Sony Nex 7 meets Olympus Pen Glass for a brand new synergy of Power and Glory !!!

FrankenSony.  OlympenStein. Fun via the U.S. Mail.

Even I have to admit that the headline for this particular blog is way over the top. Hyperbole taken to a new level. But it's a quiet Friday and I'm temporarily stuck inside due to violent yet welcome thunderstorm. Something's got to give.

I've had good luck with the mail this week. On Monday I got my Nikon Lens to Sony Alpha camera, lens adapter. I'm using it to connect brilliant old Nikon F macro lenses to my a77's.  They work on the camera and the lenses are quite good despite their age. I plan to use them for a food shoot next Friday. Testing all next week.  On Thurs. I got a nice check from my publisher.  Delayed gratification for projects finished long ago...  Then today, just before the thunderstorm struck and scared the crap out of my dog (not literally) I checked the mail box and found another adapter I'd been anxious to put my hands on:  The Olympus Pen F to Sony Nex body adapter. Woo Hoo. 

I ordered the Fotodiox adapter from Amazon and I'm happy with it.  For about $40 I can mount all the cool Olympus Pen F lenses on the front of my Sony Nex camera, manually focus with righteously good focus peaking and then slam away with 24 megapixel, state of the art files. 

The first lens I put on the rig was my favorite, the 60mm f1.5. I can hardly wait to get out and shoot with it. With the APS-C sensor the lens becomes a 90mm (e) portrait lens with a wicked fast maximum aperture.  And in my experience it's plenty sharp.  I'm heading out to pick up Ben from a video project he's shooting today and I think I'll put one of the 38mm's on the camera. You know how much I love a fast 50mm (e) on my street shooting cameras...

So, now my poor, optically limited Nex system has, in addition to the Sony lenses, a 20mm f3.5 (nice 30mm e), an f4 and an f2.8 25mm set (37mm e), a 38mm (57mm e), a fast 40mm 1.4 (60mm e),the 60mm 1.5 (90mm e), 70mm f2 (105mm e), the 50-90mm zoom (75-135 e) and a 150mm f4 (225mm e).  If I add something wide, like the 16mm I guess I'll be set.

Test images and walking about images coming soon to a blog near you...

Summertime in Austin. Hot and lazy. It's all good.

Here we are in the middle of August and everything is going according to history and precedent. The jobs have fallen off to zero, the temperatures have gone through the roof and everyone left in Austin is burrowing down somewhere cool like the frog that lives under the faucet drip in the garden outside my front door.

This image of Noellia was taken at a popular spot in the middle of Austin. It's the stream that comes from the Barton Springs spillway and flows on to Lady Bird Lake, which runs through the center of downtown Austin.  The water is from an underground spring and is a constant 69 or 70 degrees.  People come with dogs, picnic baskets, little kids and whatever else to spend hours frolicking in the stream and staying cool.

We headed to the Springs because Noellia wanted some new images for her portfolio and she wanted "outside."  Okay by me.

This was taken with the Sony Nex 7 and either the kit lens or the 50mm 1.8.  I just don't remember which. Too hot to remember.  I knew I needed a little bit of fill flash but I'd never cracked the flash menu on the camera before and I've only used the Sony HVL-58 AM flash on a few occasions and then on complete automatic with a Sony a77.  What the hell.  I gave it a try.

I put the flash on a short, off camera cord, put it in ttl-auto, dialed it down a couple of stops and shot.  I had the camera set to manual exposure, 1/250th of second and in the territory of f 5.6.  I chimped a couple of times to fine tune the flash ratio and then we moved on.

My big mistake of the day was not tossing the cameras to one side and throwing everyone into the water.  That would have been even more fun.

According to all the test reports my (fill in the blank) lens is not sharp in the corners.

Hmm. I'm a portrait photographer.  Do I really need ultra-sharp corners?

I love manufactured conundrums.  How could I not? I was in the ad business for years before becoming a full time photographer.  We thrived on finding the "pain" for consumers and then giving them a "solution".  "The Malls are too crowded?  We've got acres of free parking!!!"

I was thinking about this after I caught myself mindlessly reading a lens review of the Sony Nex 18-55mm lens on SLRgear.com. They have a nifty-charty thing that shows the performance of the lens you might be considering. It uses colors to show you how sharp a lens is at different apertures and different focal lengths and in different areas of the frame. But here's the issue for me:  I think that the only lenses that test really well on flat charts are macro lenses meant to do well when photographing flat charts because they are made to photograph flat charts.  The rest of the lenses that I'm interested in don't really need to do that, do they?

But the test sites need us to be fearful about picking lenses so they can get eyeballs.  The information can be useful but only if you apply it to your ways of working...

