Picking up a bargain lens. A used, Sony FE 28-70mm, f3.5 to f5.6. The full frame "kit" lens.

Sony FE 28-70mm OSS lens. Sitting on the front of my A7ii "beater." 

"I'm upgrading to some Zeiss stuff. Do have any use for a Sony kit lens? The 28-70mm FE?" That's how the conversation started. I hemmed and hawed since I already own the Zeiss 24-70mm f4.0. But then my friend tossed out a price that was less than half of the "new" price for the lens and I couldn't resist. After all, one can always use a good "back up" lens and the many reviews out on the web are mixed as to which lens makes better photographs. 

My friend is mostly a Leica user. He shoots with an S2, and just recently picked up an SL and a 50mm f1.4 Aspherical, but he'd decided to put a toe into the Sony waters, just to see what all the fuss was about, and just couldn't bring himself to use a "kit" lens. 

Next time I see him I'll thank him again. The lens is really very good and the combined image stabilization of the camera and lens is also a nice touch. 

I rushed into my initial lens selections when I plunged into the Sony system -- well over a year ago. I started off with the 70-200mm f4.0 G lens (which I think is spectacular) and the 24-70mm f4.0 Zeiss lens (with which I have been perfectly happy). Had I done a bit of research and tried both the kit lens and the Zeiss lens, side by side, over a long weekend I just might have returned the more expensive one and kept the cheaper one. But knowing my own butt covering propensity had I bought the 28-70mm I would start to think about the truncated wide angle capabilities of the kit lens and almost immediately started looking at wide angle zooms to supplement. In the end I would have spent much more money on a kit+16-35mm than I would have just sticking with the 24-70mm. And I know myself well, when it comes to lenses; I never shoot much at all that's wider than 24mm. I just don't "see" wide. The times I've splurged for something like the Nikon 17-35mm lens I ended up blowing the dust off of it a bit later and selling it at a loss. Just never use them. 

I do have a 14mm Rokinon sitting in a drawer ---- just in case wide is required. Rarely use that one either. 

Circling back to the 28-70mm. It's a nice lens. It's very sharp in the center and adequate on the sides and corners. In the old days I might have wished it had a faster aperture but I'm happy to apply more ISO if required and I'm more and more starting to savor a little more depth of field and sharpness in my photographs. A little context is kinda nice.  It feels nice and focuses quickly on the most recent A7xx bodies. It comes with a flower petal lens shade. Please don't put it on your lens backwards. Use your shade in its correct orientation or forever brand yourself a photographic moron...

The bottom line is: the kit lens is a nice companion for the A7ii body. Both are small and light and I can walk for hours or days without noticing the (light) weight. For the price I just didn't think I could go wrong. Ah, the power of rationalization...

Sony FE 28-70mm OSS lens. Sitting on the front of my A7ii "beater."

Welcome Back to the Visual Science Lab Blog. I Missed My Daily Keyboard Exercise. My Mind Got Flabby Too.

Selfie in a mirrored window. 

I wish I could say I got a lot done during my almost month long Summer vacation but the truth is that I spent most of it swimming, running, hanging with my (incredible) kid and going out to our family's favorite restaurants. I read four or five novels, watched movies and even spent some time meditating. I'd like to say that I am now relaxed and mellow but the truth is I'm no more or less cynical and opinionated than when I last hit the keyboard. And not much more relaxed than at any other time. Only now I am a month behind...

To get everyone up to speed I have to say that I did not buy any new cameras or lenses during my hiatus. I'm still working with the Sony cameras and I'm still finding the various strengths from model to model. Current favorite combinations include using the a6300 with the older Olympus 60mm f1.5 lens. Mix in focus peaking and focus magnification and the lens just becomes twenty years better and sharper. It's as good as anything I can buy new today. If you find one of these lenses in good shape be sure to grab it. Better still if it's cheap!

I am having fun shooting the A7ii as though it was a 1970's SLR. I toss a manual focus 50mm lens on the front and I am more or less transported back to 1978, only with an EVF and a bunch of information in the finder. Oh, and no film to buy and soup. It's like the cameras we all used to wear to school every day, just in case we ended up meeting a very, very cute woman on the way to or from class and she needed to have her portrait made. It's small, discrete and mellow. Kinda like a Nikon FM. Or an Olympus OM-1.

The camera that gets most of my attention is still the Sony RX10iii. It's so fantastic that I try to use it for everything. If I ever perfect a PhotoShop methodology for getting a narrow depth of field look with that camera then everything else goes off to the consignment shelf at the store and we pick up an extra RX10iii as a back up. With that one exception (shallow depth of field) it is the ultimate working camera for me. Too bad the A7ii is more fun (ergonomically) to carry around, and comes stock with the kind of depth of field control that is in fashion and addictive. 

