anyone using a Sony A7s purely for portrait stills photography?

photochris said:
or you can get 24mp with class leading AF on the A6000, and it has better video than the A7/r. I sold the A7 after getting the A6000, its much more responsive - faster startup, faster wakeup and faster/more accurate AF.
Click to expand...

Have you by chance tried a-mount lenses on the a6000 with the lae4 adapter and if so does auto focus work just as well as with native e-mount lenses? Because if it does then one other option for me could be an A6000 + LAE4 + Sigma 18-35 f1.8 lens for about $300 more than I paid for the A7 + 28-70 kit lens. Also the a6000 seems to have similar megapixel count to the a7 but with a somewhat smaller sensor, so I presume it wouldn't work as well in low light?
 
Last edited:
Oh one other question, if I used an APS-C lens like the Signa 18-35mm f1.8 (with lae4) with the Sony a7 I would still be getting an effective 16.2 megapixels (24.3/1.5) whereas with the a7s it would be 8.3 megapixels (12.4/1.5) correct? I don't know if the kit lens will be fast enough for my needs so I guess it's good to have a relatively cheap option like the Sigma available.
 
Yes, of course the A7 and the A7r is better for stills, more room for cropping and printing big, except in very low light situations. A7s is a hybrid stills and video camera, and that means some compromises have been made in both respects. However, it really comes down to what sort of photography you do. If you do action sports photography then neither camera is really very suited compared to a DSLR with a much faster auto focus. And for real estate, architecture and billboard photography I would choose the higher mp camera.

I do think the A7s can hold it´s own as a stills camera as well. Nikon only moved beyond 12mp on their pro cameras a few years ago. Pictures from the Nikon D700 and D3 have been used in thousands of magazines. Of course people get used to having the ability to crop like crazy, and they like/ expect that flexibility. The A7 / A7r has slightly more DR at low iso, the advantage goes the other way once you have to bump up the iso. But the A7s has better DR than a 5D MKIII and a lot of other cameras even at low iso.

I do travel photography and video most of the time these days. For me the A7s is great. First it is small compared with a full frame DSLR, and I can shoot in any light. Handheld shots of markets and festivals at night is no longer any problem. I take thousands of shots a week, and can not really deal with 36mp raw files. Most of my work goes to web, but I can still print big enough from a 12mp shot when I have to. I like the look of the photos too, the large photo sites of a full frame 12 mp sensor has a certain look.

We may pick up a second camera body soon as we are branching out into providing hotels with photography services, and then a higher mp camera could be useful. But for now, the A7s is awesome for our photography and video needs.
 
Last edited:
Also when shooting 36mp handheld the resolution advantage disappears with even the slightest of motion blur and out-of-focus areas. Just a smidge of movement and that 36mp sensor will resolve only half, most of the pixels will be blurred into one another.
 
dustylense said:
This is the crop they tried to extract from the above image for an 11x17 full bleed page. Now keep in mind this shot was taken as an after thought.
Click to expand...

It's not about the 11x17 full page, it is about the distance people are looking at it from. I think I could've upscaled that quite well to a 11x17 magazine shot but granted, that's not what I normally do.
 
dustylense said:
In stills the A7s is not much better than the A7r or A7 in low ilght. Less than a stop. But the A7 and the A7r have nearly a full stop better DR than the A7s.
Click to expand...

Though the DR advantage of the a7s over the a7r at low light is pretty nice. Over one and a half stops, which is more than what the A7r has at ISO 100.

That ISO 100 advantage goes away as low as ISO 200. By ISO 800 a7s has taken the lead. A7s is also slightly brighter at the same ISO according the DXOMark.
 
Last edited:
Also look at the the DXOMark dynamic range measurements at "screen size" instead of printed and rescaled to 8mp. a7s is then only 0.2 stops behind a7r. Does rescaling bring that much DR?


Untitled-1.jpg
 
joker454 said:
Oh one other question, if I used an APS-C lens like the Signa 18-35mm f1.8 (with lae4) with the Sony a7 I would still be getting an effective 16.2 megapixels (24.3/1.5) whereas with the a7s it would be 8.3 megapixels (12.4/1.5) correct? I don't know if the kit lens will be fast enough for my needs so I guess it's good to have a relatively cheap option like the Sigma available.
Click to expand...

