When the rumours of the new Sony A6500 surfaced a few days before it was announced, I have to say, I was a little skeptical. I really didn’t think Sony would release another camera in the range so soon after the A6300 but I was happy to be proven wrong. The newly announced A6500 is a step above the 6300 and pretty much addresses all the criticism of the 63000 which is also still fairly new

I was walking through a nearby forested park the other day, and I caught an interesting sequence of images. There is a large lake in the middle of the park and there’s always lots of ducks and seagulls there. At this time of the year it’s especially beautiful, as the autumn colours on the leaves give the waters of the lake a patchwork of green and gold. 

Continuing on from my post the other day, I’ve done some more shooting with my borrowed Sony A7II using some of my Canon lenses. This time, I was back out in the city of Dublin. I wanted to do something a little different, and so I used my 17-40f4L Canon lens to get some cityscape shots.

I recently had the opportunity to borrow a friend’s Sony A7II and I was keen to try some Canon lenses on it via a Metabones adaptor. I had borrowed the camera off him before, but that was using an older firmware. Since then Sony has added the same autofocus update for adapted lenses via a firmware upgrade (v.2 I think) from the A7RII and A7SII, and I wanted to see how good it was. I had read lots of reports about the performance on the A7RII, but not many on the upgraded A7II, and I was really pleasantly surprised by the results.

It may seem like a simple thing, but getting the correct white balance can have a significant impact on the overall look of an image. Often you may hear people complaining about the colours of a particular camera, and that they don’t like the colours that a specific brand of camera might produce. It is a common misconception that this has to do with the design of the sensor. In many cases much of what is perceived as differences in a camera’s ability to capture colours may be partly due to the way a camera’s white balance is calibrated. 

I’m very pleased to announce, that after a very long time in production, my newest guide is now available. this e-book guide is called “Processing Sony A6000 Raw files in Lightroom: A Workflow and settings guide”. While that’s probably a bit of a mouthful, it pretty much sums up what this new guide is about. In the same way that I have previously written guides for Fuji X-Series shooters, this guide is designed specifically for Sony A6000 shooters who want to get the best from their camera when processing their images in Lightroom.

My next eBook guide is almost ready to go. I’ve been working on this for what seems like forever, and it’s now in the final stages of production. I wanted to do something similar to my previous Fuji X-Series guides, but for the Sony A6000. I’ve written a lot about the A6000 over the past few years and its a great little camera.

In my previous article on using a custom calibration for the Sony A6000 in Lightroom, I mentioned that it can also be helpful to tweak the in-camera white balance defaults. A few people have asked me what I mean by this, so I've decided to do a very short tutorial on how to do it (it's not very complicated.)

When I wrote my extended review of the A6000, I was pretty scathing about the Sony 35mm f/ 1.8 OSS lens. In the article I wrote that it was one of my least favourite lenses and that it had some terrible chromatic aberration. Recently, I was going through some older images in y library, including some I’d shot with the Sony 35mm and as I went through them I realised that I may have been a bit hard on it. So I started shooting some more images with it, and I now realise that I was possibly wrong in my assessment of it, so here’s a second look at the 35mm lens.

It seems to have been a long time since Apple has released a Raw compatibility update for OS X and I was beginning to get a bit worried, but just as I was about to start investigating the issue, a new update has just popped up in the Software Update panel of OS X. 

If you're curious to see how the new Sony A6300 images look , you can now try them out for yourself. Both Lightroom and Capture One have added raw support for the new camera, and there are now a couple of places where you can download sample raw files. Here are the samples that I've found so far...

Late last week there was something of a blog storm over a video photographer Matt Granger posted about his experiences with Sony’s customer service. If you haven’t seen it already check it out. Basically he had a terrible time getting customer service for his professional Sony cameras. After he posted the video, many of those in the photographic community who also use Sony products chimed in with their own similar stories of Sony’s poor customer service. While I haven’t had to deal with Sony’s customer service here on for any of their Photography products, I too have heard the stories, and have had to deal with the company for other issues.

A while ago I wrote a blog post about my issues with A6000 images in Lightroom not being calibrated particularly well. I included some calibration settings in the form of a pair of Lightroom presets. Since then, I’ve been doing some more work on trying to get a starting point that I’m happy with. With that in mind, here is my latest version of my Sony A6000 calibration preset that I’m ow using on my A6000 images in Lightroom.

I know I'm getting  a bit carried away with posts on the upcoming Sony A6300, but I'm really excited about the potential of this camera. In particular, I'm really looking forward to the video features of the new Sony. On paper it sounds impressive, but now there's some real world testing and footage out there too, and it doesn't disappoint.

When I was writing my epic three part Sony A6000 review, for whatever reason I left out any mention of the two best lenses that I have for the system. They are the Sigma 30mm and 19mm e-mount lenses. I’m not really sure how I managed to forget about these when I was writing the piece, but anyway, I’m making up for it now by writing this mini-review of the two lenses.