The odd man out of the whole collection seems to be that poor A7Rii which sits alone in a drawer, in a neoprene pouch, waiting for the next, big paying job to roll around. Don't get me wrong, the camera is pretty amazing. Files are beautiful whether you are shooting stills or video, but unless you're working on a massive print project, or need very clean high ISOs, the A7ii works just fine, is less dear to lose or damage, and gives me a good compromise between file size and "ultimate" image quality. 

Of the three subsets of Sony that I own the a6300 and a6000 are the least necessary to me. I like using the old Olympus lenses, or the new Sigma 30mm f1.4 DN, on them and pretending I'm shooting with an old Leica but my brain always reaches for the RX10iii or the A7ii well before any of the APS-C, mirrorless Sonys. 

In other news: My world class assistant for the Summer (Ben) is packing up and heading back to school in New York this week. He hits the Austin airport early Saturday morning and I already miss him. So much so that I've already got airline tickets and hotel reservations so his mom and I can head up and visit in October. The member of the family who will be most devastated by his leaving will be Studio Dog. She'll mope around for weeks. She loves to torture me in the times after Ben goes back to school by walking down the hall in front of me, as we head out for a walk, and stopping in front of Ben's room and looking it over. Then she turns her head towards me and makes the world's saddest dog eyes. It's just pathetic. And no matter what I have scheduled I stop and play with her for the next half hour. 

During the break I've spent some quality time learning more and more about microphones, their placement and their pre-amps. I've picked up some extra microphones and now, officially, have more than I need for anything short of a TV quiz show production. I'll talk about them in the near future...

Finally, my goal for the Fall is to start every blog post with a new portrait. If no one is around to collaborate with you'll either get a new self portrait or another stunning image of Studio Dog. Since I have no immediate interest in adding to my camera inventory we may just have to go crazy and talk about actual photographs. Welcome back! Happy coffee. 

Dog cooling butt on a hot afternoon.

My favorite view from Town Lake

Dog piloting boat while human enters self-induced cellphone coma.

Preparing to dock. 

A quick tech note about the bottom four photographs in this blog: They were all done with the Sony RX10iii. The first one, of the sitting dog, was done at some intermediate focal length but the wide shot of the Lamar Bridge was done at the widest focal length (24mm equiv.) while the bottom two were done from hundreds of yards away with the fully extended 600mm focal length. I am consistently amazed at the performance of that lens and sensor combination. Just amazed. 

Photographing small products at high magnification with the Rokinon (Samyang) 100mm f2.8 Macro lens. Tight on White.

The Old State Capitol Building in Baton Rouge, La.

The photo above is just for decoration. It was taken with an iPhone. It really has nothing to do with this blog post. Just thought I'd provide a disclaimer for the painfully literal...

It's been a raucous week for me. We spent the first three days in what ultimately turned out to be a successful photographic assignment in Baton Rouge. We hightailed it back home on Weds., by rental car, and hit the Austin airport in the middle of the night to pick up my car. I needed to get back so I could do pre-production for the job we did in Georgetown, Texas today. That and needing to be home to instruct the tree service that was scheduled to come by and thin out the jungle surrounding our place...

Today was spent photographing tiny ampoules for a subsidiary of Merck. It's a follow on to a shoot we did nearly two years ago and much has changed since then. On the first go-round I was using an early Fiilex LED unit and a Sony a900 camera, along with a Sony 50mm macro lens to do the work of shooting these tiny glass bottles against white. This time I used a Sony A7ii and my newest acquisition, a Rokinon 100mm f2.8 Macro lens. The (much brighter and equally well color corrected lighting came from two of my CooLED lighting units used in Photoflex soft boxes. The EVF enabled camera made shooting tight on white less of a challenge and much more of a pleasure.

Let's first talk about selecting the right background. When you shoot in tight any type of seamless paper is to ungainly to set up and too prone to deformation from humidity, etc. I prefer to use a stout gauge of Bristol board because the surface is very smooth and the (less UV brightened) quality of the white surface is visually superior while being physically stable. I'm using the #700 pound version. You could buy a large tablet of good Bristol stock from Bienfang or Strathmore and it would be more than big enough for your shots. I prefer the 30 by 40 inch sheets because they are easier to hand from a cross stand at table height. Before every white background macro shoot I head to Michael's Art Supply store and stock up. I bring multiple sheets in case we need to substitute in a clean sheet. 

The lighting is largely from a 24 by 36 inch Photoflex softbox illuminated by one of my big LED lights. Used close in we were able to stay at ISO 100 and use f16.5 at something like 1/15th of a second. The hell with diffraction, we needed the depth of field...