I'm traveling so I don't have the cameras in front of me right now, but believe the APS-c stills are 10mp on the A7 and 5mp on the A7s. Its not a straight conversion like lens crop.
 
joker454 said:
Have you by chance tried a-mount lenses on the a6000 with the lae4 adapter and if so does auto focus work just as well as with native e-mount lenses? Because if it does then one other option for me could be an A6000 + LAE4 + Sigma 18-35 f1.8 lens for about $300 more than I paid for the A7 + 28-70 kit lens. Also the a6000 seems to have similar megapixel count to the a7 but with a somewhat smaller sensor, so I presume it wouldn't work as well in low light?
Click to expand...

I haven't used the LAEA4, but I have used the A99 which has much faster AF than the A7 - you should get similar performance from the LAEA4 since it used the SLT mirror and DSLR AF.

The A6000 is 24.3mp, but you lose about a stop due to sensor size. Until you get to 6400, its pretty insignificant. Shoot raw and the noise is easy to clean up.
 
maarek said:
It's not about the 11x17 full page, it is about the distance people are looking at it from. I think I could've upscaled that quite well to a 11x17 magazine shot but granted, that's not what I normally do.
Click to expand...
Man, try saying that to Conde Nast. Stringent rules about photography and what goes in their publications.
 
5D mark 1 was only 12mp. I have a photographer friend who still shoots weddings on one. If you do print advertising or heavy cropping, I agree that another option might be better, but it isn't so absurd to shoot stills with it if you already own one for video purposes.
My bigger concern is the lack of available lenses in that native mount!

For video, I'll happily use adapted glass and work manually, but photography? I'd like some f/2.8 mid range zooms that can autofocus. You can always throw that metabones adapter and use an EOS 2.8 zoom, but I'm under the impression AF is iffy with that setup. Could work in a pinch, or you can of course use the peaking guides to focus manually.

At the end of the day, the resolution isn't a deal breaker, the lenses aren't necessarily deal breaker. But combined, they might be more inconvenience than its worth, especially considering what else is available at this price point. :/
 
dishan said:
5D mark 1 was only 12mp. I have a photographer friend who still shoots weddings on one. If you do print advertising or heavy cropping, I agree that another option might be better, but it isn't so absurd to shoot stills with it if you already own one for video purposes.
My bigger concern is the lack of available lenses in that native mount!

For video, I'll happily use adapted glass and work manually, but photography? I'd like some f/2.8 mid range zooms that can autofocus. You can always throw that metabones adapter and use an EOS 2.8 zoom, but I'm under the impression AF is iffy with that setup. Could work in a pinch, or you can of course use the peaking guides to focus manually.

At the end of the day, the resolution isn't a deal breaker, the lenses aren't necessarily deal breaker. But combined, they might be more inconvenience than its worth, especially considering what else is available at this price point. :/
Click to expand...

Yeah I don't work with any advertising agencies, the photos would be purely for my own business use so I don't need prints. I ended up going cheap and got a Sony A7 with the 28-70 kit lens for $1500 brand new and have taken a couple hundred pictures with it so far. Being new to photography I wanted to see what I would end up really requiring for my needs and the best way I figured to do that was get a cheaper model and take some real world pictures for my business, so rather than risk a bunch of cash on an A7s + uber lens, I went with an A7 + kit lens. My needs are taking pictures of models mostly indoors, and sometimes outdoors. So far I'm finding I don't crop much at all if ever, so that combined with not needing to make prints tells me that the 12mp A7s would have likely been perfectly fine for me. Because I do my own lighting I think the A7s might have helped a bit as well keeping things clean at low iso, as I could effectively lean on the sensor more to provide enough light when I don't. The sensor would be my lighting assistant as it were, although so far I've been just able to keep the A7's sensor out of noise range, but sometimes just barely.

The big problem as you mention is the lenses. I wanted to stick with Sony because I have some of their other accessories like microphone attachments, batteries, manual lenses and so on. But I'm finding the bulk of my photos with the kit lens tend to be in the 50-70mm range, so that leaves me between f4.5 and f5.6 on the kit lens which sometimes is ok but sometimes isn't fast enough. I don't want to go manual focus for this, with the A7 I set focus mode to "center" so I use that to pick my focus point, reframe the shot and take the picture, it's fast and quick and the model doesn't have to hold poses while I hunt around for the right focus. I find it lets me get more natural shots as well because I can snap them at a moments notice really quickly with auto focus. The 24-70 Zeiss lens isn't that much faster, it would take me from f4.5-5.6 to f4.0 on the focal range I'm most using, an improvement but I'm not sure that's worth $1200. I may try the 55mm 1.8.

So far I do think the A7s would have been a better choice for me, but I don't know if it's worth double the cost of my A7 setup. Maybe I'll get a better feel for that after a few hundred more pictures.
 
