Camera or Lens?

[AllFallD0wn]

Hi all,

Hoping for a bit of advice. I'm in a dilemma right now about whether to buy a new camera, or a new lens. I've owned my Sony a390 for about 5-6 years now and it's starting to show its age and I feel I've got to the limit of what the sensor can do for me, so I'm looking at new cameras. At this moment I'm not sure whether to go with Canon, Nikon or stick with Sony. The Nikon D50xx's look good, as do the Canon xxxD's, and the Sony a77, etc.

But then I just thought maybe my problem isn't the camera so much as the lenses I have. I mostly do Landscape photography, and still mostly use my kit 18-55mm lens for this, which could be a limitation with the softness/graininess I've been experiencing on shots lately?

So I have 3 options with an initial budget of around £500-600:

1. Buy a new camera with kit lens - either Nikon or Canon so I can upgrade to better lenses at a later date
2. Buy a new Sony alpha body so I can continue using my current lenses
3. Buy a new Sony Alpha Lens

Any ideas on what may be best for me?

Cheers!

 

[Alastair]

Any ideas on what may be best for me?

Just having a quick look through your Flickr stream and I don't see any issues with your camera or lens. There's a couple of shots suffering from dull light and a couple where a better aperture could have been used (there is no reason to ever use f/22).

But there are also not a lot of recent images..

 

[ABTog]

I'm a former Sony Alpha user, so I know something of where you're coming from.
I had a Minolta film SLR so buying a Sony Alpha camera made sense to use the lenses. So I bought an Alpha 100 as my first DSLR, I then upgraded to the a350 (not too dissimilar to your a390).
But I did upgrade my lenses beyond the kit lenses.
I would personally, spend perhaps £300 of your budget on a couple of lenses and get to know them really well before declaring that the camera needs upgrading.
Two reasons:
1) If you only have £5-600 to spend, you'll not get a major upgrade of a body AND some new lenses.
2) without trying better lenses on the Sony body you won't yet have reached the limit of what your body can do.

So, I'd buy a secondhand Minolta AF 50mm f1.7 lens. A great Minolta lenses that works brilliantly on the Sony Alpha cameras. I used to own the Sony DT 50mm f1.8, but swapped to the Minolta and preferred that (it's much better built for a start). This should cost £80 or less. If you can find the RS version of the Minolta it's even better.
That'll give you a great low light 50mm prime lens.
Then look at a replacement for your kit 18-55 lens. You could get a Sigma 17-50mm f2.8 (or the older 18-50mm f2.8 which I had) or the Tamron 17-50mm f2.8. This will also be good in low light and give you a very versatile all-round zoom lens for £200ish s/h.
These lenses will also be worth having if you upgrade to a Sony a77 or to an a6000 with a lens adaptor (both of which have more advanced sensors and features than your a390).
If you were looking at an a7, you'd need a E-mount, full frame lenses, so you'd not be able use your existing lenses anyway.

Upgrading your lenses will allow you to get more light into the sensor more sharply and will potentially get your better pictures. Getting better pictures is reliant on good technique though. Judging by your flickr photos, you seem to have quite a lot of dark-ish images. Flickr also tells me that you shoot in full auto a lot of the time. I think you need to learn how to use the different settings to get the most out of your camera before you contemplate an expensive move to another camera system.
Learn about the exposure triangle, how altering ISO, aperture and shutter speed effect the image. You DON'T have to go to full manual. But you do need to know how to use each one effectively. IE, if you raise the ISO for a dark room, this will allow you to keep the shutter speed higher to freeze movement better.
Getting one of the lenses I listed will allow you to keep the aperture the same (ie in aperture priority mode) meaning you'll be able to keep control over the depth of field, then you can let the camera decide the shutter speed, if the shutter speed is too low, you can then raise your ISO to allow the camera to give you a higher shutter speed.

You are probably not at the limit of what the camera can do.
If you want, take a look at my old shots taken with my Sony Alpha a350, (from this page backwards) https://www.flickr.com/photos/alistairbeavis/page11


For reference, it was only when I was hitting the low light limits of the a350's sensor and when I was starting to do more photoshoots where sharing lenses with others was very useful, that I changed to Canon.

 

[AllFallD0wn]

I'm a former Sony Alpha user, so I know something of where you're coming from.

