Back on Black Friday, I picked up a Sony a7R III. I’ve tried it out a couple times before at Sony Kando Trip 2.0 and Sony’s Be Alpha LA event. (I should probably write about those sometime…) I’m still getting used to it.
The last times I got to use it were only less than a day each, so I didn’t get to play with them extensively. First thing I did when I got mine, of course, was go through the menu system and see what’s around. I mostly went down the list of Colby Brown’s a7R III guide and focused on things I thought would be relevant to me based on how I shot with the a6000.
Last week, I had some time to go play. So I hit up The Broad for the first time—mostly to see Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms.
Having more buttons and dials than my a6000, I am still having trouble quickly getting my settings to where I want them to be, even when shooting aperture priority. That goes double when I have a time limit, as I did trying to shoot both of the Infinity Mirror exhibits. I also noticed, like when I upgraded from my Canon PowerShot s95 to my Sony a6000, that my feel for where my camera is focusing is off again.
A couple days later, I went to the San Diego Zoo with a friend. He recently bought the Sony FE 100-400mm GM (SEL100400GM) and we went to go try to shoot. I brought my 90mm lens, but that was not a long enough focal length to really isolate the animals. Lucky for me, the a7R III was really sharp when I had focus down. For those images, I could crop in really tight and they’d still be really sharp.
That said, because I already had trouble getting my focus right in addition to the animals moving around a lot, there were a lot of pictures I couldn’t get quite right. For example, there a couple shots where I have some squirrel’s body in focus, but not its face. I started the day shooting aperture priority, but switched to shutter priority when I borrowed my friend’s lens. Another mistake I made was I accidentally turned of optical steady shot / image stabilization when I switched back to my 90mm…
Amazing pictures, all the animals have a story to tell, my favorite was the tiger face, it looks like a Little Kitten.