When I looked at the performance of the kit lens for the Nex system I at first was excited to see that, even wide open, it was very sharp and performed very well in the center of the lens.  The air was let out of my balloon when I read on and did all the interactive stuff with the cool graphic sliders. Seems the lens is not as sharp on the corners.  In fact, you've got to stop it down to f8 to get really good corner performance.  Most reviewers tell me that the kit lens won't come close to providing enough performance (across the full frame of the sensor) to work well with the 24 megapixel sensor in the Nex7.  And then there's all the fringing I might find when I do high contrast photographs of little, naked tree branches against the stark sky.  Oh my.

I let my sometimes rational brain take all the information and put it into my mental processing blender and it came out giving the lens a big C+. A snob like me would never consider shooting with it.  Never mind that I actually love lenses that have a high core of sharpness wide open and then gracefully devolve on the edges and corners.  And that includes most of the portrait lenses I have used to best effect, as well as nearly every 50mm lens on the market.

Oh the damage we do to ourselves when we have too much information and not enough theoretical depth to process the information optimally for our own individual needs.

All lenses have curvature of field.  Some are corrected for this and they make really good optics for people who need to photograph stuff that has straight lines.  These might be architectural photographers, still life photographers or technical photographers.  The overwhelming majority of the lenses we buy are used to document life around us.  And the majority of the lenses I buy are pressed into the service of photographing people.  We generally don't need stringent edge to edge sharpness and total lack of optical faults when we use lenses wide open.  We need optics that are crispy enough to do the job.

Many years ago Leica made lenses that the best photographers in the world absolutely swore by.  They still do. But strangely enough, when the lenses from Leica were tested in conventional, flat target ways, they never seemed to put up numbers that matched what we saw on film (or now on our monitors).  Then I read a white paper on optimum design for lenses based on their intended use and I got it. To make a fast, high aperture lens you need to make some compromises.  To make a zoom that's consistent across the zoom range you've got to make some different  compromises and if you want a flat field lens that does good single planes of focus and even illumination you've got to make still other compromises.  The trick is to test the different kinds of lenses and find the ones that work for your style of shooting.  There a few perfect lenses that I can actually afford.  The designers can correct for a lot but would you be willing to pay $10,000 for a 10 pound f4 prime lens to hang on the front of your tiny camera?

And you have to know what compromises are involved.  For example, the 85mm Zeiss 1.4 lens is a super duper optic but in order to make it fast and sharp Zeiss sacrificed corner sharpness wide open and also the design of the lens means that you'll get appreciable focus shift as you stop down from f1.4 to f4.0.  Especially at closer (portrait) distances.  The work arounds are to only focus and shoot at f4 and smaller or to do all of your fine focusing for close up work with a magnified live view image and with the lens stopped down to the actual shooting aperture.  And Zeiss and Lloyd Chambers will tell you that.  You can't have it every which way.

So what am I getting at?  Only that the two lenses I bought for the Sony Nex 7, the 18-55 and the 50mm 1.8 are both more than sharp enough to make wonderful portraits in my style.  Even when used wide open.  The "nifty 50" that everyone loves for the Canon has pretty atrocious performance on the test charts as do most of the 50mm 1.4 lenses from the major makers.  The thing that makes them popular though is the sharp center core and the ability to use them at faster apertures than most zoom-only users ever dream of.  You can't have everything in a lens.  That's why I have separate Macro lenses for those special moments when I find myself longing to shoot test charts.

Measurements are great but interpreting correctly is the part that counts.

Yes, I've gone crazy with the Lightroom presets today.  I'm sure I'll recover.

I think I'm getting the hang of this Sony Nex-7 stuff. Need more practice.

My friend, Noellia the actor, just wrapped up a six month project for Disney and came home to Austin to visit friends and family. She called me up to see if we could get together and spend a little time shooting some photos.  I first met Noellia when I cast her for an ad campaign nearly nine years ago.  She had just turned eighteen and answered a casting call.  We've done many projects together since then and she was a consistent and wonderfully patient model for me during the production of four of my five books on photography.

I thought our "around the town" photo session would be the perfect chance to try out the the little Sony Nex7 and see of what it was capable.  My first intention was to shoot a bunch of images with the bigger a77 camera and to kind of toss the Nex7 into the mix from time to time. But I started out with the 50mm 1.8 lens on the front of the Nex7 and, after a few minutes going back and forth between the two cameras I tossed the a77 into my camera bag and leaned on the little camera for the rest of the day.  Nearly all of the images in this particular blog were shot wide open at f 1.8. I thought the lens performed very well when used wide open.  I also like the focal length and, when used at the right distance from my subject, it was good at throwing backgrounds out of focus. 

I'd read so many articles and reviews that mention two "faults" in this camera.  The first one being battery life that's limited to about 350 to 400 exposures.  I was careful to bring two fully charged batteries along with me but surprised to find that I shot nearly 1,000 frames and still had over 50% power remaining on my first battery at the end. (I don't post-chimp much and never use the built in flash...) The second fault was said to be the rather logically opaque and chaotic menu interface and dial set-up.  It didn't seem very daunting to me.  If you shoot in aperture priority your left control dial takes care of selecting apertures while the right side dial gives you immediate exposure compensation control.  Easy as pie.  Once you figure out that a couple touches on the navigation button gets you to the white balance menu you're pretty much done messing with stuff. I don't change ISO frequently and I tend to find modes I like and to stay with them.  

