Best Settings for Street Photography with Nikon Z6II 

This was so helpful dude. I just got a z6ii this week and have been struggling with trying to understand the setup. I've been shooting with Fuji for over 10 years now and this Nikon is so different. The things you touched on (particularly your AF settings for street), were very helpful. Thanks.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, this is the best photography channel on RU-vid. You and Axel put out great content!

Finally I'm happy owner of Z 6 II + 85mm 1.8S, TTArtisan 35mm 1.4, Laowa FFII 90mm 2.8 Macro 2X, Samyang 135mm f2 + bunch of m42 lenses with simple adapters. Now I'm applying your settings. Let's see how it works. GREETINGS :) I also ordered that camera belt.

Super helpful! Thanks so much!

Great video, thanks for sharing and explaining the reason for your settings. The averaging method for metering makes a lot of sense for mirrorless cameras and shooting with an EVF and previewing of exposure

thanks so much learned so much, explained easily and have made some adjustments already

Excellent advice, thank you!

Appreciate the knowledge!

Just the essentials .Love your Videos...Thankyou Bro

Lots of good tips in this video. 👍

great info thanks so much

Excellent video,

Great video. Just got a Nikon Z5 and this helped a lot!

Great, great video! A must-view for aspiring street photographers. Get out of the camera and into the scene - brilliant!

Great video! I’ll have to check out the Center Weighted Metering and tip #7. Always look forward to your videos, you always have very useful content.

Great video! Good tips and also the WHY for those settings is a great addition. I'm using Sony A6600 and will try the settings. Thanks.

Great informative video 👌 ✨

Thanks ❤

This video deserves a million views!!

Great tips! I certainly learned a few new things. I also learned that all of these settings can be applied to my Z fc, which I prefer over the Z6 for street photography. Thanks,

Hi. I am really enjoying the videos. Learning lots from them. I hope to get back to Japan one day and do some more with Eyexplore.

Thanks for tip #3. I was having very similar experience to you, but only with face detect AF.

Saved to user settings, thanks :)

Wish I saw that vid before my first shooting session. Thank you, some great tips here.

Very helpful info as I just bought a Nikon Z6II

You are the best 😁💯 Thank you for fantastic videos and good performance💫😀😁. Keep up the good work.👍 You are a great inspiration🎬Greetings from a Norwegian🇳🇴 and a Nikon Z6 user📸

I’ve just come over to a Z6 from LUMIX m 4/3, so this is really useful for me.

Useful 7 settings on street photography.

So helpful! Had no idea those monitor modes could be disabled.

Fantastic down to earth , super informative . Thank you for sharing , needless to say liked and subbed, you my friend now earned a place in my photography channels that I follow, and yours is number three out of the many garbage ones in YT. The other two is backcountry gallery and Christopher Frost.

Nice! I use the back button only for exposure (AEL). I lock the ideal exposure and then use the shutter button to focus on whatever I want.

Great video and tips. I use a Z 85mm lens, weighs less 😊 I am also used to the D850, so I think I will buy a batterygrip for ergonomitcs.

Great tips...headed out to the countryside in Kansas in the US. Street photography in small towns...Americana...& landscapes in the tall grass prairies of America tomorrow...these tips should help...thx.........

Sooo helpful…And I haven’t even got my camera yet!

In A mode even when you set limit of shutter to 1/250 camera can go slower if it can not keep exposure with ISO limit. So you can stay in A at night.

Very nice! Been shooting Ricoh for years but love my DLSRs. Got a z6ii without the slightest intent to use it for street. Was surprised to stumble on this... might have to take it on the streets with me. Would love to know your fav street lens for the z6ii.

Actually, I prefer using the AF-on as AF/AE-Lock. I'm faster that way and I can use one of the lens Fn buttons as Spot metering, and when I press the AF-on button it saves both the focus and the Exposure! So if I want to shoot someone in a dark spot, but everything else is pretty bright, I can use spot metering and the af/ae lock to nail focus and exposure on said subject.

Great video as always. Will you be picking up Nikon’s new 28mm??

What about Exposure Compensation? Any tips?

I am planning to buy Either Z6ii or Z7ii. Which of the 2 camera do you recommend for travel,street photo,portrait and landscape? And what Z lens is the sweet spot should i buy?i am transitioning from Dslr to mirrorless. I need your professional input.Thank you

Please share raw files with Nikon Z62 vs 24-70.

Great video. One doubt. After you choose minimum shutter speed on ISO settings, if you change to shutter priority and set a slower speed on the dial do you still have to change the settings of minimum speed on the ISO menu ?

what bag do you use? it looks like the peak design sling but i can't tell for sure lol