But the real story today is about the new lens. It's from Rokinon which is one of the nameplates used by Samyang for lenses marketed in the U.S.A. I bought it about a week ago and today was my first opportunity to put it through its paces. I brought along a Nikon 55mm f2.8 Micro lens as a back-up but the Rokinon was so easy to use and so sharp that the Nikon never came out of the bag. 

We weren't shooting at 1:1. It was more in the range of 1:2 to 1:4. The lens feels great and is a polished piece of manufacturing. People complain about Rokinon lens hoods but I was able to attach and use mine with no difficulties and it held in place well. 

I had the lens attached to the Sony A7ii and I've come to the conclusion that the A7ii is as sharp a camera as anyone, even the owner of an A7r2, could ever want. The AA filter is weak and the sensor is pretty darn capable. I am still thinking that the 24 megapixel sensor size in a full frame camera is more or less the optimum choice for most people, myself included. The icing on the cake is that the dynamic range is very comparable to what I get from the A7R2, which is one of the highest rated DR cameras around. Considering that I picked up a used A7ii for under $1200 I am amazed at the level of performance the camera delivers. Even more impressed when using it in a macro, studio setting. 

With the Nikon D810 I could use the live view mode but the refresh rate made it sub-optimal in available light situations. With the A7ii I was able today to shoot down to a quarter second and see a great electronic viewfinder image. The A7 series cameras are the perfect tools for shooting in macro settings. 

I was shooting on white and wanted the white to still have a tiny bit of detail. In this way I could assure myself of preserving the highest of the highlights in the images. I set the zebra function to give me the wacky zebra lines right at 100% (or 255) this meant I could easily make perfect exposures by lowering the shutter speeds until the zebras appeared and then back off by one third of a stop; just enough for the zebras to disappear. Then I knew that my white background was 1/3 of stop under 255 (or "blow-out"). Can't imagine an easier way to keep tabs on exposure!

I was using a manual focus lens for today's job because it just makes sense when shooting non-moving macro images. I enabled the focus peaking (I prefer yellow) and here's how I would proceed: I'd compose the shot using the finder and then using the two axis level on the back finder. Once I had the comp roughed I would hit the trash button which, in shooting mode, I have configured as the zoom/magnification control. Once I zoomed in on the image at 11x I'd rock the focus ring to get the focus peaking indications exactly right. No more Canon/Nikon back focusing adventures!

The combination of the right lens with the right focal length, the practicality and efficiency of the EVF, the quick confirmation of exposure via zebras and the ability to be sure you got what you wanted in focus, made this particular shoot much more efficient than the same basic shoot done with an old school, mirrored camera. 

I was going to say that the star of the day was the Rokinon 100mm f2.8 (which focuses down to 1:1) but in truth it was the blend of the Rokinon with the workaday, mid-brow Sony that made mis smile as I lined up one and a half inch ampoules and photographed them both singly and in small groups. 

The Rokinon 100mm Macro is about $550 while the OSS, AF Sony 90mm G lens is right around $1,000, but I've owned enough macro lenses to know that I'll probably be using them on tripods and also manually focusing them. I've been burned too many times by the slow focus acquisition of autofocus lenses across brands...and image stabilization isn't usually necessary for tripod mounted gear.

In my book, for my money, the third party lens does exactly what it is supposed to do. How do I know? Well, I get paid to do this and I've done it for a long time. When I look at my 27 inch screen, at an image from this system, and I can feel my pulse quicken a bit, I know I'm looking at something that's more than just the ordinary image from an ordinary lens. This one is one of the best bargains around. I'd buy one again in a heartbeat.

Next up...looking with renewed interest at Rokinon's 50mm DS Cine lens. Each successful encounter with the brand just pushes me to want more...

Picking up a Sony A7ii as a companion for the A7r2. Why? And how do I like it?

This is the first time in my career in which every camera in my inventory comes from one company. I've always had "main" systems and "side" systems. For example: Nikon full frame and micro four/thirds cameras. In the film days it was Hasselblad and Leica. But right now I'm three formats deep into the Sony world. And the sad thing about all this is that Sony has offered me no free cameras, no cash payments of any kind for writing about their cameras; heck, I can't even get a promotional mouse pad from them....(added for the delirious forum dwellers who are certain that anyone who is actually happy or satisfied with a product is on that company's dole....).

The "best" or most ultimate camera I have from Sony is their A7R2. It's very, very good. Focuses quickly, meters very well, does great white balance and.....42 megapixels! But one thing that is its strength is also a weakness in the hands of an overly prolific photographer, and that's the huge, 42 megapixel raw file. To be honest, while the huge file is impressively sharp and all dynamic-rangy it's also pain in the ass for shooting portraits. I want all the good stuff but I wish the camera would do the same smart camera trick that the Kodak SLR/n (the first full frame digital body on the market) could do over a decade ago; it was able to shoot three different raw file sizes. You could choose between 14, 6, or 3 megapixel file sizes and still get all the editing benefits of raw, but none of the storage headaches, and none of the processing pipeline clogs of today's all pumped up camera bodies. Firmware? Anybody?

