Nikon P950 – the camera taking you to the moon and back

The Nikon COOLPIX P950 is not your typical digital Bridge camera.

With its whopping 16.0 megapixels and a most impressive 83x optical zoom and up to twice as much (166X) with Dynamic Fine Zoom, this camera lens combo can practically spot UFOs, planes, Sun’s dark patches satellites and lunar craters.

It’s like having a huge stable mobile photo and video telescope camera attached to you, wherever you go.

The main use for Zoom’s like this is starry sky which requires a stable shot, landscape photos of distant objects, bird and wildlife photos of those which are noise-sensitive.

I personally did not have a lot of success with night-shot, but I did not find the special shooting profiles until after I searched the manual. It’s a shame they are not so visible in the menu.

And hey, it’s not just about serious photography, it offers some pretty amusing shooting modes too!

From Smart Portrait for your glamorous selfies, to Smart Portrait with Food, because who doesn’t want their Micky D’s moment captured in all its glory?

Oh, and did I mention it has Smart Portrait with Pet mode? Perfect for immortalizing your furry friend’s proudest moments!

This camera even supports Raw capture recording because, well, your memories deserve to be in high definition. Even JPEGs have a lot of

Plus, with a minimum focus distance of just 1cm (0.4″), you can practically put its lens up against a bug’s face and watch them strike a pose. Here is one photo of a flower. You can even glance a few strings of dust which collected on the lens 🙂

I used a bright yellow rose to test the macro, a tint similar to Nikon’s predominant brand color. Too bad you can’t use it with low aperture, to create a blurred background. As soon as you start extending the lens, your focus point is farther than you expect. At full lens extend, at 2000mm it is only usable starting from 5-6meters to infinity. Anything closer won’t be in focus.

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Stabilization

Because of it’s large size, it’s easy to mount it on the tripod as you can easily grip and handle the fully tilting screen, battery and card slot. It’s also very stable because of it’s weight.

The stabilization on this camera is very good, not jittery or blurry, even at full zoom distance.

The moonshot mode is something extraordinary. Sharp even while shooting from the hand during full moon, the pictures are stunning. You can observe the lunar craters shadows. And while the camera is on the fixed tripod, you can even see the effects of earth/moon rotational dance.

Using a tripod to stabilize the camera during shooting, select the setup menu [Vibration reduction] [Off].

Shooting modes

The camera has a few shooting modes available on the rotation dial on the body, like PASM, moonshot and birds. It’s a shame you have to go through the menu for the rest of the modes, and there are plenty.

Shooting modes are great at helping getting the best setup possible for the shot. Shooting with this camera and shooting mode is quite easy and intuitive even in automatic mode the camera quickly understands what subject or situation it’s in and it’s going to adapt very well to the conditions.

Battery

The battery on the camera is sufficient enough to shoot couple of hundred pictures and brief video shots.

I am planning to do an additional review focused on Nightscape lighttrails and other special shooting modes just to expand the depth of this camera shooting capabilities.

Focusing in [Nightscape + light trails]

So far, without shooting in special night profiles, the camera is not performing well.

If you would likely go shoot, the moon or some well lit city night landscape while not getting involved in portrait and night action shots. This would be the perfect camera for it, if it had a larger sensor. In my tests, I had quite bad noise and struggled to get a clean sharp shot at night with some ambient light from around the Christmas market lights. So if you want to take this camera as a night shooter, i would no recommend it for that kind of street photography. Maybe only shoot black and white and fast moving subjects to try to make as much as possible. This would cleanup the image a bit from the noise and the fuzzy surroundings.

All this is quite strange because i could go as far as +3 exposure in Lightroom for some day shots, but could not make any good tweaks with night environments.

For example, take these shots taken at a recent Christmas market.

So go ahead, unleash your inner paparazzo with the Nikon COOLPIX P950! 📸🌟

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