We started our photo spree at the Barton Springs spillway and then walked down to the bridge that brings Barton Springs road over the miniature train bridge and pedestrian bridge on the east side of Zilker Park.  (The image above was shot under the bridge).  The day was steamy and hot but we didn't pay much attention to the heat.  We were busy having fun photographing and catching up.  Noellia, being the consumate NYC professional actor brought her own make-up and hair pro along with her...

After playing around in the park we headed downtown to make some fun images in the open shade of the buildings on the south side of Second Street.  Of course we ended up at Caffe Medici where we shot with abandon.  (The owner, Michael, is very photo friendly).

I had heard from misguided reviews on the web that the Jpegs out of this camera were mediocre compared to other cameras so, of course, I chose to shoot everything as a large, fine Jpeg.  In fact, I thought the jpegs were highly detailed and well mannered.  At a certain point I tossed everything but the Nex 7 and the 50mm 1.8 back in the bag and stuck the bag in the car.  Intellectually I like the idea of having other lens options.  Aesthetically, I like the black finished 18-55mm lens because it matches the body so well, but the reality is that the 50mm, on that cropped sensor is a pretty compelling match for the way I like to see stuff so I don't see it coming off the front of the camera any time soon.

The only thing I had problems with out in the field was setting the DRO (dynamic range optimizer).  I could get to it in the menu I just couldn't figure out how to change it.  Every thing else seemed pretty straightforward to me.

Noellia and I had a fun afternoon.  She got to see Ben.  Ben got to see her.  She reminded me of why I like to shoot professional actors.... it's the talent.  Tomorrow I'll go out and shoot more stuff with the new camera.  Me liking the Sony Nex 7 camera right now doesn't mean I think all other cameras are bad.  I just think this one is really good.

When you're shooting outside, fighting the sun, using a big modifier and you still need fast recycling and lots of righteous power with each pop. Then you need an Elinchrom Ranger RX.

Late last week, before all the Sony excitement, I wrote a piece about the Profoto Acute B 600 flash system. It's an elegant 600 w/s electronic flash system that provides the user with about 150 flashes. Recycles at full power in about three seconds and is simple and straightforward to use. The interesting feature is that the system does all this while running off its own internal battery. Go back and read that review here.  

So, electronic flash units aren't the same kind of bling that makes forum dwellers salivate, like a cool new camera body or a Zeiss or Leica lens.  You can't wear one around your neck (comfortably) and no one ever asks about them at meet-ups so why would any serious  photographer drop serious cash on something like that? And who in his right mind would own two different battery powered high output electronic flash systems?

Apparently most people in their right minds don't. But I do.  When I'm out shooting by myself and we're going fast from location to location I usually default to my Profoto Acute B system but when I get really serious I turn to the big daddy of photon thrashing, the Elinchrom Ranger RX Speed AS.  What does it do that the Profoto can't?  How about 250 full power, 1100 watt second flashes with short durations and a fast recycle time from shot to shot? How about pushing power through two heads?  And for all the people who drool over the idea of weather sealing...how about....weather sealing?

The Elinchrom Ranger RX series is Elinchrom's big entry into the world of self-contained electronic flash units. It's built to industrial standards and it's made to take a lot of crap and keep flashing. But since it's also Swiss made it's built to do all of this without accidents, like frying photographers who do stupid things with high voltage lights. 

The main unit weighs about 18 pounds and is, in fact, weather sealed. Every port and socket on the top has the flash equivalent of screw down crowns to keep water and dirt out of the sockets.  Notice also that every cap has its own "minder cable" so they never get lost.

Before I go any further I wanted to show you a fairly typical use (for me) of the flash.  We were basically in a mud pit the day we took this image. It was a hot, humid summer day in a week that saw sun and then torrential rains and then sun again.  We were shooting on a highway project north of Austin. The Elinchrom pack was overpowering direct sun and shooting through a softbox type modifier that was placed six or eight feet away.  If you look at the soft transition to shadows and the smooth tonality you'll see that the modifier was pretty big.  The head was on a stout Lowell stand with a leveling leg and the stand was sandbagged with forty pounds of weight.  We stuck the end of each leg on a bit of board so they wouldn't sink into the soft ground.  The Elinchrom box sat on wet ground and just flat out worked. We probably shot 60 or so shots before I got exactly what I wanted. And every one of those frames was absolutely consistent when it came to flash output.  After we got this shot we nailed five or six more, in different locations, using the same basic set up.  I didn't worry about running out of power. I had an extra, fully charge replacement battery ready to go.  Could I do this with a bunch of speedlights? Sure, give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I can move the world.  But is it efficient, effective and smart to do it that way? Probably not.  Would clients be impressed if I spent precious time rigging up eight or ten or twenty speedlights, setting them all up with radio slaves, rigging them so they all could fire into the same diffuser? Definitely not.   It's classic: Hobby vs. Work.

