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.
