Shooting into the sun with the Z7

This is one in a series of posts on the Nikon Z7. You should be able to find all the posts about that camera in the Category List on the right sidebar, below the Articles widget. There’s a drop-down menu there that you can use to get to all the posts in this series; just look for “Nikon Z6/7”.

From the mailbag:

I wanted to let you know of an effect that I encountered on my Z 7, regardless of what lens, aperture, ISO and shutter mode I used: When I‘m photographing towards the sun, so that I have the sun anywhere in the frame, I get a relatively thick, horizontal light streak going through the center of the sun expanding by a good amount of mm, more like 1cm. It’s difficult to explain.

I like to shoot backlit images of people and therefore I love lenses that flare a bit or make otherwise a nice sunlit effect. Usually on my DSLRs that’s just down to the lenses. On my Z 7 it appears to be an unwelcome effect since the „glow“ around the sun isn’t good looking because of this light streak.

Have you tried to shoot against the sun? Maybe its some dust on the sensor that causes that? Or maybe its a defective sensor? Or maybe its the sensor and I need to „deal with it“?

I set up on this scene with the Z7 and the 24-70/4 set to 24 mm and f/16. I developed the image in Lr, with Adobe Standard Profile and default settings except for Daylight white balance and Contrast at full left.

No problem.

I then applied some aggressive editing:

Still no problem. By the way, there is no trace of PDAF striping in these images.