The Amazing Sony A1/A7/A9/APS-C & Anything else welcome Mega Thread!

jonneymendoza said:
Is that not the same issue on canikon? I remember that on the ef side, only the white tele lenses worked on there tc
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No Idea about Nikon.

On canon 1.4x works with their 135mm f2 but not the 2x TC.
On Sony a-mount both 1.4x and 2x TCs works with the brilliant Sony zeiss 135mm f1.8. it was the previous best 135mm prime only recently bested by the 135GM and 135mm ART
 
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woof woof said:
70-200mm doesn't really appeal to me as the 200mm end doesn't seem to be long enough for anything. I've tried birds in the garden and squirrels in the park with my MFT 45-150mm and with birds especially the crops needed to be in the region of 70-100% to get the things anything like big enough in the frame. They're more use for more general stuff I suppose.
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It’s not a wildlife lens tbh, but it’s a great lens for certain sports. Some like it for portraits too as they prefer the compression vs say an 85mm.
 
Yes, I can see it being useful for those uses.

For portraits I think it'd have to be in a studio or some other rather empty space as if there's anyone else around they're likely to wonder into the shot not realising there's a photographer 30 yards away :D
 
I love 200mm, when space allows
 
woof woof said:
Yes, I can see it being useful for those uses.

For portraits I think it'd have to be in a studio or some other rather empty space as if there's anyone else around they're likely to wonder into the shot not realising there's a photographer 30 yards away :D
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For waist up it's fine at 200mm. Obviously the zoom range is a big bonus too.
 
For a while a 50mm lens on MFT was my most used lens. Other than that I had a 28-300mm when I got my first DSLR's but generally I like 35/50 and 135mm is about as long as I've used for people shots.

I have a 100-400mm now for MFT but so far I've only used it to practice with and moon pictures. I'm looking forward to trying some bird and squirrel shots and I have a few landscape pictures in mind. I can't see myself ever owning a long lens for my A7 for cost and size reasons. I can see how 70-200mm's are popular but I don't think they suit me.
 
woof woof said:
For a while a 50mm lens on MFT was my most used lens. Other than that I had a 28-300mm when I got my first DSLR's but generally I like 35/50 and 135mm is about as long as I've used for people shots.

I have a 100-400mm now for MFT but so far I've only used it to practice with and moon pictures. I'm looking forward to trying some bird and squirrel shots and I have a few landscape pictures in mind. I can't see myself ever owning a long lens for my A7 for cost and size reasons. I can see how 70-200mm's are popular but I don't think they suit me.
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The 70-200 f4 is really quite good. It's not heavy or too large in a bag either. I paired one with an a7 for my holiday over Xmas and really enjoyed using it.
 
addicknchips said:
The 70-200 f4 is really quite good. It's not heavy or too large in a bag either. I paired one with an a7 for my holiday over Xmas and really enjoyed using it.
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Can you enlighten me as to focus speed (A7iii)
 
addicknchips said:
The 70-200 f4 is really quite good. It's not heavy or too large in a bag either. I paired one with an a7 for my holiday over Xmas and really enjoyed using it.
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I liked the one I had. It was a good weight and size, and seemed to be sharp with good AF. Sadly it was a case of duplication with the 100-400. That meant is was a (very) nice to have lens but not necessarily needed as the 100-400 along with 24-105 could cover the 70-200 focal lengths at the cost of some extra weigh of the 100-400.
 
Livin The Dream said:
Bloody hard work again to get something I liked today, just not playing ball :rolleyes:

49311412723_d663e7d487_b.jpg
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Can I ask how you lit this?
 
There's a Sony 55mm f1.8 v Voigtlander 50mm f2 apo comparison on Fred Miranda...

https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1625777/41

There's a difference but what percentage of pictures this will be visible in and if it really matters or not are good questions :D

I'm still hovering over the buy button. I know I don't need this lens but it seems to be very good for such a compact lens, very well made and will no doubt be lovely to use unlike modern fly by wire AF lenses which just work in a functional sort of way and are sometimes not very nice to MF with.
 
woof woof said:
There's a Sony 55mm f1.8 v Voigtlander 50mm f2 apo comparison on Fred Miranda...

https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1625777/41

There's a difference but what percentage of pictures this will be visible in and if it really matters or not are good questions :D

I'm still hovering over the buy button. I know I don't need this lens but it seems to be very good for such a compact lens, very well made and will no doubt be lovely to use unlike modern fly by wire AF lenses which just work in a functional sort of way and are sometimes not very nice to MF with.
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The difference in CA is actually rather obvious pixel peeping. The difference in sharpness not as much.
CA rarely bothers me so its not something I'd spend huge loads of money or space to avoid.
 
