Master Photography Blog (Learn, Create, Motivate!): 19 -More Tests and Some Sample Images with Sony A7RII

More testing of the Sony A7RII. I'm really starting to get the hang of it. Having the focus set in the center and recomposing seems to be working fine for static objects.

I have set up my custom buttons: C1: White Balance, C2: Metering Mode, C3: Focus Mode, C4: Shoot Mode ISO AUTO Min.SS (This I've set to 1/125th as my slowest shutter speed setting when ISO Auto is on. Though so far it doesn't seem to be working. I saw in the manual that if the camera thinks it can't take the shot in the minimal settings you have put in, it will override them. This seems to negate the reason for setting this.) The round wheel I've set the down push to go right to where I can move the focus point around like I used to do with my Nikon cameras. There are limits to a lot of the settings. If you want to shoot with Face Detection you have to have the focus mode on AF-C for continuous, etc...same for Eye Detection.

I have the AF/MF button set to go to Eye Detection. Some photographers like to have that button to override the shutter button from setting focus. I tried it. I took off that ability from the shutter button. It would just fire the shot, no half press to focus. Then I set the AF/MF button to focus the shot. It works in the studio, but when I'm in the car trying to grab fast shots...it's too much trouble to focus with that separate button. You see I'm trying to shoot with one hand most of the time while driving (I know, not recommended!) So I switched it back to the usual half press of the shutter button to set the focus, then full press for taking the shot. Too many years to re-train myself I guess. But I did give it a try. You see in theory it makes sense. If you use two hands. One holds the camera and then you push the AF/MF to grab focus. Then shutter button to shoot. You see if the object or model is not moving much, then you just keep hitting the trigger and not worrying about the focus. That is the reason they set it up that way. With the Nikon system and the lenses I used I could turn off AF on the lens, and shoot action etc...after I'd focused. Now since some lenses don't give you that button, you have to lock focus with the AF/MF button if you don't set it up the way they like to do it.

Shooting in studio tips:

Set your Live Display ---Setting Effect OFF (Before I did this the camera was trying to show me the scene in the viewfinder or LCD as very dark...since I had my setting for the strobes! Turning this to OFF fixed the problem and I can see the scene as I would see it with an optical viewfinder, not as it would be with all my camera settings. Now I have to set it back to ON when shooting without strobes if I want to see the image reacting to the exposure settings I'm changing. Which is a good thing to have that my Nikon systems never had.

Set your White Balance to FLASH. With my Nikon cameras the Auto White Balance was so darn good, I never changed it to anything else! Really! But with this Sony camera I have to change it off auto or it's all blue.

Shoot in Manual Mode (just like usual).

Shutter Speed is best at 1/160th of a sec. You can shoot at 1/200th, but from the videos I watched 1/160 seemed to be the sweet spot here.

I'm going to try and set the studio settings up in the 1 or 2 buttons on the mode dial top of the camera. If that works, I can just switch to one of those numbers and presto, I'm ready to shoot in the studio....I'll let you know after I read the manual!

My triggers worked fine. I've yet to try out any flashes as I don't have any Sony compatible ones yet for the hotshoe. I'm sure my Nikon and 3rd party flashes would probably go off but not TTL, etc...

I'll get back to all that later after I test it out more.

Click on these images to see a larger view. (In this case a much larger view as I uploaded them full size JPG files.) The one strobe was an Alien Bee 800 set about 5 feet off the ground and aiming down hitting the items from camera left. It has a barn door flap head and can take color gels. For these shots in studio I just had a white diffuser gel on it.