Disclosure: This is not "borrowed" equipment. I'm not reviewing a weekend loaner.  I bought this unit and the accessories with my US dollars about three years ago. I am writing from the perspective of having used it over and over again for paying work and for producing images for books. I am writing to praise and demystify the tools rather than to convince you to rush out and buy them for your child's piano recital or to use to augment the light in your quest to capture birds in flight.....  I am not being paid by Elinchrom or any other entity to write this! End disclosure.

The only thing that is less than elegant about the Elinchrom set up is their use of a proprietary sync cord plug.  It's a screw in affair that is hard to find in a quick pinch.  The box has a built in optical slave and you can also get a "Skyport" radio trigger that will offer a lot of controls beyond just triggering the flash.  But I tend to be old school so I've bought five or six of the Elinchrom cords, just in case, and an adapter (shown below) that will allow the pack to be triggered by a conventional quarter inch plug sync cord. This and the use of the 7mm diameter for umbrella shafts are the only two problems with buying state of the art Swiss and Swedish lighting equipment. That and the price....

The top panel is sexy and utilitarian at the same time.  The entire control system is touch activated and the entire top panel with the touch buttons is one sealed interface. You could leave it in the rain but I don't recommend using it that way because you'll have to figure out how to waterproof the heads and that is problematic.  Note also the black lug on the right side of the unit just under the sync adapter. It's there so you can attach a carrying strap.  The strap is for your assistant when you find just the right location about a half mile from any navigable roadway...

The Ranger RX has a seven stop power range and it's shown on the LED panel on the top of the box so you can always go back to a fixed output setting.  There's an audible alert signal, a fast/slow recycle control (more shots per battery at the reduced recycle speed setting), an optical slave on/off button and an "auto off" button that powers down the unit after five minutes so you don't waste your battery in case the unit is accidentally activated during shipping.  The smaller port to the right of the flash head sockets is the charger socket. But batteries can also be charged outside the box. 

The batteries are substantial. They weigh around ten pounds each. They are sealed lead acid batteries which is great. They don't have a memory effect and can be charged and re-charged without having to be totally drained first. Batteries have two natural enemies, freezing temperatures and high temperatures.  I store them in my studio and they've lasted and kept their potency for three year's now. If you look at the image just above you'll see a round, black circle on the lower part of the box.  There's one on either side.  These are actually release buttons for the battery packs.  The releases are covered with a rubberized substance that maintains weather-proofing.  You push on both buttons simultaneously and lift the body of the box straight up.  Replacing the battery is as easy as putting the box back down on a fresh battery and making sure the release locks click in.

Shown with a shoe mount flash for scale.

The Ranger RX system comes in two flavors. One version, the AS, is asymmetrical.  With one head plugged in the range of power options runs from the minimum right up to 1100 watt seconds. With a second head plugged in the power is divided asymmetrically between the two heads.  One head gets 66.7 percent of available power while the other head gets 33.3 percent of the power.  If you  power the system up or down the ratio between the heads doesn't change.

A second version of the pack is just the plain vanilla RX pack. It features two flash head capability but the power with two head plugged in is equally divided between the two heads.  I prefer the asymmetrical arrangement because I often use a gridded, direct light on backgrounds and it always needs less power than my main head which is nearly always in a light-hungry modifier.

There are also two different flash heads available for the system.  The "A" heads are distinguished by their fast duration and the "S" heads are the standard duration heads.  If you want to freeze action then the "A" heads will get you there....quicker.  With an "A" head plugged into the lower powered socket on an AS pack you can get flash durations of 1/5000th of a second with a fast attack time and a short "burn" time.  If you don't need that capability (for ballet leaps, freezing champagne cork splashes, etc.) then you can get by just fine with the "S" heads.

All Elinchrom flash heads and monolights come with the same retainer ring collar which snaps into place and then locks with a bayonet ring. The unit above is a Creative Lighting speed ring made out of heavy, cast aluminum and capable of holding up my favorite extra large Octabank.

All of the heads come with a 100 watt, peanut style, tungsten modeling light.  Unlike the Profoto units there's no additional power source to run the modeling lights.  They are engaged by pushing the modeling light touch switch on the control interface.  Push once and you get fifteen seconds of illumination followed by automatic shut off. Push twice in rapid succession and you get thirty seconds of guiding light.

The bottom line is that professionals see advantages in using professional tools. The heads are robust and well designed. For people with special lighting requirements the ability to choose a head designed for fast flash durations is rare and valuable.  The ability to use this pack in bright light, close in, at half power and fast recycle means being able to shoot hundreds of flashes with short recycling times.  Almost a must for fashion work.  The ability to change out relatively inexpensive battery packs in the field means being able to work through long days without ever having to look for a plug.  The weather-sealed pack design means not fearing splashes or puddles.