I actually like a bit of false colour and fringing and all the rest now and again :D I think some pictures can look unreal as the kit and post capture processing can show things cleaner and clearer than we can see them. Even with my old crappy film era lenses sometimes shooting into the sun or when there are big differences between shadow and highlight the final image isn't what I saw because I couldn't see the scene properly :D

I still sort of want that lens though.
 
woof woof said:
There's a Sony 55mm f1.8 v Voigtlander 50mm f2 apo comparison on Fred Miranda...

https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1625777/41

There's a difference but what percentage of pictures this will be visible in and if it really matters or not are good questions :D

I'm still hovering over the buy button. I know I don't need this lens but it seems to be very good for such a compact lens, very well made and will no doubt be lovely to use unlike modern fly by wire AF lenses which just work in a functional sort of way and are sometimes not very nice to MF with.
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I bought my Voigtländer lenses through Robert White. Now and again they run cashback offers. I got my 40mm for something like £679 instead of £749 so if you did later decide to sell on, you aren't losing ;)
 
woof woof said:
There's a Sony 55mm f1.8 v Voigtlander 50mm f2 apo comparison on Fred Miranda...

https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1625777/41

There's a difference but what percentage of pictures this will be visible in and if it really matters or not are good questions :D

I'm still hovering over the buy button. I know I don't need this lens but it seems to be very good for such a compact lens, very well made and will no doubt be lovely to use unlike modern fly by wire AF lenses which just work in a functional sort of way and are sometimes not very nice to MF with.
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Hi Allan,

As I've never heard of Fred Miranda before, Is this a US Website only catering for the US?

Cheers
 
Gandalf said:
Hi Allan,

As I've never heard of Fred Miranda before, Is this a US Website only catering for the US?

Cheers
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I think he's American but there are certainly people from the UK and all over posting on that site... we might even know some of them :D

I like to have a look now and again because they have some good tests and discussions on some lenses that don't get a lot of coverage elsewhere... like the Voigtlander lenses or even old film era primes.

I can't post there as I think they don't allow people with free emails to post, I think you have to have an email address that you paid for and of course I'm waaaay too tight to pay for an email address.
 
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Gandalf said:
Hi Allan,

As I've never heard of Fred Miranda before, Is this a US Website only catering for the US?

Cheers
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Pretty sure there's a European contingent there too. FM were a great source of info about Nikon and other lenses too.
 
LeeRatters said:
I bought my Voigtländer lenses through Robert White. Now and again they run cashback offers. I got my 40mm for something like £679 instead of £749 so if you did later decide to sell on, you aren't losing ;)
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I bought my 35mm f1.4 and 40mm f1.2 from RW, I had a 25mm f0.95 MFT lens but I can't remember where I got it, maybe from him too.

I'm still thinking about that 50mm f2. I don't need it but it's a nice lens.

I don't know where I'd sell a Voigtlander lens. I sold the 25mm here but not for a very good price and as has been noticed some stuff struggles here now. I really don't know what interest I'd get in the 40mm f1.2 and I'd probably get zero interest in the 35mm f1.4 as it's only me seems to like it.

Not that I'm a committed Voigtlander fan, it's just that they're well made manual lenses with old style controls and handling unlike some of the more modern in design execution Zeiss manual lenses which to me look more like modern AF lenses with an aperture ring.
 
woof woof said:
I think some pictures can look unreal as the kit and post capture processing can show things cleaner and clearer than we can see them.
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This is an increasing problem these days. Many pictures are over-engineered - maybe just because we can. For me, a picture needs to have heart, rather than being an exposition of how much money we've spent and how many knobs we've twiddled. Something in particular that I notice is that edges (think of a skyline, say) are over-defined, and the effect is that of a paper cutout pasted in. The look is unsettlingly artificial.

I suspect that many of the perpetrators are in fact innocents, and don't fully realise what they're up to. Their 'seeing' is immature.
 
woof woof said:
I think he's American but there are certainly people from the UK and all over posting on that site... we might even know some of them :D

I like to have a look now and again because they have some good tests and discussions on some lenses that don't get a lot of coverage elsewhere... like the Voigtlander lenses or even old film era primes.

