Yesterday at IE Photo Rentals we got in the new Sony A7R II along with the Olympus OM-D E-M5 II in stock. The market place for mirrorless is growing and inevitably will be the undeniable future of photography.
The days of analog and digital-analog is disappearing year by year. You can even see it happening in the car industry as a majority of all sports cars, exotics and passengers cars move towards automatic and dual clutch transmissions. Can you imagine a world without a clutch pedal and a manual gearbox?! It is a sad thought no doubt, well at least for me. I am a bit "old school" as some may call it.
I love looking into an optical viewfinder and zoning out everything around me. You see, as cameras continue to move towards the mirrorless realm, my fear was that the viewfinder was somehow gonna get lost in the mix. Mirrorless I believe got the push it really needed from video users and as they continue to advance, I figured they would just remove the viewfinder altogether, especially since digital/electronic viewfinders were fairly terrible.
Enter the Sony A7R II, just released with a ton of features. I mean 4k video, 399 autofocus points, internal 5 axis stabilization, 42mp, etc. I mean on paper there is a lot to love but trying to convert an old school Canon user since 2003 over to mirrorless won't be easy. Previously I have not spent too much time with Sony cause of their lack of professional lens variety but I am sure it won't be like that for long. Many people use Metabone adapters with Canon lenses to make up for the lack of lenses and that works great for video users since they can manually focus but what about photographers? The autofocus for third party lenses and adapters were slow and clunky.
I have spent a total of 15 mins with this camera and I can already see a huge improvement with the autofocusing speeds and how fast it can lock focus with the Metabones and Canon 24-70mm 2.8 Mark II that I was using. Although I did run into an issue with the autofocus not working until I turned the autofocus ring manually. Not sure yet if this is an adapter issue, lens issue or camera issue but other than that, it has been pretty legit.
In those 20 mins, I used it for 5 mins outside IE Photo Rentals taking photos of random things just to get an initial feel for it. Then last night around 11pm, I used the camera for 10 mins to shoot a two Porsches. Took multiple exposures and light painted with the Westscott Ice Light. I will post up another blogpost with the results of that shoot. Then today I took photos of Calvin for 5 mins at the Aquatic Zone in Corona, CA. Note that my perspective is from a photographer's point of view.
Below I will put up some samples and 100% crops to give you guys an idea of the resolution, image quality, and noise level.
Everything at the Aquatic Zone was shot on the same setting: f/2.8, 1/200th, ISO 2500. Shot on RAW and converted to JPG. No processing.
Shot professional with iPhone 6 lol
f/2.8, 1/200th, ISO 2500. Shot on RAW and converted to JPG. No processing.
Canon 24-70mm 2.8 Mark II - f/2.8, 1/200th, ISO 2500. Shot on RAW and converted to JPG. No processing.
Due to it being downsized cause of the web, it is harder to see the finer details of Calvin's eyelashes but trust that it is pretty amazing. Sharp and focus was on point.
Canon 24-70mm 2.8 Mark II - f/2.8, 1/200th, ISO 2500. Shot on RAW and converted to JPG. No processing.
Did a terrific job locking focus on a moving subject indoors (granted my son is not a fast swimmer but you get the gist).
Canon 24-70mm 2.8 Mark II - f/2.8, 1/200th, ISO 2500. Shot on RAW and converted to JPG. No processing.
Not Calvin but you can see the details in this image clearly. The combination of the Canon 24-70mm 2.8 Mark II and the A7rII is proving to be a nice dual.
Canon 35mm 1.4 L - f/2.8, 1/3200th, ISO 200. Shot on RAW and converted to JPG. No processing.
Details in the tail lamp is ridiculous.
Canon 35mm 1.4 L - f/2.8, 1/2500th, ISO 400. Shot on RAW and converted to JPG. No processing.
I believe I can read the white text in the bottom right if I tried hard enough lol
Canon 35mm 1.4 L - f/2.8, 1/160th, ISO 400. Shot on RAW and converted to JPG. Adjusted exposure +1 stop.
Slight CA in the Canon box and black lettering but it was stopped down two stops. Wide open, the glass picks up a lot of CA.
I will have up some photos from the Porsche shoot in the next few days. I will be interested in seeing how the final composite makes out on that shot but stay tuned for that.
So I have spent just enough time with this thing to know that I am interested in finding out more. I can see myself being a believer and even converting over from Canon. I think for most things (cars, travel, product, landscapes) I would use a camera like this but for shooting weddings or more speed based photography, I would still keep a Canon in my bag.
See you on the next.
Andrew Manley