Schuylkill River Trail Outing with my Nikon Z fc

As I mentioned in my post about my new Nikon Z fc, I went on a short walk to test it out. More recently, Holly and I took a longer walk along the Schuylkill River Trail which gave me an opportunity to get more practice with it.

For that previous walk, I only used my NIKKOR Z DX 18-140mm f/3.5-6.3 lens. For the more recent outing, I used both that lens and the NIKKOR Z 28mm f/2.8 lens which is one of the options for the kit lens.

I used the 28mm lens at the start of our walk which included a stop at Fitler Square. I have taken many pictures of the ram and bear statues there, but I like using them as test subjects for new cameras and/or lenses.

I also took a picture of the Philadelphia skyline from the trail from where I’m sure I’ve taken a few photos.

I’m still learning the Nikon’s autofocus and struggled a little with getting the focus right on a couple of close-up photos of branches. The pictures turned out fine, but it took a few tries until the autofocus zoned in on what I intended.

I took a few more shots with the 28mm lens before switching to the zoom lens. The trail lends itself more to the zoom lens given the distance a lot of the points of interest are from the trail itself.

One of the features of the 18-140mm lens that I noticed on my first outing is that its Vibration Reduction image stabilization seemed to work really well. I decided to test it while trying to freeze the Boathouse Row waterfall. I shot the following at 1/25 of a second handheld and it doesn’t have any noticeable shake.

The river trail runs along side commercial train tracks which is interesting if you like trains (as I do). But the tracks do cut the trail off from the city which limits the points at which you can get access to the trail.

The trail and the trains themselves are popular places for graffiti.

The rest of the pictures I took along our walk all turned out well.

Despite still getting used to the autofocus and having plenty to learn about the Nikon Z fc, I have been generally pleased with how easy it’s been to use and with the results. I’m certainly looking forward to getting out with it more and, I hope, travel with it in the not too distant future since that was one of the reasons I wanted to get it.