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.

As I've mentioned many times on this blog, I really love Autumn. I love the colours and I love the light, and I wanted to capture it in a different way this year, so as well as shooting lots of photos (more on that to come) I set out to shoot some video too. In the centre of Dublin city there is a famous park, called "St. Stephen's Green". It's one of my favourite places in the city. It's not a particularly big park, but it's a lovely combination of trees and walkways, and when viewed from certain angles, looks like you could be somewhere in the countryside, and not in the heart of a city.

I’ve been using the little Sony A6000 now for almost a year and it’s a great little camera for the price. One of the things that had been frustrating me however is that I always found that I wasn’t quite satisfied with the look of the raw files when processed in Lightroom. To me, the colours never looked quite right, and so I set about doing something about it. Having shot lots of test shots on multiple cameras for comparison, I’ve developed two approaches to addressing my concerns. First, I tweaked the default white balances, and second, I tweaked the calibration settings in Lightroom to come up with what I believe is a more pleasing look.

I've been kind of in a rut lately when it comes to shooting street photography. I've been doing the typical thing of blaming everything else. It's the weather (in fairness, it was) or it's the fact that there's roadworks everywhere in Dublin right now, but the truth of the matter is it's just me. Not one to be undeterred, I decided that to get my mojo back, I'd try something different. I do like black and white images, but lately I've been mostly shooting colour, so I decided to set my camera to black and white, and see what happens. 

I’ve previously tried using Nikon lenses with my Sony A6000 and I’ve been mostly pleased with the results. There were a few minor issues though. For one, the focus rings on the Nikon lenses that I own are really bad. There’s a significant lag between when you turn the ring and when it catches the mechanism underneath. This makes manually focussing a tad tricky. Secondly, you have to control the aperture with a ring on the adaptor which has no stops, so it makes setting a specific aperture quite difficult. Using the Metabones adaptor with my Canon lenses was a much better experience.

For the longest time I've wanted to try out one of Sony's A7 series of cameras, and I finally got the chance this weekend when a friend of mine let me borrow his A7II. I've been considering replacing my ageing Canon gear with a camera from the Sony A7 series (mostly for video), but I've had some reservations about it, and so it was a great opportunity to try out the system. I haven't spent that much time with it yet, so this isn't by any means a full review. Instead, consider this more of a hands on, first impressions kind of report. 

Here’s the latest instalment in my ongoing series which previously had the somewhat unimaginative name of “Recent Street Photography”. I haven’t been shooting as much street photography recently, mainly because I’ve been travelling and doing lots of design work too. However, I still have had some time to take some shots while out and about here in Dublin.

Now that the Sony A7RII is shipping to customers, there are lots of reports coming in about the camera. More importantly there are now raw files available online that you can download and check out, and Lightroom and ACR (along with Capture One) all now support the camera too. I've been reading a lot about this new Sony for a while now, and I am very interested in it, as it seems like Sony has really listened to its customers and created a very impressive camera. 

After my first rather unprofessional test of the A6000 with the new XAVC codec last week, I set out to create a better video on Friday. This time I used my good Nikon 24-120 lens and a tripod. Unfortunately I still had a few issues, but they were entirely my own fault. Still, I think it's a nice result, and I was lucky as some interesting things happened while I was filming.

When I wrote recently about trying out Nikon lenses on the Sony A6000, I noted at what a difference it made compared to Sony lenses that I own. Well, as I have quite a bit of Nikon glass, I tried shooting again with one of my best Nikon lenses, the 24–120 f/4. The 24–120 is a great lens. Not only is it quite sharp, but it has great colour and light transmission, and images from it always look gorgeous. There are some really nice and unusual flowers in the local park here in Dublin, so I decided to try out the combination to see what kind of results I would get.

There was a nice little surprise for Sony A6000 owners yesterday when Sony announced a new firmware for the camera. Version 2 added one big new feature, and that is the XAVC-S codec. Up till now, if you were recording video on the A6000 you were stuck with the rather awful AVC-HD codec and a low bit rate, and frankly the quality wasn't the best. You could record uncompressed HD from the HDMI port on the camera, and having tried that in the past, the difference is remarkable. But adding an external recorder defeats the purpose of having a small camera. With the new firmware, Sony is adding a much better codec and the results are pretty great.

I'm a big fan of Sony Products, and anyone who follows this blog knows that I've a soft spot for their cameras. I currently have an A6000 and I've previously shot with a Nex 7. I've also been eagerly following the developments of the A7 line with great interest. I've said it before, but Sony are one of the few companies really innovating in the imaging space. Not only are their sensors used by pretty much every other major company now, but they're constantly pushing the envelope in the camera market. From the RX1 which brought a superb full frame sensor to the compact camera form factor, to the A7 Line which made full frame really affordable and small. The A7 line certainly isn't perfect, but with the recently announced A7 R Mark II Sony are getting pretty close to it.

As much as I love mirrorless cameras, there's one thing about the current designs that unfortunately is a bit of a problem for me. The issue is the viewfinder. My problem is not the electronic display itself, but rather the physical design of the viewfinder. Most of the mirrorless cameras that I've used are a real pain to use in bright light if you're a glasses wearer. 

When I was shooting a lot with my Sony NEX–7, before it died on me, I would occasionally use Nikon lenses on it, with a Novaflex adaptor. I really liked the results, but I didn’t do it that often, because personally, I found that the process of manual focussing was a little to awkward for my style of shooting. Even with the great focus peaking feature (which isn’t always accurate unfortunately), it just wasn’t worth it for the amount of times I wanted to do it. With my newer A6000, I had put off trying to shoot with Nikon lenses because of this, but I recently took the opportunity to try it out, and boy, what a difference.

I'm not a huge black and white shooter. Don't get me wrong, I like black and white, but I rarely set out with the notion of shooting exclusively in the format. I used to in the past, but I haven't done it in ages, so when I was in the city centre here in Dublin the other day, I decided to try shooting some black and white images with my new(ish) Sony A6000. 

I've been shooting some more street photography recently, partly as part of my review of the A6000, which was a good excuse to get out there, despite the really cold weather we've been having lately. I've written my first impressions of the little Sony camera already, and I'll be doing a full, comprehensive review once I've been using it for a few weeks. 

A couple of months ago my Sony NEX-7 stopped working. I was out shooting and the controls just stopped responding. I tried all sorts of things to get it back but to no avail. The camera was out of warranty and it was going to cost me €100 just to have it even looked at. I still haven't done anything with it yet, and I do intend to leave it in to be assessed at some point, but I'm just reluctant to spend several hundred euro to get it fixed when they're going for less than €400 now second hand. 

I had also been looking at the A6000 as a possible replacement. Over Christmas, there were some good deals at one of my local camera stores so in the end, one day when I felt like some retail therapy I decided to treat myself.

 I’ve had the NEX–7 for over a year and the experience as been both maddeningly frustrating and incredibly wonderful.