Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All in Sony
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.
One of the biggest complaints that users of Sony’s Aps-c format E-mount cameras such as the A6000 have is the lack of good, inexpensive prime lenses. In my recent long term review of the A6000 I made this point, and I wished for an equivalent to Fuji’s excellent 35mm f/1.4. In fact, the lack of a good fast native prime for the format has been a real issue. Fortunately Sigma has just addressed that gap in the lineup with the launch of the new 30mm f/1.4mm prime lens for e-mount (and m43).
Sigma today announced a very interesting new product. The inspiringly named MC-11 is a lens mount adaptor designed specifically to adapt Sigma's lenses for use on Sony e-mount systems. It comes in either canon EF or Sigma SA versions for use with corresponding sigma lenses.
Since I posted my initial thoughts on the A6300 last week, there’s been a lot more information coming out about the upcoming camera. There are two things in particular that I missed when the announcement first came out, so I’m going to talk about them briefly now.
Yesterday Sony released the spiritual successor to the A6000, the A6300. I say spiritual, because the A6000 is still being sold. As many of my log term readers know, I’ve been using the A6000 for over a year now, and I recently wrote a 3 part real world review of the camera. The successor has been rumoured for quite some time, and now it’s here. I’m very impressed with what I’m reading about it, at least with the specs on paper. At first glance the A6300 may seem like a minor evolution over the A6000, but in my opinion, it’s a massive improvement over the older camera, especially in the area of video. In fact, for video, I think that it’s revolutionary to have these features at the price point and size.
It's been a while since I've taken any night shots. It's not something I do that often, not for any particular reason (other than fear of getting mugged!) Anyway, over the weekend I had the chance to take some pictures of the Grand Canal area of Dublin City after dark. I had my Sony A6000 with me, along with a sigma 30mm and 19mm lens, and my somewhat ancient Manfrotto tripod.
Last week I released my latest set of Lightroom Presets, “Coffee Tones”. The presets are a set of film like coffee coloured filters for use in Lightroom. I wanted to share some more examples that I’ve used the presets on, including some shots that I took this weekend. I also wanted to thank everyone who sent kind comments on the new set.
Continuing on from Parts 1 and 2, This third part completes my review of the Sony A6000. In this part I look at using the camera for Street photography, do come comparisons, and finish off with some conclusions and more sample images.
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 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.
