degrees Fahrenheit so I decided I would test out a early
Christmas present I gave myself and that's the nikon z6 mirrorless camera so
I put my 105 millimeter micro macro lens on it
F 2.8 and decided to take the camera out and take a look at the bees up close and
then share some of this video with you none of the video is edited it's
right out of the camera the camera was set on automatic we are shooting at 119
point 8 frames per second which is the 120 setting in the camera so other
than that it's all automatic and there's lots of activity on these landing boards
today what the bees are primarily doing are just cleaning house and getting rid
of any dead bees and stuff anytime there's a bump up in the temperatures we
want to be ready to help the bees and offer them some outside feeding if we
can one of the advantages of the 119 or the 120 frame rate is we can do these
slow-motion sequences so I thought it would also test that out this lens does
have vibration reduction built into it but remember this is not a lens that is
being sold with this camera I have the adapter and so it's not a perfect world
but I'm pretty pleased with the image quality here and it looks pretty stable
all the video sequences that we're watching are handheld so we're not using
a slider a tripod or anything like that and just a great opportunity to
test it out on some bees and look at the bees in the process they're flying out as
I said I did set out some two to one sugar water to see if any of them would
be interested in it and some of them were and we'll show that sequence in a
minute at the end of this video you're also gonna see the rig that I use the
way I set it up I am using a Sennheiser on camera microphone so I'll also show
you that but the bees are healthy all the highs are good we have seven
colonies here in this apiary and they were just flying everywhere
they're interested in everything and several bees of course are dying in the
snow which is typical don't panic if you see a bunch of dead bees in the snow in
front of your hive those we're not gonna make it back anyway
and they are just taking advantage of the warm day just like we are nice
closeup here slow-motion sequence again this was shot
at 120 and I've slowed it down to 10% normal speed so you can see this female
worker be kind of cleaning her tongue she's got sugar water residue on her
that's what the little white spots and stuff are the bees are gonna clean each
other up they're getting high-energy off of it normally we would feed one to one
but because it's in winter now we're going to to one or even more dense would
be better for the bees remember they won't have the time to dehydrate they're
going to be putting the sugar water that they're getting in the cells that
they've consumed already for the early cold
here's another entrance screens are still in place now I left the screens
instead of replacing with wood reducers and that's because on days like today
when it does warm up it's gonna melt off the snow quicker and they're gonna get
some ventilation in there and they're gonna clean house I notice the focus
does rack a little bit but again remember this is a micro macro lens and
it's not great for any kind of automatic focus it is kind of rough I'll have to
look into the camera a little better and see if I can control the speed at which
it adjusts focus and now we're out here all of these sequences are filmed on my
property and this is the pond in my backyard you can see where the water
level was on these trees there so we've had a big snow melt off it was frozen
and now it's thawed again so we kind of got a spring thaw
but it's December 2nd so this is unusual we had an unusually early winter hit and
now we have strange warm up here for the past couple of days as I said it got to
55 degrees Fahrenheit now I'm hand-holding this and the panning is a
little rough and choppy here I would probably post reduce this and stabilize
it with a warp stabilizer or something the other thing is testing the high
contrast here usually when you shoot snow it tends to darken way down all the
settings were automatic so I'm just seeing how the camera handles this this
is an Aster that's gone by just to show some macro close-up here and again that
dynamic range is pretty darn good so I'm probably gonna be doing a lot of
my honeybee video sequences with this z6 I like it of course and we're aiming
straight at the Sun so I wanted to see how well it handled that the audio is
pretty good here but then that's coming from the Sennheiser microphone which
I'll show you at the end of the video and this is the run off that's just
going through my woods right now this is normally what we would see in the
springtime but it's happening now and this is slowed down just a little bit
this is at 50% of the normal frame rate
you can touch the screen and focus on different parts I found that pretty
sensitive and you can select areas and it did a good job of that so I liked the
touch screen I did have some problems when I was reaching out to touch the
screen and that it would block the viewfinder and the touch screen would go
dark because the viewfinder has a sensor so if you put your face up to it it will
automatically switch off the screen and you'll be looking through the EVF which
is the electronic viewfinder and so I had to be careful about how I held my
finger up next to that flip screen on the back there or it would switch to
the electronic viewfinder instead of showing what I needed on the screen but
small thing took me just a second to figure out that that's what was going on
we're super close again these are all macro sequences I think the camera's
gonna do really well with wide-angle lenses and some of the primes and so on
so we'll just have to see again we're a little shaky here but I'm hand-holding
it the lens itself does have vibration reduction I'm not sure that it's able to
to utilize the cameras built-in vibration reduction and it was
interesting I came across this little black wasp ear that normally would be in
hibernation so this is probably a queen and very cold this is in the shade so
we're we're videoing in a dark area and the camera did really well and it's just
a long shot here to show you the kind of the value range here if we're looking
across the pond the snow looks pretty natural in color and the white balance
was on automatic as well so and we're just taking close-ups a little bits and
pieces of plants here and here's the rooster now I wanted to show him because
his head is being hit by the Sun and his body is in shade so the dynamic range
here is pretty good and it also would track him so I touched his head on the
screen and the focus stayed right on him and here's one of the bees that flew out
and did not make it back she's just expired in the
snow and again that's fairly normal when you have an immediate warm-up like this
now here's the camera setup this is the Nikon Z or Z six yeah and the body is
very small the sennheiser microphone looks huge on it I have the adapter one
of my motivations for getting this mirrorless camera was the fact that I
could use all of my Nikon lenses this is a Sennheiser mic the model 440 and
these are the settings that I used although it's in the off position right
now just so you can see how it is I had it on full range for the focal length it
didn't have problems going from focusing to something far out to something very
close to the macro lens I had to manually get it kind of close
and then let the automatic focus take over so it wasn't great for that and
we're showing you the back of the camera this thing is tiny it's so lightweight
in my hand you could tote this thing around all you want the way I got those
low water shots was I tilted the screen out that screen goes flat and
this is the maximum tilt down so if you were holding it over your head it will
not fold flat it goes out just this far and here it is in the closed position
again that microphone normally doesn't look that big but this camera body is
very small and so I decided I'd do a comparison
these are Nikon's largest bodies the one on the left is a Nikon d5 the one on the
right is the Nikon d-4s and it has the 70 to 200 on it and the d5 has a 24 to
70 so just you can really in comparison see how tiny the z6 body is and
again this is going to be my fun camera I'm just gonna run around and probably a
lot of my youtubes will be with the Z6 here and I'll be using other lenses I
figured the micro macro lens would be the most difficult so from the back
again you really get a sense of scale there thanks for watching I hope you
found this beneficial