My Next Camera

Right now I'm using the A99ii as my primary camera and the A99 as a secondary camera. The A99 is showing its years and doesn't really do well in low light situations.
So, should I get another A99ii or should I start planning for the next camera? Do I even like the smaller e-mount bodies? To be honest if an A99iii came out tomorrow I might eventually be tempted to buy it. That said, no new A-mount camera will probably ever be made.
Recently the A7rIV came out with a better grip, making it a cool camera to look to if and when I will make my new purchase. That said, not only don't I need the 61 Megapixels that it's packing, to be honest I don't even need the current 42 Megapixels that my A99ii has. Experience has shown that starting from ISO 800 it doesn't really matter that you have all these megapixels. It's just clogs out your hard drive without providing any actual benefits. The extra megapixels are useful to landscape and studio photographers that have the need for large prints. A lot of my clients don't even print at all.
So, what would I spend my money on? Perhaps the future A9ii? Hard to tell. I definitely don't need 20fps. That means that if and when Sony comes out with a A7IV I might get that one after a while, even though it's the "low end" one. If it come with 36 Megapixels that would be perfect.
For now this is all speculation and I will probably buy something after its been on the market for a while, perhaps get a good deal on a used body.

Update: Now aiming to purchase the A7rIV in late April to coincide with my birthday. Of course, that will depend on my ability to save money to buy it. Right now it seems like I would be able to pull it off, but life sometimes happens when you're making plans.
Of course I will need to buy some batteries and the LE-EA4 converter to be able to mount my current A-Mount lenses on it. Eventually I will want native lenses so will also have to start saving money for future lenses. Hoping that some video work will pay for all of this.
I will probably also need to change the name of this blog, after years of shooting with the A99 and the A99ii. I think it will be good to have an e-mount camera so that my blog will appeal to more people.

Post

I think it's time to talk a little bit about what I now use to process the images that I take with my trusty A99ii so that they will look their best when I eventually show them.

I currently am using Lightroom Classic CC for most of my processing needs, finishing some photos in Photoshop CC. I do try to NOT use Photoshop is possible but it does allow me to overcome some issues and improve on what the camera captures.

My previous posts showed me relying on Irfanview for culling, the process of initial selection of which photos to keep and which to reject. I still use that tool from time to time but once I got my new fancy workstation I sought to just use Lightroom instead, and even called support to describe to them what my needs were. We finally came to a method for culling that I really wish would have been easier to access and find but is definitely there!

What I wanted is a way to easily view photos full screen, and mark which ones I didn't want. Once marked, I wanted Lightroom to advance to the next one and not show unmarked ones anymore. It might sound petty but when you have 5000 photos from a wedding to go through, this is can be a real time saver. The other issue was that I wanted to go through all the photos quickly without the need to create tons of previews, a lengthy process when you have a lot of photos. Instead I wanted to use the jpg preview already built into the RAW files the A99ii generates. 

To do that, when importing I chose Build Previews: Embedded & Sidecar.

I also generally choose Develop Settings: Creative - Warm Contrast, to apply my favorite preset to all the photos. I will describe how I use the preset later on.
Now that I have all the photos in Lightroom, on the right lower side of the screen I will switch to the filter to flagged.As nothing is currently flagged, the view will show none of the photos.

Then I will click the middle flag. This will now show all the photos except those that have been marked for deletion. Having a 4K screen this process that I have to do each time is quite inconvenient but it works.

Now I press F on the keyboard to enter full screen mode. pressing the right key cycles through the photos while X marks photos you don't think you'll need. Once flagged for deletion you'll no longer see that photo and Lightroom will cycle to the next one. Sometimes I just want the best photos marked and leave some of the others just in case. In that case I mark for deletion (X) all the ones that are out of focus or otherwise unusable and press 5 on the keyboard to give a 5-star rating  to the photos I really like.

Once done, Ctrl+Backspace will offer to delete all the photos marked for deletion. To see just the photos marked as 5-stars I switch the filter to rated and press the five stars button (also a bit small for my 4K screen.

What about editing? What do I commonly use?

As mentioned, I really only use the one develop setting: Creative - Warm Contrast. The reason why I like it is because it warms up any scene, adding some pleasant brown to it. I find that it works much better than simply warming up a photo by adjusting the temperature of a photo. That said, I almost never use it in the default setting of 100. Instead, I typically crank it down to 50. How much I actually use depends on the original photo. There are of course situations where I don't use it all like a scene lit by candles or fire and full direct sun scenes. The full benefit of this develop setting will show when shooting on overcast days.

The downside of this develop setting is that it sometimes makes blue objects go green. If that happens you can change calibration settings to add some blue back.

That might alter the look of the photo in ways you might not like. Lowering the vibrance might help somewhat but in some situations you might need to finish a photo in photoshop, layering two instances of the photo, one with the develop setting and one without.

I really wish Adobe add a tool enabling selective use of develop settings to Lightroom so that blue objects could be excluded from it.