Hanukkah in high ISO

Generally speaking, I don't like to take pictures in family or friends' parties of any kind. I like to participate in them like other people do, have fun, talk to people, dance, etc... I take photography seriously so it takes time out of my being a regular Joe.
However, from time to time I find myself in a situation where I have to take photos due to various reasons. For example, my mom pressured me into taking pictures at a family gathering for Hanukkah. She now has a few granddaughters and she really likes to have photos of them.

My family at 1600 ISO

It was a nighttime event and I knew the lighting won't be very good so I decided it was a good opportunity to test the high ISO capabilities of the A99. I shot at 1600, 3200, 4000 and 5000 ISOs, previously unheard of. Surprisingly enough , the results were not that bad, certainly better than the A580s. That said, the rules for good high ISO photography seem to be sort of the same as "regular" ISO. You still need to have contrast in order to have a nice image. You can have much less light to work with, but it stills needs to be pretty.

My brother and father at ISO 3200

My niece at 5000 ISO

 On a very different subject I now have an Indiegogo campaign for my upcoming feature film, so if you want to support a most revolutionary film, you can donate here.

Wedding, that Dweem within a dweem

So, finally something serious to test my A99 with, a most joyous occasion.

The place where the wedding was shot was seriously darkish, so we had to rely once more on flash photography.

The A99 is simply fantastic in terms of color reproduction, much better than the competition in my mind, bust serious event photographers might still prefer the likes of Canon 5D MkIII due to the better high ISO performance.
We shot with both my new A99 and my now ancient A580, and of course the A99 produced much more stunning images.  That said, my Sony 20mm 1.8 lens doesn't seem to match well Full Frame, though it's supposed to. There is too much curving distortion at the edges, making people's heads look strange, and made me work furiously with Photoshop to try and compensate, and also make a lot of crops to negate this issue. It works better with the APS-C sized A580.
I also found out that 32GB cards are just not enough for the A99, even when you have two slots.  I should get a 64GB card, but the prices are a little bit steep right now. It is worth to invest in a speedy 90MB/s card as there is never a delay in writing RAW files, even when you shoot a bunch of them. Switching to a slower card, I found some delays when shooting multiple photos that I was used to with the A580.
Why not just buy multiple cards? SD cards sort of scare me. I wish cameras would just come with an internal 256GB or 512GB hard drive and Wifi capability for over-the-air backup.
What happened was that sooner rather than later, my first 32GB was full. I thought that the camera would switch to the next slot, or at least offer to, but it didn't. Instead, you have to go once again through the menus to switch to the other slot. Bare in mind that the playback and recording slots are not necessarily the same. This should definitely be addressed. When in a hurry, you don't want to go through menu options. It's bad enough that switching between focus modes is also a menu option. There should be a button to go through them. Maybe, when video recording is disabled when not in video mode, the record button should switch between focus modes.
So, verdict is - great camera, not that great a work when it comes to to human interface design. Please, Sony, next time you have a new camera, please send it to me so I can check it out and let you know how it performs in real life :)

Naming and Dance

I name all my cameras.
My first SLR, being a Minolta was called Mina. Since then I had Sonja (A350), Sonja 2.0 (a580) and now, I'm going to call my new A99, Fefe, since it's a Full Frame camera. I briefly considered calling it "Slut" since it's my first SLT, but I seem to have more respect for it.
So this is what Windows explorer tells me about RAW files from the A99 are like from a technical perspective:

42 Bit depth? Seriously? How can this be? Something somewhere is off.
Spent an hour today shooting dance practice in Studio Naim on Salame st, where I practice Yoga, Pilates and Dance. Yes, I like doing all kinds of things.

The shot above was of course made with my brand new 20mm 2.8 Sony Lens. Can't stress how the new auto focus capabilities help when shooting dance, leaving me with a lot of focused shots to choose from.

Fun with mirrors

I am still working on my feature film, hoping to use crowd funding soon to fund, and will post link to it when that happens.

So why are we here?

I've started out as a photographer with a Minolta film SLR that I bought on vacation in Eilat. I didn't know a whole lot about photography back than and it was quite a different world back than. Having purchased a few cameras since than, I sort of stuck to Sony. Every time I was going to buy a camera, whether it was stills or video, Sony had the right innovation and pricing for me. Also, I had a good experience with Sony equipment,  in rain, sand and snow and had very few malfunctions. Not long ago I had a problem with my Sony A580 picture stabilizer, but even though it was dead, the camera actually continued working and earning me revenue rather than showing one of those infuriating service-your-camera error numbers that you get with Canon equipment.
The Sony Alpha 580 is a good, surprisingly small DSLR which I got because I really needed to shoot some video along with the stills I was already shooting.  However, as I became more serious as a photographer and a videographer I sort of outgrew it. The short length of videos that you can take, overheating, and slow weak processor made it difficult to use on a lot of occasions. It's automatic focus is really not that good and if you shoot with a long shutter you have to wait a few seconds for it to recover. If you shoot a few shots, one after the other, the camera will take its sweet time processing them and writing to the card, even if it's a fast SD card.
I thought of getting the Sony A77 or even switching to Canon or Nikon. I have a few friends with Canon, so I could borrow lenses and other accessories from them if needed. However, if there was one thing that I really liked about the 580 was the tiling LCD screen which I constantly use in various photography and videography scenarios. It allowed me to be more creative in my work and in my art.
Canon and Nikon, however, do not like to put these "video-like" LCDs into their high-end models. I briefly considered the Canon EOS 60D, but it was sort of comparable in features to what I already had, only with some manual video control. Also, all the projects which I shot with both Canons and my own Sony cameras showed the Sonys to have superior color reproduction.
So, Sony A77? It seemed like a solid APS-C camera, but some reviews were a little negative with regards to the OVF technology, which is fancy for digital viewfinder. I also discovered that some the photos I took could not really be printed in large format as they weren't sharp enough or had enough pixels. I was working on a photography project which was much suited to large printing, so this was a little annoying. I thought of getting a medium format film camera for completing this project but instead decided on buying a full-frame camera, the Sony A99, as full-frame cameras produce sharper images and the 24MP image is not to big yet large enough to fit the sensor and lenses.
Time went by and Sony sort of delayed the A99 announcement, which brought me back to considering the A77, but one very small thing convinced me to wait. The A77 doesn't have a ear plug phones socket, which I sometimes seriously need to ensure that sound is good when recording occasional interviews.
So, I got funding for the A99 (not cheap) and was glad to see that Sony invested a lot of thought into making that model a very good stills/video hybrid with almost all features that I could need and then some more.
So right now that only thing keeping me from having one is that fact that it is not sold yet in Israel, where I live.
I've asked two of my Sony vendors to figure out how much it costs to get it here. I guess it will take about two month at least for me to hold the A99 in my hands but I am seriously excited and will definitely write some more when I get to actually order it.
For now, you can look at what can be accomplished, even with the limited video capabilities of the A580, as shown here in the music video I did for Adi Ulmansky when I first got the camera and the Sigur Ros video I made recently.