(#3) Exposure - "matrix" was invented as a Nikon version of center weighted. And center-weighted was a way of TTL metering invented to make metering easier than "average". Leica tried spot-metering in the SL IIRC. In all cases, it's not foolproof and if you don't know what you are doing then each one has its problems. You could actually start metering light (as in incident light as opposed to the subject metering that TTL does). But the incident hemisphere is not foolproof either as it forces you to orient it in a way that gives the proper weight to shadows/shade and this is at your discretion. Average - a man who could not swim started to cross a river of an average depth of 2 ft - he drowned. In a mirrorless camera, the sensor is the light meter and in fact each photosite (the real sensor - analog and colorblind) measures an EV. Matrix metering in the Z just mimics what happened in a Nikon FA in 1983 in the way the photosites contribute to the exposure, except, as you notice, the dominant region is where the AF focuses, so it moves the main region in the matrix around. Setting the camera to plain "average", I guess, ignores all these difficulties and you are back to the "average" problems that people suffered from, before center weighted or matrix metering (not perfect either). You could use spot metering but this is the worst on the foolproof scale. If you have light colored people in the frame, pointing the spot of the spot meter at their light skin gives about as good a metering as metering a neutral grey reference card. As to matrix metering coupled with AF tracking, this may be driven by a desire to get human skin well exposed. The question then is if skin tone/color is somehow recognized and compensated for - I guess not. IMO the best on the foolproof scale in the Z, is highlight-weighted metering. After "a lifetime" of metering and manual exposure, I found this works excellently when you use some auto-exposure setting. Its downside is that it really bases the exposure on the brightest photosite in the sensor (it seems to ignore the sun when directly in the frame) and consequently, your shots look 2 EV underexposed, generally. But all your shots will be consistent as long as they share a highlight. In Lr, the histogram has about 2 EV seemingly without data to the right and if you can ignore the few pixels associated with that highlight domain - meaning you accept not to have gradation resolution there - then you can lower the "white point" by those 2 EV (or 1 or 3). If the histogram shows "emptiness" in the lowest EV in the histogram (because the dynamic range in the subject was modest) then I would raise the "black point", too. In Lr, you change these black and white points in the tone curve - grab, hold, slide horizontally. This remaps raw gradation values to Lr's (or CR's) internal bit-representation and make the shots pop more; and it will retain the full extent of exposure correction sliders (of which you lose a lot if you do not change the black or white points). Yes, you lose some DR in this way, but that may only be a concern when you shoot a person in a very white costume next to a person in a black costume in very bright sunlight (at low light levels, subject dynamic range or contrast is much lower than in bright sunlight). Lr uses the black and white points in an absolute way and this works well with the exposure sliders. In C1, the exposure sliders push the black and white point around and this is extremely frustrating - unworkable for me. In the video, in that street, under that sky, there is no change in light. The sky in the background is blown out (in YT video). If I had to make a series of stills there, I would spend a bit of time metering for my optimum exposure, and then shoot the sequence with one fixed manual exposure setting, completely. No matter where you point the camera, IMO, all shots should have the same exposure (I always shoot fixed WB) and consequently, in LR, on your display, they have the same tone, and match perfectly. Or, done well, manual exposure can reduce your time in your post office by a lot and you are crafting images in the streets sooner. Shoot a ColorChecker Passport after the metering, before or during or after the series and neutral tone is a matter of a click. Or when the light was difficult, you create an ICC profile file with the Passport tool first and apply that profile to the series (some of the reflected light from the buildings in the alley in this video might throw a cast on the main subject that this approach easily identifies and removes). And, once you are neutral, your artistically motivated deviations are applied very easily and consistently.

Hi,in my camera there is no mode where I can control shutter speed but only iso. Should I still shoot in AV mode in that way?What aperture do you normally use for street photography?

Whats the picture control you using?Best when applying preset

Hey, I hope you know what i am trying to ask: What is your AF point selection usually (I use a canon camera). Because I find myself in situation when I cannot decide between manual and auto selection. What do you use with your camera? Thank you in advance. Greetings from Germany

Im also moving from a D4 to Z6ii!! How have you found the transition? I shoot photojournalism

#5 - raw and WB. Indeed, when you shoot raw (and no simultaneous JPEGs) then WB is just a label in the metadata of the raw files. And the photosite data are not impacted by WB. So WB defines how Lr opens your raw files by default. And here's where I have a different opinion. I never shoot auto WB. This forces the camera to do some AI, trying to recognize what is in the frame, from there what the source light's color temperature might have been, and then set it. That is a processing-expensive thing and I rather not load the camera with that processing If I can avoid it. My experience with Nikon D and Z is that keeping the WB fixed at "Cloudy" gives me a good start in Lr. Note that Auto-WB will try to remove warmth from the setting-sun light, when the "Cloudy" setting opens by illustrating how different the setting sun light was from "Cloudy". Of course, when you shoot JPEGs next to your raw files, as we occasionally do, you have to have the correct color temperature (or white balance). As I always have a ColorChecker Passport with me, I can easily set WB from a shot of the reference grey card in that passport.

AP mode never gets my shutter speed right, even with setting minimums for shutter speeds.

Good tips. Do you really need the battery grip, though? I mean, when you go on a shoot, one battery does not suffice?

Can these settings be applied to my Fuji XT3 camera?

nice tuto but I would have liked to see your LV when you shoot street photo. I am using z6ii + 24-70 F/2.8 BBF, AF-C, mode A F/2.8, 70mm, auto area people and installed V1.4. stored on U1. and nothing appears on the display, no box on eyes, on face. my iphone 12 pro max detects a child in a big marketplace ! same for sony a7iii. I need to be at short distance, fill the display as much as possible with the face... It is a mystery and i wonder if a parameter interferes. it is very confusing not seeing yellow boxes and sometimes red erratic boxes as if i was in auto area focus only.

My basic setting is not having a huge ass camera equipped with a battery grip and a long ass bazooka lens…but that’s just me

Nikon really has a lot of customisable settings in the Z6ii. I tried setting my Fuji X-H1 similarly but a lot of custom settings are not available. Point for Nikon.

I find the subject tracking of the z6ii to be unreliable especially under circumstances where there are conflicting subjects. At night, it rarely works at all. As a result I've gone back to zone focusing, which renders the so called advatages of a swanky camera worthless.

I hate the fact that you're using a 24-70 f2.8 lens and now makes me want to buy one 😢

Hi. my monitor want turn on on auto mod ... only on monitor mod.

Why such as big set up to scare people? I shoot with the Z5 and the 85mm, a single battery lasts me for ever, AFC, wide area subject, F/8 and higher, never miss a shot.

Street photography with a hunk of a camera like that... mmh. No thank you. :)

I’m sorry but you were moving so fast I cannot follow you. Have a good day.