Looking at my notes, I've got some catching up to do, so I'll get to today's excitement tomorrow.
One thing that I haven't mentioned yet that every Z9 user should know is that "live view and blackout free viewfinder" has a limit. That limit is 1/8 second shutter speed. If you take a one second image, you're going to get one second of viewfinder blackout.
I discovered this because I got into one of my experimenting modes. One thing I've been trying to get better at is dragging the shutter with motion. If the Z9 can follow focus well, if I can follow a specific point on the head perfectly, I should be able to get better slow shutter speed images that imply all the motion and urgency in a scene. Like this:
If anything, now I have the opposite problem I usually have. Whereas before I tended to have slightly out of focus heads with lots of motion in the body/background. Now my heads are snap in focus—thank you Sports VR and Z9 focus system—but I'm not getting enough blur. But if I drop down below 1/8 second, well, the viewfinder cuts out and I can't follow the subject well. Here's another example:
Of course, I'm making this even more difficult than usual by being ridiculously close to the subjects with a 500mm lens. The number of times you'll be able to fill a 500mm frame with a jackal in the wild is near zero, but this fellow was at a kill sparing with a hyena and oblivious to me. And with the vulture, for instance, I couldn't come close to holding framing well enough, so the focus system stuttered a bit trying to figure out what to do (I wasn't set on Erratic Subject motion for Focus tracking with lock-on, which probably hurt). Surprisingly, even though my framing on the vulture was left/right/up/down, the camera still managed to figure things out a few times. I've actually de-emphasized the sharpening on the vulture head a bit because it looks "wrong" to be tack sharp.
This is one of the "joys" of using a new, complex camera. There are literally thousands of things that are controllable, but getting the camera set so you can control them well is something that takes study. While you might think the above images are interesting/good, I consider this experiment a failure. I know I can do better with more practice and familiarity with what the camera will do. This is one of the reasons why I say "practice, practice, practice."
The warthog is a more typical failure: they don't often run parallel to you (or slightly towards you), so you get the receding butt view.
Meanwhile, while I'm catching up, I notice there are some animals I've been photographing that I haven't mentioned, so here we go:
Elephant: The Z9 seems to understand that this is the subject, but the best I've gotten is body recognition, and sometimes not even that.
Monitor lizard: Same general problem as the elephant, though if the lizard fully shows the head in profile, the camera often picks up head/eye.
Dragonfly: Surprisingly recognized, though I didn't have enough lens/closeness to get more than body recognition.
