Rare review of non Canon/Nikon gear for high level sports photography

I thought this was a very well-thought-out review discussing real-world pros/cons of the Sony camera and not the spec-sheet discussions most people without real-world experience have. It's not too often you get a competent sports photographer with Canon/Nikon experience reviewing off-brand. Some very good thoughts regarding different features. And, a very well thought out conclusion. In other words, very different than the typical fan-boy reviews that say a product is either the best thing ever or complete junk. Like most things, it's grey - some good and some bad.


Anyway, I thought it a very good read.

And a great cap to the other thread in the Forum on Long Lens Sport shooting with Sony. I agree. An interesting article and worth a read. Sony is still a few years and a few lenses away from being able to REALLY shoot a football game with consistency.

ZurichPhoto said:

And a great cap to the other thread in the Forum on Long Lens Sport shooting with Sony. I agree. An interesting article and worth a read. Sony is still a few years and a few lenses away from being able to REALLY shoot a football game with consistency.

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It's ready in the right hands.

PVCdroid said:

ZurichPhoto said:

And a great cap to the other thread in the Forum on Long Lens Sport shooting with Sony. I agree. An interesting article and worth a read. Sony is still a few years and a few lenses away from being able to REALLY shoot a football game with consistency.

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It's ready in the right hands.

http://www.getmyshot.com/#mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=0&p=0&a=0&at=0

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I'm curious if you, yourself are a shooter who has shot Cardinals games or if this is someone else. What I found interesting in the review was, again, that real world assessment of someone who does shoot NFL games. The basic gist is: he thinks he came away with some great shots but not as many as he did with his other equipment. Especially in some demanding situations.

I think we need to keep things in perspective. Lots of cameras on the market are completely capable of meeting the needs of lots of family sports shooters. Especially when said shooters are often limited to consumer grade lenses anyway.

My old Canon 20d, made me good money doing sports photography. Does that mean it's as capable of doing the job as a D4 or 1dX or 7dII, etc.? No.

Does everyone wanting to shoot sports want or need those capabilities? No.

So, I found the review very interesting because it pointed out that for the demanding purposes of a sports photographer at the professional level - the gear did not produce results like the competition. But, the reviewer also pointed out situations where the results could be better.

The reality is - sports photography is very demanding. Every piece of gear on the market today can deliver some quality photos in the right hands. Some gear does a better job than others.

And, unlike fanboy posts about 1 brand or another, the reviewer did a very credible job of trying a real-world workaround to get around to test out using non-Sony lenses to compensate for lack of tele and super-tele fast lenses. Good information there.

So, on one hand I think it's silly to say the A7II can't shoot football. Of course it can. My 10 year old 20d was able to shoot football. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that the sony camera and the lenses it can use produce results as consistently as the high end competition. All that really matters to a buyer is if the A7II and it's lenses produce results that are good enough for the user.

Thom posted a review recently with very similar conclusions


The latest Sony has come a long way. Every photographer makes compromises in the brand/body they buy as well as lens.

IMHO mirrorless still is a compromise for the sake of size/weight. Some find them good enough and they really are getting much better, others like me don't mind the weight for the much superior output and no compromise of the Canikon offerings.

Canikon will have to adapt, physics simply dictate that as the technology capability has arrived to embrace all that mirrorless can offer melded with their decades of high end lens and focus optmization. The P&S convenience imaging business is already lost, only the high end is left now.

Like in all evolutionary technology areas the business question is can the entrenched leader smell the change and adapt quickly; Kodak/Fuji, Blackberry, Nokia, Microsoft, IBM, Sun... etc. etc. etc.

After reading the article I was scratching my head about several points.

First, the date of publishing the article some pretty long time after actually testing. New adaptors already available, new FW....that makes the article lagging behind.

Secondly, even if the author mentioned that it's recognized that the A7RII is in no way a camera aimed to sports photographers, for me it sounded a bit weird the comparisons with recognized top sports cams. Of course it's somehow understandable that at the demanded price the owner could very well expect a camera which does well in all areas. However are the C/N top sports cams the tools of choice for landscape photography for example? And they demand even higher prices.

Third, some aspects about cam's operation sound weird. For example having image review engaged in high speed advance mode. Would an owner of a conventional DSLR dare to chimp on the back LCD when shooting at freaking frame rates? So the review obviously should be switched off - of course this perhaps should be linked in FW to switching the cam into (fast) continous. Another point is testing in field the available AF modes. I suppose I'd also struggle similary when doing such a "test" with top C/N sports cam w/o at least some basic knowledge about their sophisticated AF systems. They do their job - but they'll do that the better the more adequate the AF system is configured. Not even discussing the issue of someone used to certain operation and performance modes (of a certain brand) searching for the "known features" on a different brand's cam. It's just that our brain is pretty lazy and once used to certain procedures it prefers to keep it that way (where are the known patterns?). So lower success rates I'd consider totally normal in a first attempt with "new" equipment and adding, in one of the most demanding areas of photography for both the photographer (in his/her "auto-mode because the faster the action is the more one needs to rely on long time trained procedures) and the equipment.

--
Cheers,
Michael Fritzen

John_A_G said:

PVCdroid said:

ZurichPhoto said:

And a great cap to the other thread in the Forum on Long Lens Sport shooting with Sony. I agree. An interesting article and worth a read. Sony is still a few years and a few lenses away from being able to REALLY shoot a football game with consistency.

Click to expand...

It's ready in the right hands.

http://www.getmyshot.com/#mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=0&p=0&a=0&at=0

Click to expand...

I'm curious if you, yourself are a shooter who has shot Cardinals games or if this is someone else. What I found interesting in the review was, again, that real world assessment of someone who does shoot NFL games.

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you don't have the full story.

the person that pvcdroid was referring to above is the team chief photographer for the cardinals, he shoots pro football with the same camera body that jordan used in the review.

see the photo in the article below, he's also a sony artisan, not a canikon guy... in the pic it looks like he's using a different sony adapter(laea4) than what jordan used, it has an older af system, i'd really like to hear his impressions of that.

point is, that's not someone who may or may not shoot football every now and then, like the dpr guy, it's a pro photographer who's been shooting for the cardinals for the last 16 years.

John_A_G said:

The basic gist is: he thinks he came away with some great shots but not as many as he did with his other equipment. Especially in some demanding situations.

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the basic gist is: it's an interesting article, written by someone with an unknown level of nfl pro shooting experience, using unfamiliar camera gear that he's apparently never shot sports with before(?)

of course he's not going to come home with an optimal amount of keepers, gene lowers has a lot more sony experience.

but given that i shoot sports with an a7r, i think that jordan probably got most of the issues right... these cameras are evolving, at a rate that far exceeds any other camera platform or camera company in the world, but they haven't reached the peak of the sports shooting pinnacle yet.

my a7r isn't even two years old; it took dslrs over a decade to get the af systems to where they are now.