Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All tagged Sony
As the last vestiges of summer have now long faded away, my favourite time of the year for photography has come. I love Autumn, and indeed winter, for shooting street photography, because of the light. The low sun here in Ireland creates a beautiful golden character to the light and as the season turns from Autumn to Winter, and the sun gets lower, you get beautiful long deep shadows.
I wanted to get a more flexible lens option for my mirrorless cameras, as I’m kind of stuck with primes apart from the Fuji 18-55mm. Which is fine for certain types of photography, but not ideal when you want flexibility. I really wanted to get the 16-80 Fujifilm lens, but you just can’t get it anywhere right now, especially here in Ireland. It’s been on the waiting list at most of the stores in Dublin, and you can’t even get it on Amazon. The other option I have been considering is the Sony equivalent, which is the 16-70 f4 Zeiss to use on my A6000. Recently, I saw that my local camera store had this lens second hand at a great price, and so I went in to check it out.
I’ve just published a new photo essay over on my Photo Stories blog. I had visited a nearby urban farm back in May and taken lots of photos, and I was captivated by the colour and texture that images of nature. You should check out the blog post here before you carry on. As I try to keep my Photo Stories blog relatively gear and “technical nerdy stuff” free, I wanted to talk about the technicalities of the images here.
A little while ago, I decided to upgrade my Vlogging camera, and so I bought a Sony Z-V1. I had been using a Canon GX1 Mark II, but I wanted something with 4k recording, and the Sony seemed like a good option. I have been using it on and off for the past few weeks, and so here is some early first impressions of Sony’s little Vlogging camera.
If you’re looking at getting Capture One, you may be confused by all of the different versions. There is Capture One Pro, Capture One Express, Capture One, Fuji, Sony and so on. On top of that, there are subscription options and perpetual licences. I get a lot of questions about some of these versions, and so, in this post, I will attempt to break down the differences and offer advice on which version you should get.
As an amateur vlogger, like many others who are interested in this field, I have wanted camera makers to create a camera for this space for quite some time. While many have added features that will improve the experience when Vlogging, as far as I can tell, Sony is the first company to release a camera specifically designed for Vloggers. Announced yesterday, the ZV-1 looks like a pretty perfect camera for my Vlogging needs.
There’s been a good bit of photo software news over the past week so rather than doing lots of separate posts, I thought I’d cover it here in one section. The headlines: Skylum shows off AI Portrait enhancer coming in Luminar 4, Phase One announced a new offer for Capture One, Exposure announced some details of Exposure 5, and a useful piece of software for Sony and Olympics shooters who want to use Pixel Shift.
Sony once again demonstrated its technological chops this week releasing a new version of its A7R series. The new model, the A7RIV brings the sensor to an impressive 61megapixels, and the new model also ads improved speed, autofocus and ergonomics. The fact that Sony can fit all this into a pretty small body is even more impressive.
I’ve written a good bit about Capture One for Fuji shooters, including a whole book about it, but I think it’s something you should consider if you shoot Sony too. While the advantages aren’t as clear cut as they are for Fuji shooters, given the problems that Lightroom has with details and Fuji RAW files, there is one big benefit for Sony Shooters - the colour is better.
In the latest episode of Street Photo Diary, I’m once again shooting with my favourite street photo camera, the Sony A6000. I ask if its still worth buying one in 2019 and head out to shoot on the first proper day of Summer here in Ireland.
This is just a super quick public service announcement and I almost missed this, but Phase One decided to extend the 50% sale of Capture One for the Fuji and Sony specific version until the end of April. It was supposed to end in March but they said it was so successful tat they were extending it to the end of April.
I’ve noticed something interesting in my web stats lately. I’m getting an awful lot of traffic from articles related to the Sony A6000. Considering that I probably talk about Fuji cameras and processing far more, it surprised me that this is the number one thing that people come to my site for from search engines. But that’s not all, on my YouTube channel, videos about the A6000 are also getting a lot of traffic. In fact my first Street Photo Diary video about the A6000 is my highest watched video of all time.
It’s time for a brand new season of my “Street Photo Diary” series. Following on from the photo essay I posted earlier, I set out to shoot some street photos with a Sony A6000 on a beautiful spring day in Dublin City. I also talked about the settings that I use and the importance of capturing "mundane" subjects when shooting Street Photography.
I love reading about the photography industry, whether it’s about the market, new gear or so on, it’s as much an interest for me as taking photos itself. In the industry, there is a lot of well-known pundits, whether they are from magazines, blogs or YouTube. As with everything, there are those I like and respect, and those that I don’t have much time for. But even taking that into account, over the past few months especially, I’ve noticed some real credibility issues for industry observers. Why? Let me explain...
Yesterday Sony announced the latest camera in its A6K line, and for the first time, Sony has embraced the Vlogging market somewhat seriously. The new camera, the Sony A6400 is a mid-range entry in Sony’s APS-C lineup, which borrows some features from higher end Sony cameras as well as adding some new features of its own, all for a relatively affordable price.
I recently posted a video to my YouTube channel about processing some Sony A6000 images in Capture One. In the video I mentioned some sharpening and noise reduction presets that I use. These should work with any Sony RAW file, so even those from the Sony A7 series or the A9. You can find links to download in this post, as well as the video itself.
A few weeks ago I wanted to photograph something a little different, so we headed out to a place in North County Dublin where you can see Dublin Port from the far side, as well as watch the boats come and go. We timed the trip so that we would arrive as the sun begins to set, and I was only travelling light camera wise. I went equipped with the Sony A6000, with the only lens being the kit lens. I also had the Canon G7XII with me, which I had initially brought just to shoot video, but I ended up shooting stills with it too.
White Balance is one of those controls that I think a lot of photographers don’t think about or don’t make use of enough. Many just leave it on automatic and don’t worry about it. Yet a poorly chosen white balance can probably affect your photos as much as an improper exposure, and when many people complain about certain cameras having “bad colour” in many cases this can be attributed to the white balance.