I can't post there as I think they don't allow people with free emails to post, I think you have to have an email address that you paid for and of course I'm waaaay too tight to pay for an email address.
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ancient_mariner said:
Pretty sure there's a European contingent there too. FM were a great source of info about Nikon and other lenses too.
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I tried joining years ago with my old 'Blueyonder' Telewest/Virgin Media email address & it wouldn't ever let me. I then 'lost' access to that e-mail address as it originated from my first house/pre-divorce days etc so I went for an 'Outlook.com' address - that works on FM & allows sign up (y)
 
droj said:
This is an increasing problem these days. Many pictures are over-engineered - maybe just because we can. For me, a picture needs to have heart, rather than being an exposition of how much money we've spent and how many knobs we've twiddled. Something in particular that I notice is that edges (think of a skyline, say) are over-defined, and the effect is that of a paper cutout pasted in. The look is unsettlingly artificial.

I suspect that many of the perpetrators are in fact innocents, and don't fully realise what they're up to. Their 'seeing' is immature.
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Well, it's fashion - they might be guilty of enjoying the effect, not so innocent. It's like the fashion for a particular kind of bokeh that the human eye never sees, or 'milky/silky' water scenes from long exposures. These are all artificial, but occasionally pleasing (YMMV) misrepresentations of something real.

What I think is true is that sometimes the effects are added because the image doesn't tell a story on its own. On those occasions, "the tail is wagging the dog". IMHO.
 
droj said:
This is an increasing problem these days. Many pictures are over-engineered - maybe just because we can. For me, a picture needs to have heart, rather than being an exposition of how much money we've spent and how many knobs we've twiddled. Something in particular that I notice is that edges (think of a skyline, say) are over-defined, and the effect is that of a paper cutout pasted in. The look is unsettlingly artificial.

I suspect that many of the perpetrators are in fact innocents, and don't fully realise what they're up to. Their 'seeing' is immature.
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Many years ago my art teacher told me to draw what I see not what I know to be there. With even my lowly A7 and lenses, old creaking CS5 and next to non existent processing skills I can sometimes end up with pictures that show more than I could see. And I do have 20/20 vision, but they don't zoom.

I suppose it depends what we want to end up with. An accurate capture and representation of what we saw or something else.
 
I rather suspect we (photographers) have been confusing aberrations caused by equipment with creativity and artistic representation for a long time - probably since HFT. So someone uses a plate camera for the look it gives to some otherwise very mundane images and gets lauded for their artistic ability, when a large part of the time it's just the equipment plus some carefully crafted statements to encourage the right thinking in the viewer. Cynical?
 
Forget the photo it's the noise in it that really count's :)
 
woof woof said:
DPR announce the most important camera of the 2010's according to a readers poll...

https://www.dpreview.com/articles/0...he-most-important-camera-of-the-2010s?slide=4

I urge you not to read the comments... they're mind melting.

You have been warned... Don't read those comments...
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Haha the comments are brilliant. I still don’t get why the A7 was a game changer tbh, that crown should really go to something like the EM5, Sony really only did the same thing but bigger.
 
I suppose the key is that it's a readers poll so we're lucky something called CameraMcCameraface didn't win.

I'd have thought that the GF1 and whatever the Olympus equivalent was started mirrorless and were quite significant, but there you go.

That GF1 and 20mm f1.7 cost me £733.99 from Wex in 9/11/2009. The A7 and 28-70mm cost £1,549 from Wex on 8/11/2013.
 
snerkler said:
Haha the comments are brilliant. I still don’t get why the A7 was a game changer tbh, that crown should really go to something like the EM5, Sony really only did the same thing but bigger.
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I think, and there's no disrespect from me in this, that M43 and to an extent even APS-C are still viewed as toys, and the A7 was the first *proper* camera to go mirrorless for the mass market.
 
ancient_mariner said:
I think, and there's no disrespect from me in this, that M43 and to an extent even APS-C are still viewed as toys, and the A7 was the first *proper* camera to go mirrorless for the mass market.
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I think you're right. If the A7 series hadn't been launched but MFT, the A6xxx series and Fuji's were selling like hot cakes would Canon and Nikon have introduced FF mirrorless systems and ceased development of FF lenses? Maybe they would have got there eventually but I'm sure the A7 series has made them move faster. In that sense maybe the poll is right.
 
ancient_mariner said:
I think, and there's no disrespect from me in this, that M43 and to an extent even APS-C are still viewed as toys, and the A7 was the first *proper* camera to go mirrorless for the mass market.
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I understand that people (wrongly) think that but to say Sony’s a game changer when something similar was already out before is wrong,... imo.
Bobsyeruncle said:
And better...:)
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Bigger yes, but better? Depends what aspect you’re looking at. They’ve certainly done better with the A9, but the EM1-2 and EM1x can certainly hold their own in performance compared to other cameras.
 
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