NX1 and an Ultra Marathon 1.32 Firmware

Decided to give the NX1 one more shot with sports photography this last weekend. I hired a 2nd photographer and handed him the NX1 to shoot with while I used my trusty D4s and D810.

The race conditions are heavy woods rugged mountains the race is 50 miles ran straight on the PCT trails in Oregon. So you get both extremes of good light and very low light. The one thing that absolutely frustrates me is the NX1 blackout between raw shots it is to slow and cannot be used for running events or soccer events. I had to set the camera to CH, Zone AF Small, Jpeg Fine, 8fps, this is the only way to get all the shots I needed.

Lenses I used are the 50-150mm, 16-50 S, 45mm 1.8. Ended up only using 2 batteries for the first day of shooting. Total photos were taken for the 50-mile race and a 50K race between 4 cameras 11,400 pictures!

I did find the photos very edit-friendly in jpeg which was nice. I would not shoot above 1600ISO I did shoot at 3200 ISO to get 1/500th for some of the shots. 200 ISO produced amazing pictures!

Zone AF nails the shots almost every time in good lighting but in low light it struggles just a bit. Also what really impressed me about the NX1 as the runners ran toward me it the focused stayed locked on the eyes which I have found the GH4 and A6000 to struggle with. Ive stuck some NX500 and D810 plus D4s pics in for comparisons. I',m sure if I could shoot raw the pictures would look much cleaner.

D4s really hard shot had to focus on the mountain and take it F8 so I wouldn't blow out the sky and mountains. The DR is huge on the Nikon Sensors allowing me to pull up the shadows and still get a usable shot.