More dance

I shot another modern dance performance in the same place as before when I had no cameras (waiting for my 580 to be fixed and A99 to be delivered) and used a Canon Rebel T2i instead.
The experience was of course much different. I did have a second photographer using a Canon EOS Kiss X3, shooting at the other edge of the stage as we were not allowed to cross the stage.
We both shot mostly in ISO 3200. I used the 50mm 1.4 lens, and Alon used a 50mm 1.8 lens. If you've ever been to a low budget performance in Israel, you'd know that they light the stage very little. They say it gives more character and drama to the shows.
Personally I think they should always have proper back lighting so we would not be forced to use these high ISO settings. Of course the lower-end Canon camera produced more grainy photos.

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.

A little bit of Video

Finally got to use the A99 in a video job. I will probably not post the result video as it is not very pretty due to various reasons beyond my control.
 We shot a hand held scene where I switched focus manually between a newspaper showing some picture and a cellphone animating that picture using Augmented Reality technology. I used my 50mm 1.4 lens exclusively for this.
 I want to thank Sony for the really awesome  LCD on the A99 that lets me do these scenes where I can focus really well using just using the camera's screen. I did practice this quite a lot with the A580, and it works sort of the same and possibly slightly better with the A99.
The director of the video didn't like the crop factor of the video when using stabilization, so I had that switched off at some point.
I also discovered that, at least using the A99, some cellphones, including my Samsung Galaxy S3's display looked very flickery. I tried to change settings on both the A99 and the S3, including shutter speed, but nothing seemed to solve the problem.
 That said, the iPhone 3G and Samsung Galaxy S2 worked well for these shots. The iPad 2 was also a little bit flickerish, but slightly less than the Galaxy S3. I guess this is due to some new super AMOLED spec, with lower refresh rates that the screen traded for sharpness.

We also shot a few test scenes for my upcoming feature, "Spiral" but I will not post these either at this point. I did get a chance to use the flip to the front position of the LCD screen to both setup the shot without the need for a stand-in and to show the actresses how they looked in the shot.

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.

Saturday, war still raging

As I mentioned in my last post my country is at war, so from time to time rockets fall from the sky, especially in south of Israel, while Gaza is being heavily bombarded.
I started this day thinking that I would take some nice shots in the morning, but I guess it wasn't meant to be. They were not very good, something was off and it wasn't the fault of my new A99 camera.
I did release one photo in the morning but I actually took this one with my cellphone while throwing away my biological waste. It's actually composed of three shots I stitched in Photoshop. Could have probably done a better job at that, but heck, it's a cellphone shot.
The day picked up when I was at my friend Sivan's place and took photos of her cats. Cats are easy to shoot, almost too easy, but the lighting was extra good and the carpet really nice.

Sivan's cat and some of me

Then I want to lunch at my parents' place and took some photos of my new twin nieces.

So, basically, animals and babies, the easiest subject on Earth. At least I was shooting RAW and the photos looked extra good. Beware of continuous shooting though! It is really fast and doesn't slow whether you're using RAW or JPEG (at least with my 94MB/s Extreme Pro 32GB SanDisk card).
IMHO, unless you're shooting someone running or dancing, you should really choose the continuous Lo mode or be stuck with a lot of near identical photos of the same subject.
I am using Irfanview to filter through the RAW footage and delete the photos I'm not going to use. Sure, eventually all footage goes through Lightroom, but for the initial selection, this freeware is much faster saves me a bunch of time.The best way to do this is NOT to delete photos of the card, as sometimes you might regret hastily deleting a photo. You should copy the card's contents to your hard drive, then use ifranview for deletion, and then Add the photos using Lightroom. Don't forget to empty your Windows trashcan when you're through. You can also retrieve a photo deleted by mistake from the card.
I finished the day by going to yet another anti-war demonstration.

Video interviewer at the demonstration

Stop the occupation, siege and racism

This time I was using the 50mm 1.4 lens. Viewfinder was a little dark. As the manual says, you can brighten the viewfinder manually from the menu.
So, no video testing from now, but I seriously want to do a music video and some lengthy shooting with the A99 when shooting a play on Friday.

Anti War Demonstration

So, as I mentioned, country is at war, so I decided to take my camera and shoot some anti-war demonstrations, one in Jaffa and one in Central Tel-Aviv. The one in Jaffa was kind of small and ended when we heard sirens and a missile landing, probably at sea.
Took photos, still in JPEG mode. RAW testing still ahead. I used my wireless flash for the shots, helped by my AP, Alon Sherf . You can see or feel him just at the edge of some of the shots. As I explained in previous posts I put my camera in M mode for the shots, fast shutter, 800 ISO, Iris at 2.8 and use the flash in a low brightness setting. Lighting was really awful in almost all of the shots, almost brown in color, so the flash was quite necessary.
I started out with my 50mm 1.4 lens but as the people got into tight lines facing the road I was forced to switch to 20 2.8 and stayed with it until the end of the shoot.
Discovered a few things. The default settings of the camera do not allow for manual focusing with my lenses and the MF/AF front sliding button is gone. The back AF/MF button does NOT switch from auto focus to manual focus, unless you press FN and switch it to MF or DMF modes. Kind of weird, but I will adapt.
I was also looking furiously for the delete photo button just to discover that the trash can is painted blue and not visible at night (though you can still see the AF Range on the button, in bright white.
Really like how I can use the LCD and the A99 detects my eye going for the OVF and automatically switches. Thank you Sony, for making this that easy for me. Also, camera responsiveness and clarity of photos much better than my now ancient A580, most probably due to it being a full frame camera, and partially due to the improved new image processor.
My wireless system is really clunky so if anyone can recommend a radio wireless system that works well with Sony's cameras, I am willing to shell a few more Shekels for this.

My AP Alon at work, visibly holding the flash in the middle of the shot

Almost forgot, it seems that Lightroom 4 doesn't have a profile for the Sony 20mm 2.8 lens :( it is a pity since there is some noticeable edge issues. Any workarounds other than set it to auto?