The A7R – Day Two – The Camera Forum®

The A7R – Day Two

Day Two: I begin testing lenses and learning the camera setting options for the new Sony A7R. The A7R with its high megapixel count should be capable of producing professional level advertising imagery. Does it? Short answer: With the right lens choices, yes it does. The video and all of the still photographs on this page were made using the Sony A7R. To learn a new camera system takes me some period of time. I approach it a bit differently than many. I rarely crack the instruction book until convinced it is a camera worth my time to invest in mastering it. Frankly, most aren’t. Many others fall by the wayside pretty quickly (Sadly, often the cameras with the most exciting potential). Not this time. The A7R has been full of positive surprises for me so far.

Sony has packed a whole lot to love inside this tiny little beast. It has riveting resolution with soft, malleable files – even the JPG’s! and rich, accurate color in both stills as well as the excellent video. I was very surprised how well matched these two hybrid media are already, needing very little further post processing to finished advertising quality files. Large beefy files cover 7360 × 4912 pixels in stills. The same surprise awaited me when switching over to video. I always like to establish a “baseline” when learning a new camera. The baseline is whatever the manufacturer ships the camera with as default settings. Once I see where everything sits at the defaults, then I feel confident going in and starting to make adjustments to suit my taste.

The A7R defaults are pretty darn amazing, as is the camera’s ability in both stills and video. But judge for yourself. I decided to put the A7R through what would be a normal routine for me doing a product shot or two in a day’s production work. I decided to photograph a wine bottle and also a new twist on a dramatic camera lens still life. I chose to shoot both of these with a Canon FD 35mm Tilt/Shift lens so I could play with the depth of focus. This is that lens below. I have done minor post processing adjustments to the still files, though not very many nor very radical. The lens I chose and my lighting setup does most of the “juice” work for me in camera. That’s right where I like it.