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 A6000
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lately, I’ve been getting a few emails from readers asking about the Sony A6000. In particular, people are interested in using the camera for street photography. I’ve shot street photos a lot with the A6000, and it’s one of my favourite cameras for street shooting. However, as I hadn’t shot this genre with it for a little while I thought I’d take it out for a spin, and record the proceedings as an episode of “Street Photo Diary.”
At this time of the year, the days can get very dark and dreary here in Ireland. With the short winter days, when it’s sunny it’s actually quite beautiful, but when it clouds over, it becomes very dark and dreary. On days like this, it’s often tempting not to bother shooting, and certainly, I’ve been put off by what seems like bad light. However, as Jay Maisel once said, there’s no such thing as bad light, just difficult light.
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.)
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.
Continuing on from part one of my Sony A6000 review, in this second part I look at image quality and shooting video on the Sony A6000
Last January, at the beginning of 2015, I decided to add a Sony A6000 to my ever growing camera collection. The reasons for the purchase were twofold. My Sony Nex–7 had died an unceremonious death, and it was going to cost too much to repair. Secondly, I wanted a small camera for video. Since then I’ve used the little Sony more and more and over the past 12 months I’ve really grown to like it.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