People ask if there is a difference in the quality of the light output between expensive and finely designed systems like the Elinchroms and the Profotos.  The engineers would tell you "of course." It's really all about precision.  Bigger and more expensive capacitors means better power filtering. That means more duration and color temperature consistency.  Shorter flash durations yield crisper results.  Faster T.01 and T.05 times means less color variation over the burn time of the exposure.  

I spent a few years convinced that I could do my work with a set of Alien Bees units and a couple of Vagabond batteries but it's just not the same.  The work I do with the Elinchroms has fewer color shifts as I reduce or increase power.  The flash tubes seem less prone to causing UV excitation and the general quality of the hardware means I never have a broken stand adapter or detached speedring at an inopportune time.

Am I suggesting that everyone rush out and buy a set?  If you want to spend years shooting ads and portraits on sun drenched locations then you should really consider the advantages.  If you do this for a hobby and your aren't in the 1% you'd probably be considered crazier than me for buying them.  It all depends on what you have in your mind when it comes to lighting stuff up.

I do know this, in situations where you need f11 or f16 at 1/250th of second at ISO 100 shooting into a 4 foot by 6 foot Chimera softbox from about eight feet away you can't do much better without a good extension cord.  You'll certainly spend more trying to do it with many multiples of shoe mounted speed lights and handfulls of radio triggers.  You'll outperform the Speedlighters and DIY'ers on the number of flashes and the frequency of flashed every step of the way.  And you'll have a better quality of light into the bargain.

I find myself using the Profoto Acute B and the Elinchrom Ranger as studio lights too.  They are so familiar to me know that I barely need to think about them while I'm setting up and shooting.

Final interesting note:  The quality of the light between the Profoto and the Elinchrom is very, very close.  That means on really big shoots I can use the Elinchrom for my main light and the Profoto for a background light.  It's good to have reliable tools when your livelihood depends on getting everything just right... miles from nowhere.  And each, packed into the Honda, can serve as a ready back-up for the other. Buy once, use often.

A short follow up about the nature of blogging my purchase of the Sony Nex7.

Taken with a Sony R1 that I bought in 2005.  Still works just right.  Has an EVF. 

I'd like to get one point right out in front:  I don't blog in order to sell you cameras. If I did I'd have ads all up and down the sides of the blog.  I blog to tell you how I operate as a photographer and as a person. I like buying and using different cameras and, if you read this blog and many other popular photography blogs on the web, chances are that you like new cameras as well.  One thing I think you'll notice over time is that it's rare for me to request a "review" camera from a manufacturer which I then write about for no other reason than to boost affiliate or "click thru" sales. Generally I write about cameras that I've researched and then gone out and purchased with my own funds because I like the camera.  I then use the camera to take images and I write about my use of the camera. When I've wrung all the enjoyment out of a camera I release it back into the wild and re-bait the hook and try again. No one goes fly fishing just to catch fish...if you need to catch fish dynamite and a big net will always be more efficient...

In the past six months we've had lots of new cameras come to market that are very, very popular.  If my sole intention was to maximize sales to Amazon you would have seen "in depth" reviews of the Fuji XPro-1, the Canon 5Dmk3, the Nikon D800 and D800e (lots of fodder there for an extended collection of blogs with links...), the Sony RX100 and, of course, the Olympus OMD.
In fact, if I'd purchased an OMD I could probably have wrung twenty or thirty long blogs about it by now. All with links galore. I could probably make a meager living just selecting the most popular camera on the Amazon sales chart and gushing wildly about it until the next popular camera overtakes it. All sales all the time.

If I wanted to differentiate myself from other reviewers I could go after the cameras from companies with smaller market shares like Pentax, Samsung and Ricoh.  But the reality is that when you come here and read stuff you can be pretty certain that, when it comes to cameras and lenses, I've bought it (skin in the game), I am beholden to no camera company for any income or free product and, at the time, I probably thought the camera or lens was interesting. I'm certainly not seeing much affiliate cash for my many essays on old Pen lenses or the ethics of photographing on the streets....

Some photographers seem to think that once you've  committed by buying into a system that you are locked to that brand for the foreseeable future.  Most blog readers who come here to my site are not in the photographic profession full time.  For them camera purchases are just one of many things they buy from their family's discretionary income. They can't expense and depreciate their creative tools.  And in their business life most things are provided for them by their employers. They don't wake up one day and say, "Oh crap, Windows really does suck so hard. I'm going out today and have my IT department replace my machine with a new Apple MacBook Pro Retina machine!"  Most people either don't have the power to do that or they have become complacent about what they use because it's almost as good.  And it works for the ranges of tasks that are part of their employment.

As several of our fellow VSL members who live in India have pointed out to me more than once there is also an income disparity between the U.S. and a number of other countries such that the purchase of a new camera constitutes scrimping and saving for a good long while before diving in and making a purchase. This is another way of being "locked."

