I Shot My First Photos With the Sony A7V… Here’s What Happened

All right, boys, the new A75 is here with a brand new partially stacked 33 megapixel sensor. Thank you, Jesus. In my opinion, the specs lean more toward a photo centric than video centric upgrade. All right. You got Julie here. We're going to test out the sensor. Sony claims 16 stops of dynamic range. Let's see what's going on. All right. We're bringing up the flash card to the woods today. Test out its durability here. Now, despite what the rumors have been saying, third party lenses do work on this camera. For this entire shoot, I'm going to be shooting on the Viltrox 135 and the 85 1.4. Now, I'm going to give you my first impressions of the A75 towards the end. But first, I'm going to show you how to cook up some nice photos using Luminar Neo, the sponsor of this video. I'm going to expose for her hair and the highlight on the tree here should also complement. It's going to look really good, I think, especially with a make sure that she faces that direction to keep the sun out of her face so I could just light her face with flash. The reality is that it doesn't matter if you're shooting with the A75, A74, 321. If you don't know how to take nice photos, then what's really going on? All right. So let me take you through my thought process here, because initially this is the composition that I was drawn to. I really like the symmetry going on here with the bushes. But look at the and it just looks like trash, don't it? So I could ask her just to pose to her right, put the modifier super close and overpower the sun like I did in my last video. But there's less ambient light here and the background would be pitch black. So I scrapped that idea. And now it's time to improvise. So I asked her to lean up against a skinny tree, not directly in front of the tree. OK, by having her slightly to the side of the tree, it gave me a more balanced photo. Now, editing this photo in Luminar Neo, look at how insane this tool is. It's called Light Depth and it's an updated version of Relight AI. It generates a 3D depth map of the image, which allows you to manipulate the lighting in the photo based on the camera's position. So by just simply moving this slider, I can add light to the background, to the foreground, and I can even fine tune how much light I'm adding. So since I'm going to go for a more dramatic edit for this look, I'm going to only add light to my model and let the background just fall more into darkness. I then quickly created a mask to erase some of the unwanted light that came with this feature right towards the bottom of the frame and some on the edge of her coat. Then I use the dramatic tool to remove some of the warmth from her skin and desaturate some of the oranges in the background. I then use Face AI to make her eyes pop a little bit more. Then I added a small amount of skin softening using Skin AI. The final touch to this photo was really accentuating that the highlight on the tree and on the side of her jacket. So I used a mask and then I subtly increased the highlights and the whites on that to really make it pop. All right, shot number two, I'm going to take advantage of what the sun is doing here. So the sun, you know, the bright colors when you shoot with the sun as your key light, you tend to get brighter, more saturated colors. The problem is that I have to now find shade for my model here so I can get nice even lighting on her. So because I can't find a tree here that I can create really nice shade for her, I'm going to just create my own shade here. So using my modifier, I can create shade for a good waist-up shot. I just basically turned my beauty dish into a two-in-one light modifier. I blocked the sun out, giving me essentially a blank canvas, and now I'm able to light her using my soft light. Okay, so I took a couple shots and it wasn't doing it for me. It's cool, but the light is too low and it just creates too much of a flat look, and I like more dimension. So what I can do is raise the light and just ask her to back up a little bit so that, yeah. And now the light's going to be a little bit farther away, but I think I'd rather have this problem than the other problem. So like that, okay. I also had her sit down for a couple of shots. I blocked the sun out with my modifier again, and then I exposed the camera for the bright highlights on the ground behind her. Now look, this is an easy way to make your shots more punchy and dynamic. Look at how I'm using all the shadows being casted on the ground behind her to make the scene look more interesting, and then I'm able to use my flash to match the exposure of the background. If there's one feature in Luminar Neo that blows my mind every time I use it, it's studio light. It's definitely not the easiest one to use, and it definitely takes some trial and error, but when you find that sweet spot, you're able to create lighting effects similar to the ones that I use in a studio. Now to be honest, I already like this photo and how it looks, but let's just say I wanted to add a creative spin to it. I could literally create my own split lighting in this software, almost as if this was actually shot and I used the sun peeking around a tree or branches as my key light. What's cool is that you can even add multiple light sources to a single photo. Now you see the little white dot? That little white dot represents a light source, and as I move it around, notice, and you're going to see how the highlights and the shadows shift along with that light, depending on the direction of the light, which gives it a sense of realism. Now you could always take it to the next level and upload your own texture. So if you really want to sell the fact that light is peeking through trees, you can download a sample photo on Google, upload it into the custom textures, and now it's all about fine tuning and figuring out what works best. This is a super powerful tool that nobody really talks about. Now when you come across tall grass that is backlit during golden hour, I'm not going to lie, that's straight up cheating, so there's no excuses here, right? The only problem that I have is the grass is so damn tall that with my long lens, I'm going to have to stand in down here at Wisconsin to get this all in frame and to make this shot more impactful. Shooting from a lower angle will add that extra oomph to the shot. The flash photos look good, but I actually prefer the natural light photos that I took here instead. For me, it gave more of a dreamy vibe to it, and the look over the shoulder creates more of an intimate perspective than let's say a standard pose. In the past, I've showed you how to make an image look more like it was shot during golden hour in previous Luminar videos, but here I'm going to show you how to enhance the golden hour