So, I'd buy a secondhand Minolta AF 50mm f1.7 lens. A great Minolta lenses that works brilliantly on the Sony Alpha cameras. I used to own the Sony DT 50mm f1.8, but swapped to the Minolta and preferred that (it's much better built for a start). This should cost £80 or less. If you can find the RS version of the Minolta it's even better.
That'll give you a great low light 50mm prime lens.
Then look at a replacement for your kit 18-55 lens. You could get a Sigma 17-50mm f2.8 (or the older 18-50mm f2.8 which I had) or the Tamron 17-50mm f2.8. This will also be good in low light and give you a very versatile all-round zoom lens for £200ish s/h.
These lenses will also be worth having if you upgrade to a Sony a77 or to an a6000 with a lens adaptor (both of which have more advanced sensors and features than your a390).
If you were looking at an a7, you'd need a E-mount, full frame lenses, so you'd not be able use your existing lenses anyway.

Upgrading your lenses will allow you to get more light into the sensor more sharply and will potentially get your better pictures. Getting better pictures is reliant on good technique though. Judging by your flickr photos, you seem to have quite a lot of dark-ish images. Flickr also tells me that you shoot in full auto a lot of the time. I think you need to learn how to use the different settings to get the most out of your camera before you contemplate an expensive move to another camera system.
Learn about the exposure triangle, how altering ISO, aperture and shutter speed effect the image. You DON'T have to go to full manual. But you do need to know how to use each one effectively. IE, if you raise the ISO for a dark room, this will allow you to keep the shutter speed higher to freeze movement better.
Getting one of the lenses I listed will allow you to keep the aperture the same (ie in aperture priority mode) meaning you'll be able to keep control over the depth of field, then you can let the camera decide the shutter speed, if the shutter speed is too low, you can then raise your ISO to allow the camera to give you a higher shutter speed.

You are probably not at the limit of what the camera can do.

Thanks for the detailed reply. I would agree that a lot of my images are quite dark. As a general rule I'm always told to shoot darker and then lighten up because shadows can be recovered a lot more than blown highlights can, but then am scared to push the exposure back to what it should be. I think I need a lot more practice at PP and not over-shadowing/darkening images.

9 times out of 10 I shoot in Aperture priority mode (and almost always ISO100 because landscapes & tripods) (although more in manual these days since I got some LEE filters).

Thanks for the advice though, and I'll definitely look into those lenses

 

[Ulfric M Douglas]

Thanks for the detailed reply. I would agree that a lot of my images are quite dark. As a general rule I'm always told to shoot darker and then lighten up because shadows can be recovered a lot more than blown highlights can,...

I don't think that's right at all.

Just bracket.

Research a great wide lens, buy it.

 

[Nawty]

Thanks for the detailed reply. I would agree that a lot of my images are quite dark. As a general rule I'm always told to shoot darker and then lighten up because shadows can be recovered a lot more than blown highlights can, but then am scared to push the exposure back to what it should be. I think I need a lot more practice at PP and not over-shadowing/darkening images.

9 times out of 10 I shoot in Aperture priority mode (and almost always ISO100 because landscapes & tripods) (although more in manual these days since I got some LEE filters).

Thanks for the advice though, and I'll definitely look into those lenses

That is only true of modern cameras from the past, say 3 or 4, years. If your camera is older then you will probably want to expose as bright as you can to get as much details in the shadow yet preserve the highlight detail you want. Given the age of your camera I would definitely say the latter should be your exposure technique (edit: Google Expose To The Right, ETTR).

Most often the best advice is to get a new lens but in all honesty cameras have moved on so far since 2010 that I would buy a new camera and lens - there are some great bargains around now as cameras have got much cheaper, relatively speaking, since 2010.

 

[sk66]

That is only true of modern cameras from the past, say 3 or 4, years.

Not quite... you will never recover (truly) blown highlights irregardless of the sensor gen/tech.
But yes... either push the exposure as far as possible (using SS, *not* ISO) w/o clipping highlights, or bracket/combine exposures.

Besides refining some technique issues (f/22, post skills, whatever), I think a newer/better Sony alpha body would be the biggest gain per £. But I'm not sure you actually need it as I think you're probably being overly critical/pixel peeping.

 

[ancient_mariner]

If you have around £500 to spend then I'd look for used Sony Zeiss 16-80 zoom and an alpha 58 body. The zeiss lens will give a significant boost in image quality over the kit lenses (and is into prime quality) and the a58 has a more modern sensor, good focussing and EVF to help with exposure, plus they're good value used.

I still use the a58 + Zeiss as my travel outfit, even though I have a D610.