RE-CONCEIVED PERCEPTIONS
Some of the product testing I’ve been doing for this issue has challenged accepted wisdom, and that’s a good thing. In any pursuit, it’s easy to get locked into certain thoughts and practices that can actually end up being restrictive, preventing you from thinking outside the box.
Firstly, there was Canon’s fixed-aperture 600mm and 800mm supertelephotos for its RF mount full-frame mirrorless camera system. Wouldn’t you have liked to be a fly on the wall at that product planning meeting? You think we should do what? Are you mad? Photographers will never go for it.
These are legitimate concerns because we really are conditioned to having control over the setting of apertures – not just to manage exposures, but to play with depth-offield. Unless you’ve regularly used a mirror lens, not being able to adjust the aperture feels very alien indeed. For starters, shutterpriority auto exposure control doesn’t really work anymore – you might as well be using the manual mode – and working the light involves just that… work. You can’t just sit back and let the camera sort it all out because the fixed f/11 has already throttled back the exposure even before you get to grips with just how much light is available… or not. And then, of course, what are you generally shooting with a supertelephoto? Yup, stuff that moves, usually fast. This means higher shutter speeds and, of course, optical image stabilisation won’t help you here because it’s only designed to help you out when shooting at slower speeds. You can start to see why nobody has gone down this path before, can’t you? What’s made it worth considering optically is the mirrorless camera configuration, and Canon has then decided to go further and thrown in added affordability by ditching the diaphragm. So you get a 600mm that weighs in at under a kilo and easily fits into a standard photo backpack thanks to a collapsible barrel design. The 800mm is only marginally longer and heavier, and both lenses cost a fraction of the conventional equivalents. Better still, they work brilliantly – handheld shooting is a breeze and the optical performance is sensational. If you want some extra support – which you might with the 800mm – a monopod is all you’ll need, so the heavy-duty tripod can stay at home as well. OK, so viewfinding can be pretty tricky (especially with the 800mm) and you’ll start working the ISO settings like never before, but this is the digital-era solution to the fixed aperture… especially on the latest-generation mirrorless cameras.
Which brings me to the Sony A7S III. So it’s a video-centric full-frame mirrorless camera with a modest 12 megapixels to work with, right? Yes, but, conventional wisdom up-ended, neither of these things diminish its potential as a stills camera. It is, in practice, a truly superb stills camera and, despite all the allure of the A7R IV, the A7 III or the A9 II, right now it’s my absolute favourite Sony Alpha camera. Why? Because each of those 12 million pixels is really, really big and that translates into superlative image quality thanks to the much higher signalto-noise ratio. I call it the “big pixel look” because there’s a smoothness and linearity to the tonality that’s unmatched… and the detailing is still super crisp. Definition isn’t just about resolution. It’s also about having a wider dynamic range and a significantly increased sensitivity, so noise – or, more precisely, the effect of noise reduction processing – doesn’t become an issue until you’re well into the upper end of the ISO range, like ISO 51,200. The Sony’s ISO 409,600 highest extension setting is still pie-in-thesky, but this camera is unmatched in the range of ISO 1600 to 25,600 which has many practical implications not just for low-light photography, but when you need to use very fast shutter speeds or, not surprisingly, if you have a supertelephoto lens with a fixed aperture of f/11. RF to FE mount adapter anybody (yes, there is one)?
The biggest irony with the A7S III though is, that while it’s undoubtedly primarily designed as a pro-level video camera (and it’s definitely brilliant here too), it’s the purist’s still camera, and that’s because it’s also the purist’s video camera. Looking at it this way then, it’s arguably the most hybrid of the current hybrid mirrorless cameras.
Here’s to more challenges to the many long-held pre-conceptions in photography.