Nov 27

Nov 27 Capturing Autumn in Dublin City on the Sony A6000

I've said many times on this site that Autumn is my favourite time of the year for photography. I'm sure this is the case for may photographers out there. The combination of colour and light make for some beautiful scenery. It's well and truly into winter now and I thought I'd look back on the lovely fall season that we've just had. Here in Dublin we've had a beautiful Autumn. It was very warm and we were blessed with some lovely sunny days. It certainly made the season even more beautiful here in Ireland.

Dublin probably isn't as green a city as some other capitals. While there aren't the tree lined avenues or boulevards that you get in other cities, at least not in the city centre, there are lots of trees and nature in many places throughout the city, and not just in the parks. The canals in particular have some lovely old trees and these look beautiful in their Autumn finery. The light here is gorgeous too. We're far north enough that we get long shadows and low light in Autumn and winter. This leads to some really beautiful golden light in Autumn and this year, as I said earlier, we had a very mild season, with some beautiful golden sunshine.

I usually shoot with lots of different cameras, depending on what I'm trying to achieve, and the lenses that I want to use. This year, for capturing Autumn I used my Sony A6000 most of the time. At first this wasn't really a conscious decision. It began organically as I was trying out the Metabones lens adaptor with my Canon lenses and the camera. I just started using it more and more, and in the end it became my default camera for capturing the fall colours.

While Fuji cameras have the reputation for capturing great colour, Sony's cameras actually have really nice colours too, once you tweak the defaults slightly. They're slightly more delicate than what you get from the Fujis but the results are really nice, in my opinion. Not necessarily better, just different. The dynamic range on the A6000 is amazing too, which really helps, especially when you're shooting into the light. The 24mp helps when you're capturing an image with a lot of fine detail, such as lots of foliage. Anyway, I'm not trying to say one camera is better than the other, or that you couldn't get these kinds of shots with another camera, of course you could. It's just a matter of what I chose to use in this case, and I'm really happy with the results.

There is one thing that I've noticed shooting with the A6000 so much, and it's something I've mentioned before, is that the results depend greatly on your lens choice. I know this is kind of obvious, and the same can be said for a lot of cameras, but the issue with the Sony is that Sony's own lenses (for cropped sensor e-mount), aren't very good. You don't really appreciate this until you put a good quality Canon or Nikon lens on the camera and you see the difference. To be fair, I don't have a huge selection, and I'm sure that some of Sony's lenses are better than the ones I have. I'm also using some Sigma lenses too, and these, while sharp, aren't great either. There's a kind of harsh quality to them that really takes away from the results you can achieve with the camera. I would love to try some of Sony's FE lenses on it and see if they're better, but they are quite expensive.

I'm working on my full review of the A6000 and I'll talk about the lens issue in more detail in that. For this Autumn project, some of the lenses that I used are as follows:

Sony 50mm f/1.8
Canon 24-105 f/4L
Canon 100mm Macro f/2.8
Canon 17-40 f/4L
Sigma 19mm f/2.8
Sigma 30mm F2.8
Sony 35mm F/1.8
Sony 18-55mm (Kit Lens)
Nikon 24-120 f/4 vr

As you can see I used a wide range of lenses throughout the season. The canon lenses are definitely the best, through the use of the Metabones adaptor. This range may not be entirely covered in the shots below, but these are what Ive been using throughout Autumn.

I also shot some video for the season too. I had been planning to shoot more around the city and put it into one long video, but I ended up just shooting in the one location. I've posted it before, and you can find it here.

Here's a selection of some of my favourite shots from the season.

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