I am lucky to be part of a group of photographers who still actually work in their field, doing photography.  I don't intend to quit. I'm not trying to become wealthy or famous by blogging. I am not selling a DVD or an endless series of workshops. I'm doing the work.  I'm trying to reach out to like minded people and share the process, sometimes logical and sometimes misguided, that drives my decisions, colors my art and moves my excitement of being involved in the media forward. Part of that is trying new stuff and incorporating what I learn into the not inconsiderable store of stuff I've found out along the way to middle age.  And it's nice to have a certain sense of community...

Someone commented on a forum after I wrote about buying the Sony Nex7 that they "didn't get the whole Kirk Tuck brand."  Well who could? I am not a product. I am not a mission statement and I'm certainly not a cult leader issuing orders about which "holy" camera to buy. Branding is for products and multinational corporations.  I have a reputation instead of a brand.  To clients I am a reliable supplier of content. I work to supply images for their marketing needs.  To my vendors I am a source of income but also a good referral source.  To my readers I hope I am believable as a normal, average, flawed human being, plagued with the same indecisions and foibles as they are when it comes to dealing with the tidal change in the overall application of photography.  If I had all the answers I would be selling them to the highest bidder.  What I am trying to do here at the VSL is share what I feel and what I see in the market place.  I have the opportunity to shift gear around to suit my needs.  I have a great local store that does fair trade-ins and consignments.  The value of recent gear that I elect to shed doesn't drop in value to zero just because I'm no longer interested in it.

I've been playing with the micro four thirds cameras and lenses long before most of the rank and file forum rats discovered them.  I've plumbed the depths and done some nice work with the cameras and lenses. Call it gear ADHD or whatever but I wanted to try something new.  My gear allegiance right now is to the company that makes the best EVF. In my mind that's the change that M4:3 brought to the table (with the Olympus VF-2) and that's what is driving the market.  Sony's EVF's in the a65, a77 and Nex 7 are the best in the industry right now.  That's where my interest lies.

I'm not asking anyone to follow me into the store and do what I do, or like what I like.  That's crazy.  If I gave a crap about high ISO performance, if that was my primary metric, I'd be shooting with a Fuji X Pro-1, and trying to figure out how to make it focus consistently...  If I wanted the best IS in the world I'd join the long line and snap up an Olympus OMD.  If I wanted the ultimate in pixels there's a Nikon D800 at the local camera shop that could be mine within the half hour.  No.  I like the idea of bringing a finder up to my eye and seeing all the parameters of imagemaking beautifully and instantly resolved in the viewfinder BEFORE I snap the shutter.  The ultrafast electronic first curtain shutter. It's an imaging paradigm shift.

You don't need to like the same thing.  I probably won't care about the Sony brand when the other two "majors" finally get dragged into the current century and implement real EVF's in their top tier shooting cameras either.  But I don't think that qualifies me for permanent, online psychoanalysis.  The blog is a form of entertainment, for me and for you. It also keeps my books (which I worked really hard and long to produce) in the public eye.  I love it when they actually get sold.  But I don't flog them in every other blog post, nor do I flog products I don't use in every other blog post.  So, brand addicted gear nuts:  Get over it.

This is a blog, not a buying guide for people who are too something to do their own research and trust their own tastes.

Something interesting about our out of control acquisition: http://www.pixiq.com/article/the-ugly-truth-behind-our-beautiful-cameras

(Full disclosure about affiliate advertising.  I take advantage of Amazon's affiliate program by putting links to products I blog about in the VSL blog. When a reader clicks on a link and buys something from Amazon I get a small commission which does not effect the price a reader pays on Amazon. My total of commissions so far for the first week of August is.......drumroll.......$40 US.  Some weeks are a bit better and some are a little worse.

I am not currently accepting any placed advertising on the blog and have turned down requests from one of the biggest camera stores in the world to join their program.  I am not currently promoting workshops or collateral items.  I am not heading to Creative Live and, as a result, I am not flogging their programming either.

As an income generating venue I hope you'll agree with me that this has been a total loss.  A time sink hole. Financial quicksand. Just thought I'd be really upfront about it. I have one great hope: When I bring out the e-book of my first novel I hope people will read about it here and then buy it.  That's it.  All done.)

The strange saga of the Sony Nex 7...

I'm sure I didn't mean to do it. I was at Precision Camera and I must have tripped and fallen.  My credit card slipped out of my hand and shot across the sales floor just as one of my favorite store associates was walking by with a black and gray box.  The card landed on top of the box, hopping like water drops on hot oil, and the sales guy must of interpreted this wild gesture as a funny way to demand some new, fresh product.  By the time I picked myself up off the floor and dusted off my Costco five pocket blue jeans my sales associate already had a sale rung up and was busy suggesting additional product while convincing me to sign a liability waiver holding them harmless from my latest accident.  I must have been too stunned and bewildered to resist so I left the store with a nice plastic bag in one hand and yet another invoice in the other.  