I find myself defaulting to other cameras with smaller raw files, like the a6300 at 24 megapixels, or the RX10iii with 20 megapixels, when I head out to shoot anything but big client jobs (meaning client jobs that must have the potential to be used across media). And many of them would be well served with the full frame "look" but at a more modest 24.

The reason for most of us to use a full frame camera  hasn't got much to do with the pursuit of "ultimate resolution" it's more about getting the faster ramp in focusing ,which drives the background out of focus more quickly than smaller sensors used with lenses that have the same angle of view. Most of the time I'm happy shooting Jpegs with the A7R2 since it gives me nice files at the medium size setting of 18 megapixels. But, of course, we always want it all...

This past weekend I made a journey to the local bricks and mortar camera store to replace a lost lens cap. I forgot the lens cap but came home instead with a slightly used Sony A7ii. Kind of the middle of the road model for the current A7x series. On one hand you have the A7R2 which is the king of dynamic range and resolution and on the other hand you have the see in the dark A7S2 with its 12 megapixels. The A7ii is somewhere in the middle, about halfway between the two when it comes to the number of pixels. Not as high a resolution number as the S and nowhere near the sheer detail of the R. It's the essence of moderation, where the A7 system is involved.

I rationalize my purchase with the hoary excuse from the film days: redundant back-up. You need to carry a similar camera as a back-up on every assignment. My rationalization was a bit of a stretch as the a6300 that I own isn't far behind the middling A7ii, in terms of overall image quality (stills) while the a6300 is a faster focuser and has standout, 4K video files. But there is that out of focus background thing we all think we want and need. Another reason to buy the second full frame body is that, at $3200, I am loathe to drag the A7R2 around in the muck and mire to take fun, personal photos. It's become an important tool for work and I'd be upset if I took it out for a spin at a kid's swim meet and it accidentally got dropped into the deep end. A second (used) camera with 90% of the premiere camera's capabilities, but at 1/3 the price, was music to my ears. 

Now, with Ben sitting in the video editing chair today, I finally had some time to go for a stroll this afternoon and to take the new (used) camera for a spin. Here's what I think: Feels great to hold onto. All the buttons are where I expect them to be. I've set up the function menu to match all my other cameras so the learning curve with the new body is minimal. The image stabilization works well. I used it today with an ancient, 50mm f1.4 (pre-ai) Nikon lens, on a cheap adapter, and it was great. Makes me re-think my irrational desire to go out and buy the 50mm f2.0 Zeiss Loxia lens.

The only thing I'm bummed about (but knew it going in...) is that the A7ii doesn't have a silent shutter mode like the A7R2 and the a6300. If it did I would replace the a6300 in tonight's equipment line up for the dress rehearsal of Buyer and Cellar at Zach Theatre. I could put the 24-70mm on one body and the 70-200mm on the other body and be so happy. But for the ten or twelve shows a year that we shoot rehearsals with audiences in attendance I think I'll continue to manage with the mixed format. 

For regular commercial photography assignments the noisy shutter (not as bad as the original A7) isn't really an issue. My clients are keenly aware that they are being photographed. There are really no differences in the finders or the overall feel of the cameras when comparing the two A7x models. And there's really no difference in battery life either. 

The other area that is different is their video capability. The R is a beautiful 4K shooting camera but the 7-2 caps out at 1080p. But it's a nice 1080p and the menu features the range of picture profiles while the body also features a microphone input and headphone output. Those are great things. 

I am happy (though probably irrationally so) to have two nearly identical, full frame cameras to take out on assignments with me. I know that today's cameras are very reliable but being somewhat old school I always feel a bit naked when I go out with a mix of formats or, even creepier, no back-up at all. 

I think my purchase came at an advantageous time. The earthquake in Japan seems to have stabilized the market for camera gear and halted the downward slide of prices. With sensors in short supply for the near future I think the prices of used A7x cameras will bump up a bit while discounts for new product will be aggressively curtailed. 

All the cameras have their strengths and targeted uses. I'm happy that they share a universal menu interface and a universal function menu. It makes life easier when we switch gears to a different format. 

If I lived in a perfect world I'd buy a second A7R2. It really is a magnificent camera. But living in the real world means paying for college and stocking some cash away for the inevitable post election economic slide. And that means a great companion camera at 1/3 the price makes good sense. But that's just me.