look to give it more of that dreamy vibe. So if you go into the sunrays tab, you can add a light source, and here I'm only emphasizing where the sunlight is already coming from. You can fully customize the sunrays, how they look, how bright they are. I even made it look like the lens was flaring a little bit just to give it that extra softer, dreamier vibe. Then I finished it off with a little bit of a golden hour touch, and voila, we're done, we're good here. Okay, so I totally did all that for nothing. I was thinking I could get a cool shot at the top of the hill, but nothing really spoke to me up there, but I was able to find a spot where the tall grass wasn't as tall in the frame. It was like mid-height, and I was able to get a really clean portrait of her with the sun directly behind her. After my first shoot with the a7V, I want to share some of my thoughts on the actual usability of the camera. Unfortunately, we still don't have full RAW support, and I did shoot comparison photos between the 5 and the 4. I shot for the shadows and the highlights, but the problem is that we can't open up the files and compare the image latitude because we don't have RAW support, which is kind of curious. I just saw on the internet that someone claimed that the a7V had a stop more dynamic range than the 4. I don't know how the hell he opened up these files. I'm really curious as to how. Now, if you're curious as to how I edited RAW files for this video, there were still some programs like Aperty that could open up the files, but you don't get full latitude. So what I did, I just exported TIFF files and uploaded it into Luminar so I can edit them to edit for this video. But anyway, we get full support soon, so hopefully we can do some more tests. Now, okay, as many of you know, I have been shooting Sony for a very long time, at least a decade at this point, so I'm very familiar with these cameras. Now, if you were to blindfold me, you could trick me into believing that I wasn't shooting with a brand new camera. It's very familiar. But I will say though, I will say that for those out there that have been using higher class of cameras like the a1, a7R5, anything higher than a7IV, you're going to feel the downgrade in camera when you use the a7V. I don't know if that makes any sense. The a7V has the same EVF as the a7IV, and on a bright, sunny day, it's really hard to see. It's a very small EVF. That's what I'm saying, is that when you go from a big to a smaller EVF like this one, it's kind of jarring because you feel like you can't really see the details, and then it doesn't help that the screen isn't super bright as well. So on a bright, sunny day, I find that I struggle a little bit compared to how I usually work with other cameras. But other than that, there aren't many negative things that I can say about this camera. It's super easy to use. The AF locks on from a mile away. You can shoot and get lock focus through tree branches. The camera does feel more secure in the hand when I'm holding it. It's got more of a rubberized texture. The screen mechanism, four-way screen, absolutely needs to be standard for every camera. And the fact that this camera has a full mechanical shutter, which means that flash photographers like myself don't sacrifice image quality when using high shutter speeds, and like, let's say, losing high speed sync, because I'm not using electronic first current shutter like other cameras have. And some of y'all corrected me in the last video, which is totally fair. Actually, I tested all this. It's just that because I have so little time, so little turnaround with the camera, I'll just go off the top of my head and I'll misspeak. But the a7 IV does have a full mechanical shutter. The a7R V also has one. You can tell, if you go in the menu system, if it only tells you electronic or mechanical, like the a1, a7C II, it's that mechanical is not actually mechanical. It's an electronic first current. So anyway, but with all that said, if you're shooting portraits, this upgrade to the a7 V, I know it looks the nice new thing on the block, but it makes no sense. I don't care how many stops of dynamic range you get with the a7 V. It just doesn't make any sense. We have reached peak camera quality. It doesn't matter. But if you occasionally need more speed out of your camera, then I think this is a no brainer. So think about it. This is the first camera to bridge the gap between 10 frames per second and these 20, 30 frames per second. See, fast sensors, cameras with fast burst rates have always been reserved for the higher end cameras, but now we have it in the mid range on Sony. And for that reason, that's, I just think that this is for photography, a pretty big upgrade. If you need that speed, actually a massive upgrade. If you can make use of the speed in the pre-capture, it feels premium blackout free. Now I do want to thank Luminar Neo for sponsoring this video and allowing me to put out something more educational rather than just sitting down and just editing photos using their software. Let me tell you how I use Luminar Neo in my workflow. So the first thing is that you can use it as a plugin and that's how I use it. You don't need to switch from whatever you're using now to Luminar. You don't need to make that kind of that jump. I'll upload my photos into Lightroom like I normally do. And if I ever want to use one of the features in Luminar, I'll just quickly just send it over to Luminar and there you go. It's an addition to my workflow. The second thing is that I love the non-destructive editing. So because you can just quickly undo anything that you're doing at any time in the software, it promotes experimentation. It's fun to experiment to see what works and what doesn't work. The third one is it offers a ton of different features for different kinds of photography. And you've seen that light control feature. It may not be perfect. And you see these images didn't even have like full latitude, but I was able to create like slit lighting outdoors. It dramatically changes how the image looks. This is such a cool feature that if you tinker with it, you can create some pretty cool effects in software. If you like editing on your phone or iPad, they do have a mobile version that I have to say is one of the most beautifully designed apps that I've ever used. You get access to a lot of the same desktop features like Relight AI, which works very similarly to Light Depth along with a whole bunch of other retouching tools. Now, if you want to check it out for yourself, use the code Manny10. The link will be down in the description. I appreciate you and I'll probably talk, well, let me see here. I get delivery of the, well, they're supposed to ship them out on the 18th. So yeah, we're going to be exploring, exploring the A7-5 a little bit more.