I haven't read every post so sorry if it's already been mentioned but I wouldn't use the A7s for stills work. D3X, 1DX, D4S, 5D Mark III, D800 and D810 are all better options in my opinion. Around 16 MP seems to be the bare minimum if working with ad agencies or publications because that's what the D4s shoots. Of course if you want to make them really happy rent a Hasselblad, Phase One or other medium format camera.
 
Carlos Morillo said:
I haven't read every post so sorry if it's already been mentioned but I wouldn't use the A7s for stills work. D3X, 1DX, D4S, 5D Mark III, D800 and D810 are all better options in my opinion. Around 16 MP seems to be the bare minimum if working with ad agencies or publications because that's what the D4s shoots. Of course if you want to make them really happy rent a Hasselblad, Phase One or other medium format camera.
Click to expand...

In my case it's for use in my business, so no ad agencies or publications involved at all. My businesses are all computer based, no physical goods or items. That's why I was considering the A7s for stills, and still am considering it even though I'm currently using the A7. I did buy the 55mm 1.8 and will be trying that out on a shoot hopefully in a week or so. It's amazing though how much less lens correction the 55mm 1.8 lens needs compared to the kit lens. The kit lens differences between raw and corrected jpeg files can be quite dramatic, but on the 55mm they are fairly close.
 
Hey guys a followup question, see the two pics below:

DSC00170.jpg

DSC00170_1.jpg

There's that weird moire pattern on the cushion as shown in the second zoomed in picture. That's with the Sony A7 + 55mm lens, 100 iso, 1/1250, f1.8 shot in raw. It's easy to see on the source raw image as well but alas the forum forced me to down res that image otherwise it wouldn't let me post it. Does anyone know if that sort of artifact would go away with the A7r or the A7s?
 
I'll answer my own question here since I just got a Sony A7s as well so I can do direct comparisons with the A7. Looks like the A7 shows moire sometimes like in the above pic, but in the same type of picture the A7s does not show any moire.

EDIT: Scratch that, I can get moire on both cameras depending on the picture.
 
Last edited:
If you light and expose a portrait properly the a7s should make a perfectly good still image. Try not to over think the gear. It's still a mirrolress dslr. Would only use the a7r if you're a hardware geek or need it for large scale print or you're predominantly a photographer.
 
hambulance said:
If you light and expose a portrait properly the a7s should make a perfectly good still image. Try not to over think the gear. It's still a mirrolress dslr. Would only use the a7r if you're a hardware geek or need it for large scale print or you're predominantly a photographer.
Click to expand...

Yeah I'm really trying not to get lost in specs, hence why I figured let me just get both and try them out side by side so I've been using both the regular A7 and the A7s. I use them in full auto with "center" focus so I can focus, recompose and shoot as that is how I'd be working most of the time, I tweak f stop to get the look I want and only boost iso if it happens that the shutter speed with auto iso is too long (prefer to have 1/125 or faster as I don't have the steadiest hands around). So far on outdoor pictures I find I have a slight preference for the A7, I can't really explain why but it's pictures seem a touch better to me than the A7s. The A7s auto focus is very good having only missed a handful of times, but the A7 so far has never missed auto focus. So for outdoors pictures I'm leaning to the plain old A7 over the A7s, but then again outdoor portrait pictures probably only account for 20% of the pictures I would take with the rest being indoors.

Indoors it changes depending on the test. When using only available light (only existing house lighting) the A7s wins in raw because it's images are much cleaner than the A7's. But that's more of a torture test than a real world test since I would never do my photography that way, I'd be using two of my Nova Led panels. I need to do a test with those at my film house with proper lighting to get better real world feeling for both of the cameras. Right now though if I open curtains and let sunlight flow in then the noise issues on the A7 go away and it can compete with the A7s in raw, hence I think with proper lighting both cameras will be equally noise free. I can see though that for those forced to take pictures indoors with only available light that the A7s is definitely the way to go. I need to do some more tests on my end with lighting to see how both work for me.
 
If you have control over the lighting it won't matter too much what camera you use. I started shooting flash lit portraits on a Panasonic gh1 (14 mpix 2x crop) which is not a great photo camera compared to what's out there, but when you light and expose correctly, working to any given sensors strengths you'll take a great shot. Worry about resolution and colour depth when you're taking thousand dollar images for magazine print. The a7s is full frame so the way it handles light, coc, and dof is going to be awesome. You could light with moody incandescent or try diffused LEDs. More mpix is generally better for fine detail but the a7s is a superior video device. If I had the cash to spare I might get both the r and s. But sony will supersede the cameras before you know it and you'll feel like you got ripped off.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top