{"id":1626,"date":"2015-01-21T16:09:20","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T16:09:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/?p=1626"},"modified":"2025-04-21T17:41:54","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T17:41:54","slug":"sony-a7ii-sample-photos-jan2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/?p=1626","title":{"rendered":"Sony a7ii Sample Photos Jan2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

This camera story starts with my long simmering desire to own a full frame camera. \u00a0I’ve been in the Canon camp since 2004, and have owned several really nice lenses, a Canon L USM 17-40mm zoom, \u00a0 and a Canon L USM 24-105mm. \u00a0I started out with a 10D body (stolen on vacation), moved to a 30D. \u00a0These bodies are APS-C, which means the sensor is smaller than full frame, and thus the lens undergoes a multiplication factor (essentially a zoom) of 1.6. \u00a0It has always worked fine, good quality pictures, but it came to bug me that a good portion of the deliverable light of my lens pair was being “thrown away”.<\/p>\n

At some point in my development, I purchases a used Olympus Four Thirds system e-420, for the unbelievable price of $300, perfect body, two sweet lenses, camera bag, other goodies. \u00a0This setup weighed half that of my Canon rig, and the quality just blew me away. \u00a0Paradigm shift . . .<\/p>\n

I gave this camera to my Dad because it was small and easy to use, and in the pursuit of going even lighter, picked up an Olympus micro four\/thirds PEN PL5. This camera also took great photos and was smaller yet, weighing all of a pound. \u00a0It did have the disadvantage of being so physically small that the controls were not easy to manipulate in the field. \u00a0 After a year with this camera, it came to my attention loud and clear that I was using it 95% of the time over my much heavier Canon setup. \u00a0I guess I don’t like a stone around my neck as much as I used to.<\/p>\n

Back to full frame SLRs. The a7 came to my attention and I read up on it for a good year, thinking I’d be able to finally have full frame and take advantage of my two Canon zooms, and have a light body, all in one. \u00a0It helped that it was advertised as being “the smallest full frame SLR made”.<\/p>\n

Finally I pulled the trigger in early January 2015, body only. \u00a0This mirrorless SLR has garnered a reputation for being compatible with lenses from almost every lens maker out there. \u00a0A small industry of Sony to <whatever> lens adaptors has sprung up around the a7.<\/p>\n

Lenses:<\/p>\n

Decades ago, my Dad gave up on being a serious photographer and handed me his Nikon bag. \u00a0It had a lot of lenses and his old film body, an FE model. \u00a0 I also shot Nikon back in the day (an FM body being my last film camera), mostly Kodochrome slides. \u00a0I also still have several Nikon lenses. \u00a0And it occurred to me that all these lenses were fair game for the Sony, as long as I could relearn to shoot in manual mode. \u00a0Between the two bags, I ended up with this treasure trove:<\/p>\n

Nikon Prime lenses:<\/p>\n

Nikkor 24mm : 283g<\/p>\n

Nikkor 28mm : 276g<\/p>\n

Nikkor 50mm : 258g<\/p>\n

Nikon Series E 50mm<\/p>\n

Nikon Zooms:<\/p>\n

Nikkor 24-120mm<\/p>\n

Nikkor 35-135mm<\/p>\n

Nikkor 35-105mm<\/p>\n

Osawa 80-205 mm<\/p>\n

It’s ironic. \u00a0I almost threw this stuff away, I thought all of it was essentially worthless. \u00a0 Twenty-thirty years later, these lenses are doing great on this Sony a7. \u00a0Old Nikon lenses are sharp, esp the primes. \u00a0For their small size, they are heavy! \u00a0Quality glass. \u00a0 Irony #2 – I probably won’t even use the Canon lenses on the Sony. The adaptor is expensive, the end result is heavy, and the purported performance is rated marginal.<\/p>\n

I’ve taken a couple hundred pics with the Sony, here’s some sample work. \u00a0All these were shot RAW and processed in Lightroom, with jpgs exported for this slide show. \u00a0 Shots in the neighborhood, mostly. \u00a0The point here is to demonstrate sharpness. In some cases, high ISO was used. \u00a0It didn’t seem to hurt picture quality as much as one would think. \u00a0In a few cases I did use the ISO smoothing feature in Lightroom. \u00a0 But mostly these pictures have very little post processing applied to them.<\/p>\n

All RAW images are 24M size, I use Lightroom5 to create JPGs in the range of 1M +\/-. \u00a0These are uploaded to Smugmug, and launched from here.<\/p>\n

(click thumbnail for gallery)<\/p>\n

\"50mm<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This camera story starts with my long simmering desire to own a full frame camera. \u00a0I’ve been in the Canon camp since 2004, and have owned several really nice lenses, a Canon L USM 17-40mm zoom, \u00a0 and a Canon L USM 24-105mm. \u00a0I started out with a 10D body (stolen on vacation), moved to … Continue reading “Sony a7ii Sample Photos Jan2015”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1626"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3093,"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1626\/revisions\/3093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}