I am very excited about my new 42MP Sony A7rII mirrorless camera. Years of straining my eyes to manual focus has left me a wee bit blind in my right eye. About 15 years ago without knowing it, I switched to my left eye. Then just 8 years back I scrapped my manual-focus-only SINAR digital back for Canon and started to rely on back button auto-focus, which was tricky at anything below F 8.0. Fortunately I usually shoot tethered so am able to double check focus—a slow process. But, with the incredible OLED (organic light emitting diodes) EVF (electronic view finder) on the Sony is so bright with great resolution that I can once again manual focus even with my right eye. Also love how easy it is to zoom-in on the EVF with the push of one of the programmable custom buttons to really fine tune focus. I’ve been playing around with facial/eye recognition auto focus at F 4.0 on the Sony on my 70-200mm F4.0 zoom. It works pretty well in full light, see accompanying photo of Sylvianne and I, but if the light level drops then it is hit and miss. A few of weeks back at one of my “Lumiere Espresso” coffee shop meetings, this one in Amsterdam with Renée Robyn and friends, her host, a photographer as well and an ambassador for Olympus was sporting the Olympus 5 with a F 1.4 (55 mm I think). This thing was amazing at auto focus facial recognition at 1.4 in really low light. Bang On! It made my Sony look pretty bad, but afterward I realized that an F 4.0 lens lets way less light in than an F 1.4 so the F 1.4 definitely would have a great advantage in low light auto focus, anyhow this made me feel a lot better about my new baby. Anyhow, all this rubbish to say, check out the mirror-less cameras if you haven’t already, they are really coming into their own and with all the travel I do, I am a big fan of small and light which these puppies excel at.