Somehow I made it to the refuge of my favorite coffee shop (Caffe Medici actually makes really good decaffeinated cappuccinos)  and opened the bag to sort out what had just transpired. In the bag was a box with a Sony Nex 7 and a black 18-55mm kit lens.  Next to that box was a Sony 50mm 1.8 lens for the Nex system.  And, finally, at the bottom of the bag was a horribly expensive Sony InfoLithium battery for said camera.  Oh well, who am I to argue with the currents and whims of the universe? If the photo gods have thrust a package upon me it would be churlish to resist.   I headed home for the hoariest of rituals: the charging of the battery. Followed by the next most painful ritual: The rationalization to the spouse.

As you know I have been a long time proponent and user of products in the micro four thirds camera segment. I have owned Olympus EP2's and EP3's, EPL1's and EPL2's and I've both bought dedicated lenses for the system as well as adapting older, manual focus Pen lenses and Nikon Ais lenses to the system.  When I reviewed the EPL2 I went so far as to put a $5,000 Leica Summilux 35mm lens on the front for while.  I got interesting looks from the local high priests of Leica and humorous grins from the Olympus camp.  I've used the Panasonic G3 (much to the dismay of Olympus diehards) and even the GH2.

For a while I tried to isolate what it was about the Pens (other than their contrarian position in the market) that made me so excited about the system.  I liked the lightweight and small profile of the cameras.  Most of the lenses were quite good.  I really liked the electronic viewfinders.  It was a great system for walking around looking for fun stuff to shoot.  And for the first time since I joined this profession and hobby I found a plentiful supply of people who not only shared my interest and passion about the Pens but also loved to get together to shoot them, talk about them and compare notes.  In a sense, the feeling of belonging was a branch of social marketing that I find pretty specific to the Olympus Pen users.

So I thought it was very strange when, after three years of use, my passion for the cameras started to dwindle.  The Olympus OMD came out this year and has been an enormous and well deserved success.  Every time I pick one up and play with it I'm amazed at how cool that camera is.  But for some reason I could never bring myself to buy one. I could never get myself to go down the road of fleshing out a more complete and comprehensive system.  Or to put together a system that would take the place of larger cameras as my working system.  Or, to replace all the other systems with nothing but the Olympus cameras. I'd play with my friend's voluptuous black OMD, all tricked out with the grip and the new 75mm lens and I'd be seduced for the moment but as soon as I handed the camera back all the seduction faded away.  

Then it started to dawn on me.  I liked the Olympus Pen products (and I'm including the OMD in that mix) mostly because they were the first on the scene with a great electronic viewfinder and the whole idea of "pre-chimping" and having pre-shot control of everything you shoot was such a powerful concept that it became the strong core of my attraction for those cameras.  The VF-2 was always a better implementation of an EVF than anything Panasonic had come out with in the same product space.

But the whole time that I was buying and using the Pen cameras for my personal work I was also working my way through the larger DSLR systems, looking for the holy grail of industrial digital cameras for the way I work (which may be totally different than the way you work....). Up until this year I've mostly worked with Canon and Nikon systems but while I respect the image quality these cameras are capable of I was looking for a combination of that capability married to a system with a killer EVF.  Sony came along and they seem committed to an EVF future.  I took a chance and once I started working with their EVF everything else just faded.  

Recently a friend dropped a Nikon 800e by the studio and suggested that I keep it for a while and write a review about it.  I kept it for a day but every time I brought it up to my eye I remembered everything I didn't like about shooting without the amazing electronic preview and everything I really liked about the Sony SLT cameras.  At that moment it was clear to me that the pleasure I got from the Olympus Pen gear was,  in part,  a direct result of my working style with the EVF.  Now the Sonys were supplanting the Pen cameras by dint of having an even better EVF.  I realized that the whole issue of size was, for me, secondary to the way the camera actually functioned.

Once I started to use the a77 (Sony) on a day-in-day-out basis my appreciation for the new method of viewing my subjects continued to increase.  I started picking up the bigger Sony from my equipment tool case rather than a smaller m4:3 camera on those times I went out to shoot for myself.  I've gone into Precision Camera five or six times in the last month with the intention of buying an OMD but each time I played with the competing systems as well and I would leave uncommitted.  I rejected the Fuji X Pro 1 because of all the focusing issues (which I experienced first hand) and mostly because I was amazed to find that the hapless engineers at Fuji didn't provide an adjustable diopter.  I rejected the Leica M9 (the camera I really want) because I can never justify the price in a recession that's affected the art class so dramatically...  I'd already played with the Nikon 1 system and I was frustrated at not being able to buy any decent prime lenses for it.

