Jumping Right In
Only three days after I bought a Sony α6700, I did something bold with it: I took it into the studio for a model photo shoot.
And just as a warning, this post isn't safe for viewing at work.
I still hadn't finished reading the instructions but I felt I had learned enough that I shouldn't have an issue. And, after all, I do have more than 45 years of experience taking photos. How hard could it be?
The truth is that I only wanted to try taking a few photos with the new camera. I had brought my Nikon D750 as my main camera for this meetup.
But I wanted to see what it felt like holding such a small and light mirrorless camera with a flash trigger on it. The studio that my club uses has plenty of triggers for all sorts of camera makes, so I placed one on the Nikon and the other on the Sony.
The challenging part, as it turned out, was the focus mode. I was shooting in manual-exposure mode, with the shutter speed fixed at 1/100 of a second, the aperture at anywhere from f/5.6 to f/8, and the ISO set at 200. All I had to do, once I figured out the lighting, was to point, lock the focus (I've set up the α6700 to use back-button focusing), and shoot.
There's a mode on the α6700 that allows me to focus on a human. The camera will find a face and lock on the eye that is closest to the lens. I set that mode up before I arrived in the studio. But when I made the manual-exposure settings, the camera must have deactivated the face-recognition feature because as soon as I pressed the focus button, I stopped seeing the camera search for a face. Instead, it just gave me a green box in the centre of the frame that indicated when I was in focus.
Our visiting model, Denisa Strakova, started our shoot by posing in front of a red backdrop that had a patterned spotlight. It looked like she was in front of an ornate window frame with red panes, though the pattern also projected onto her. It was a neat effect and Denisa knew just how to move in this light.
As soon as all of the photographers had a round of shooting this setting, we changed to a white background had Denisa sit on the floor. We used a very strong flash with a narrow beam on her, and Denisa played with shadows cast on her.
While I don't need glasses to see through the viewfinder, I do need them to see the image on the back screen of the camera. And as my eyes readjusted to having glasses on and off, the display didn't seem to show particularly sharp images.
After taking these series of shots, I put down my α6700 and picked up my Nikon D750 with my 24–70mm f/2.8 lens, and used it for the rest of the photo session.
When I got home and looked at the images from the α6700 on my computer screen, I could see that the images were, in fact, in focus. And now that I had time to slow down and look at the camera settings, it appeared as though the focus sensor had changed with my manual settings. It was no longer prioritizing a face and was not set up for continuous focusing.
I'm learning.
Anyway, here are some of the shots that I took with the Sony α6700. If you saw this week's Wordless Wednesday, those shots of Denisa were captured with my Nikon.
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