Run and Gun Video Production Under the Blazing Sun

The local football club invited me to shoot some pictures at their annual Sports and Family Day. Since we are a small town with typical local challenges, I went there for a mostly symbolic fee—basically just to get sunburned! But since I was already going to be there, I decided to have some fun and test a unique gear combination for video too.

I wanted to see what I could get out of the Nikon ZR, the Viltrox DC550 monitor, the Sirui Astra 50mm lens, and the NiSi ND Vario TrueColor filter. To make this work, I built a rig that weighed over 3.5 kilograms, powered by an extra V-mount battery, and packed it right next to my photography gear.

The Reality of Shooting in Direct Sunlight

Let’s skip the small talk. Here are the main challenges you will face when shooting video in these extreme outdoor conditions:

• Screens are useless against the sun: Even with a bright camera screen (1000 nits) and the Viltrox monitor (1200 nits), you can barely see anything in direct sunlight. It is very hard to check where the autofocus is locking onto. Instead of trusting your eyes, you must rely entirely on the waveform tool to set your exposure correctly.
• Anamorphic desqueeze saves the day: While checking focus and exposure is difficult, the Viltrox monitor helped a lot because of its anamorphic desqueeze feature. It allowed me to see the properly stretched image, making it much easier to understand the framing.
• The control problem: The biggest downside of the Viltrox monitor is that you cannot control the camera from it. Because of this, I had to keep the camera screen flipped out at the same time just to use the tap-to-focus feature on the camera body.

The Battle with Autofocus and Focus Peaking

Autofocus does not perform perfectly with this lens, which meant I had to constantly fight the camera to get the sharpness somwhere near where I wanted it. I wanted to keep the aperture wide open for a nice shallow depth of field (maximum f/3.2, which was the limit allowed by my variable ND filter). Because of this wide aperture, the focus missed the target quite often—sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot.

To make things worse, both the Viltrox and the Nikon focus peaking features become almost completely invisible on the screens under such bright sunlight. If the situation doesn’t allow you to zoom in to check focus manually, you are basically just guessing and praying that your image is sharp. I really wish Nikon would allow users to zoom into the image while recording to check focus accuracy in real time.

A Lesson Learned

Luckily, this was just a casual, zero-pressure shoot done entirely for fun, so the final results are what they are. However, if this had been a serious, high-paying client job, it would have been a massive struggle. I most likely would have put this specific setup away and used my Z6 III or Z8 instead, where I could use the electronic viewfinder (EVF) to see exactly what I was doing.

Final Thoughts

In the end, it was a great learning experience and a fun day out. Despite the struggles, I absolutely love this camera and lens combination. The external monitor is also a helpful addition when conditions allow. The whole setup was put together using a Puluz camera cage bought from AliExpress, completed with a top handle and a side handle, which made handling the heavy 3.5kg rig much more manageable.

Setup:
Nikon ZR - 4k60 / NRAW normal
Sirui Astra 50 mm T1.8
Viltrox DC-550 PRO
NiSi ND VARIO PRO NANO 1-5 

Photos mostly taken with:
Z6 III / Tamron 28-75
Z 50II / Tamron 70-200 G2 with FTZ adapter