I started playing with the Nex 7 when the shipments caught up to demand and at first I wasn't terribly interested.  The interface seemed wacky.  But over time I kept coming back again and again to play with the camera.  Finally something clicked and I understood the operating system and the interface.  The final sticks (that broke the camel's back) were the consistently good reviews across the web, coupled with the fact that you can add an adapter that will give you full, fast use of all the Sony Alpha lenses.  That, combined with the same capability that the m4:3 cameras have to use most other lenses in the market place, pushed me forward.

When I went to lunch with Ben today I started telling him all about the new camera.  He laughed. He thought I was making a joke.  When I insisted I was not joking he got very serious. His mother stepped in to assure him that his college savings account required two parent signatures for any withdrawals and he calmed down.  

It would be silly at this juncture for me to write a review of the camera.  I've only used it for several hundred frames.  I took it along with me today on a mid-afternoon walk and I was surprised at how quickly I learned the major points of the control. But I guess I should not have been too surprised as a lot of the menu implementation is the same as that in the SLT line.

Above.  A much more expensive hobby than photography...

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Sony Nex 7 let me give you a brief run down:  It's a relatively small, mirror-less camera which currently (along with the Sony a77 and a65) has the highest resolution, LED illuminated EVF on the market.  It takes dedicated Nex system lenses which are larger than the corresponding m4:3 lenses.  The camera has the same video engine as the a77 which makes it the state of the art in video for consumer cameras that do both disciplines.  And the other big feature that gets most of the headlines is the 24 megapixel APS-C sensor.  It's the same one used in the a77 but as there is no need for a mirror of any kind the Nex 7 handles ISO 3200 quite a bit better than it's rotund and mirrored cousin.

self portrait into a smudgy parking garage mirror.

The Nex 7 with kit lens is lighter than the OMD with grips and kit lens. I used the camera with the 50mm 1.8 lens all afternoon today and found the combo really nice.  If I had already made the step to the Olympus OMD I probably would not have been tempted, but there it is.

A 100% enlargement from the frame one above...

I've found a few of the downsides to the camera. Most have to do with the menu system.  Certain features only work in certain modes.  The dials are TOO configurable.  Stuff like that, mostly.  The one area in which the Olympus cameras trounce the Sony Nex 7 is in fast focus acquisition; the Sony is a slower camera to focus.  The battery life is pretty short as well. I expect I'll get right about 350-400 shots per charge once the battery has been through several more charge cycles.

The upside is that the files are incredibly sharp and detailed. And that includes all the stuff I shot today at ISO 800 (see images below in grocery store).  The image stabilization works quite well and I even channeled my friend, ATMTX, and shot some of the photographs below using the LCD finder on the back of the camera to sight and focus with. Horrors.  The camera handled everything I tried today but I really didn't push it much.  I'll know more about the camera when I've shot some studio portraits and also have done a few road trips with it.  

Are there any recent cameras on the market that can't do a great imaging job at ISO 100?

(tongue in cheek) Ahhh.  It's got those great Sony blues!

 Shot with modified "stinky baby diaper" hold.  Amazing auto ISO and IS.

Is there any modern camera that cake can't make look good?

 One of the features of the Sony Nex 7 is that it looks like a very nicely done hipster doofus point and shoot camera. I was able to shoot images inside several stores and no one batted an eye.  I loved walking around the chic grocery store/glamor bar on Sixth and Lamar snapping images of whatever caught my eye without the least hesitation.

I do think it's funny that I chose to buy the camera yesterday as it seems that Michael Johnston also handled one yesterday and mentioned it on his site today (the Online Photographer). I also think it's funny that my friend, ATMTX, wrote recently that he uses his Sony Nex 5 less and less these days in deference to his growing collection of Olympus cameras and lenses.  And one of my really good friends, Frank, seems to have found personal nirvana with his acquisition of the OMD.  We're all wired a bit differently I guess, and that's what makes this photography thing so much fun.

I put this building shot in for two reasons:  1. It shows off the  wonderfully sharp system and when blown up larger gives a good example of how well the camera and lens work.  But also, #2. A person from the UK wrote to tell me that he hates my building shots and that I live in a tiny, fly-speck of a town and I need to get out more.  This one (above) is just for him.

When I decided to move to the smaller Sony camera I made up my mind to "prune my optical equipment garden."  To that end I sold my Pen gear (all cameras with the older 12 megapixel sensors---not that earth shattering of an idea) and I am also contemplating selling off my collection of the original Pen manual focus lenses.  There was more inventory in the drawer than I remembered...  

Edit: quick on his feet, reader Corwin rescues my Pen lens collection by letting me know that there's actually a Pen FT to Sony Nex lens adapter.  I ordered one and I'll keep using the Pen lenses.  Only now I'll be able to use them with focus peaking. Major score.

Finally, the menus are much more similar between the two different Sony models I use in my work, the a77 and now the Nex7.  It's already much less confusing to go back and forth.  And I don't need to carry the manual around with me in my back pocket.  Well, I guess I'm off on a new imaging adventure. Thanks again for joining me in yet another Quixotic Quest...

I wonder if Cervantes would have been a camera collector?