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Ohmyfreakinggawd! How absolutely gorgeous are these two beautiful humans! Caitlin, Chad and I went on an adventure engagement shoot to the beautiful Maori Bay out on the West Coast in Auckland. These two were absolute stars and so so much fun to spend my evening with!
The back story to this shoot is that I needed a few couples to help me test out my new Sony kit last week and along with Kate and George, and Janelle and Josh these two newly engaged cuties helped me out one evening last week. If you're not interested in all the Sony verse Canon talk and how I've found the switch over the last week then keep scrolling, the pretty photos are waiting for you at the end. Buttttt if you're into all that photography talk, this part is for you. So I tested out my gear at three couple shoots and one wedding over the last week and now I have some more of my experience to share. This shoot was all taken with my new Sony A7RIII bodies with either my Sony Zeiss 55mm 1.8, Sony GM 24mm 1.4 and Sony GM 85mm 1.4. Again everything is bascially shoot between 1.4 and 2.2ish, I tried to use a range of F stops from 1.4 up to 2.8 but everything is just as sharp and I really could have shot it all at 1.4. This time I really overshot with 924 images, I struggled a bit with the live view and the view finder and getting the exposure how I wanted it with the bright sun so theres a bunch that I just deleted right away due to that. I delivered 216 images, again pretty much all of them were in focus and super sharp, the rest were over exposed due to me playing around with how I wanted the images to look or duplicates with funny facials. I'm pretty blown away still by how many are in focus and the fact that when culling through the shots I don't have to zoom in to see if it's in soft because basically none are.
The whole moving from zoom lenses to primes is still taking a bit to get used to. I've found that I absolutely love both the 85mm and the 135mm and they are amazingly sharp, however having set focal lengths means I can't shoot as quickly as I would normally do as I have to change the lenses over or physically move to get a different version of the same image. I also don't like the 24mm for up close and personal shots as it tends to distort the shape of peoples heads a lot and would prefer to use the 55mm or the 85mm to do those images. The 55 isn't wide enough for big landscape shots but it's great for closer photographs of the couples. The 24 is amazing for those bigger wide shots and for full length photographs of the couples or even waist up landscape shots but it starts to distort the image if anything is closer to the lens. The 135 is just
beautiful but limiting because you have to swap it over to use it and either swap it back to the 85 or 55 or go reasonably far away. This time I set the ISO myself for most of this shoot which definitely gave me more control of how I wanted my images to look, the main issue was getting used to the screen. There were a few times when I had it on automatic for the ISO on manual where I'd not noticed my shutter speed was at like 1/2000th of a second and suddenly the ISO was set at 3000 when changing locations into the shade so it will just be a bit of getting used to if I was to continue using these cameras auto ISO. It did come handy at the wedding over the weekend when moving from the bright sun into the shade during the aisle walk. I really using the customisable buttons and the dials at the front and back of the camera which allow me to change my Shutter and F-stop on the fly a lot faster, I'm not sure why but I always found this a bit clunky on my Canon 5D Mark III & IV and would actually bring the camera down, use the menu and then bring the camera back up to my eye. Obviously not ideal in situations where you need to be quick.
I still definitely notice way more chromatic aberrations than with my Canon L glass but I've just added this into my presets. Have tweaked my presets a bit to not have such an issue with the banding. So far I've still been shooting non-compressed files but I do have a bunch of second shooter images to compare once I get to editing some of those to see what difference it makes. Once the images are exported to JPEG they seem to be the same size as my canon files were.
Still don't mind the smallness of the cameras and the fact that it's all so light weight is still absolutely incredibly. I'm starting to get more
used to the menu and am now a lot quicker with moving the focus around while using the live view screen, however it is grey and kind of hard to see. I haven't looked into whether I can change it to be a brighter colour like red or something, but that would make it way easier to see as sometimes I found it got lost and I didn't know where it was until I looked in the view finder.
I did find it a lot harder to use the Godox speed lites but I'm going to say that's mostly because I really am not all that savvy with speed lites in general, I know how to use my canon one really well to do what I want it to do but I don't know what all the extra things are. I found the menu for setting up the Godox speedlites to have one as a slave a bit tricky over the weekend, I must have looked "real" professional to the videographers but I did get my shot so ha! I'll definitely be doing a bunch of reading and practising with those this week before this coming weekend just to find out how to get them to do what I want them to do!
The one thing that people say is that the colours are different. They definitely are. The colours aren't just different but the images itself is less saturated as a whole and the whites more muted. This could be a colour or white balance setting but I haven't played around too much with that. At the beach at all three shoots I love the colours, at the wedding which was in a green garden it is a hell of a lot different than my normal colours as an unedited image and an edited image. It will take a bit of playing around with my presets in green environments to get the images to where I'd like them. I think because I've been shooting Canon since 2013 and shooting weddings with Canon since 2015 I've gotten extremely used to how images are going to look, what lenses will give me what image, what presets or adjustments I want to use on what type of light and location and now not only am I learning a whole new system and learning how I want to shoot with primes, I am also learning a whole new way to edit the images I take and how the images I take with these cameras and lenses will react in PS and LR.
All in all, still super happy I changed, still more things to explore with them and more practise to do to get faster with the cameras.
For reference, what I had verse what I now have... Canon 5D Mark IV
Canon 5D Mark III
Canon 70-200mm 2.8 L II IS USM
Canon 24-70mm 2.8 L II USM
Canon Macro 100mm 2.8 L IS UM
Sigma Art 50mm 1.4
Canon 600EX II-RT Speedlite
Godox V860 II Speedlite + Triggers
Canon 6D I Body (backup)
Canon 24-105mm F4 L IS USM (backup)
Now I have
Sony A7RIII x2
Sony 24mm GM 1.4
Sony Zeiss 55mm 1.8
Sony 85mm GM 1.4
Sony 135mm GM 1.8
Godox V1S Speedlites + Triggers
I got my new kit from James at Auckland Camera Center who was super duper helpful and used Chris Turners videos on Youtube to set it all up before my shoot and customise the buttons.
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