Sony a7R III Training Tutorial

hi I'm Tony Northup and this is my tutorial for the sony a7r 3 it's long but you don't have to watch the whole thing look at the description of this video and you can skip around don't worry I'm going to assume you already know how to use the camera so I'm gonna skip all the really basic stuff and just help you jump from whatever camera you're currently using to this new camera show you the ins and outs of it subscribe to see lots of free videos including camera views and photography tutorials tips on Lightroom and Photoshop and such and if you have a different camera visit SDP dot io / tutorials where we have similar tutorials for just about every modern camera every now and then you might forget where a particular feature is or how to do something and it's kind of hard to dig their whole video so I wanted to give you this link in case you actually want to get a PDF of the camera manual so you can hit ctrl F and actually search through it and find exactly what you're looking for let's get started I'm going to talk about the battery but first I wanted to mention this camera does support USB charging cameras from other manufacturers generally don't so flip open the side panel here and you can see this USB port right here it's just like the port's that most devices used to charge everything other than an iPhone so plug it in there and you can charge your iPhone that means when you travel you don't necessarily need to bring a battery charger I just use a single USB charger for my phones and all my gadgets and my camera here the battery lasts a long time I can shoot four or five soccer games consecutively with a single battery and still have some room to spare and I can definitely travel around for a whole day nonetheless it's a good idea to get an extra battery in case it runs out or something if you do need an extra battery this is a link to it s DP io / Z battery if you're running two bodies you have an eight nine and a seven are three like we do for different purposes they're the same battery so you can just carry the extra one like that the memory card configuration this camera has two memory cards which is very useful for redundancy memory cards do fail and if you are a pro and you've never had a memory card fail you just have good luck but will it's bound to happen inevitably even if use high quality card so I encourage everybody to use make use of both of these cards and write to both slots simultaneously if you're shooting anything important at all you'll see two SD card slots in here the d cards go in facing with the label out there's a slot one and a slot two and the distinction is very important especially if you're shooting action slot one here is what's called UHS two slot two is UHS one the difference being UHS two is a newer and faster standard it supports faster writing and that write speed is going to be important because it determines how quickly the pictures can go from your camera over to the card slot and if the card is reading them as if if writing to the card is too slow then the camera gets backed up and then you won't be able to take any more pictures until the buffer and clear some more so you want to be writing as fast as possible and that means using slot one and not letting everything bottleneck on slot two if you write RAW files to both cards it will bottleneck on slot two and that might be fine because this camera has a great buffer but if you are ever running into issues I want to suggest an alternative to using the raw raw we're done and connect configuration and that is a raw with a JPEG backup for your redundant configuration so I'll say this write RAW files to slot one and JPEG files to slot two having a JPEG as a backup is an ideal in the event of a failure but this will provide you with greater throughput and less buffering so this is a choice that you have to make depending on your own shooting style I will show you how to set it up now going to the back of the camera the menu button is up here in the upper left there's a couple of settings that we need to check we're gonna go to the little setup menu here it looks like a toolbox by the way this is not touch sensitive I don't know why so let's go over to setup 6 and then you can see this first option here record media settings we'll select that and now you can see here prioritize recording media this is your primary slot and it's generally going to be slot 1 recording mode standard means it's only writing to slot 1 or whatever salt slot you selected what you'll generally want is simultaneous 4 with stills end video this will write the same file whether you have jpg rock and figure it's going to write the same file to both cards and that's what I use most of the time so you can select that and then switch over to raw and you'll have this raw raw high quality configuration if you're shooting continuous and you find that the camera buffering is becoming an issue and holding you up do this instead go into the menu record media settings and for recording mode select sort raw / JPEG this will write raw files to slot 1 and JPEG files to slot 2 and hopefully alleviate that bottleneck that's all you have to do as far as choosing your memory cards go the fastest UHS to card while there are a bunch that are about the same I'm using the Sony G Series UHS 2 cards which you can pick up at this link here stp dot io / EG SD i use that in slot 1 it doesn't make any sense to put one of these in slot 2 because they're very expensive and the camera cannot take advantage of that extra speed though it will work in slot 2 your slot 2 can go with a less expensive card the best-performing card I can find is the SanDisk Extreme Pro Series you could get the similar capacities for each of these but put this in slot 2 using this link here and down here in this corner I put a little chart that just shows you what kind of card you need for different video bit rates but these cards should allow you to use the highest bitrate possible I'm also gonna pitch that you buy some really cheap SD cards a bunch of them like half a dozen of them and scatter them throughout their out your life put one in your desk at work put one in your glove box of your car put one in your wallet or your purse wherever you're gonna be stick a cheap SD card in there why because we've all left the house at some point without having a memory card in our in our camera because maybe we've left in the memory card slot or something or you fill something up and cheap SD cards are cheap but they are way better than nothing and if you don't believe me you can read this whole thing because this person I saved their butt by giving them this recommendation so go to SDP last cheap SD to get a really cheap SD card let's talk about the ports on the camera I already showed you the USB charging port but I'll flip this back open and we can take a look at the other port here right above here is a USB C port that's for tethering high-performance tethering because with this forty five megapixel camera it takes a while to tether pictures through a USB 2 port above it here we have a micro HDMI port that you could use to connect this to a field monitor if you wanted a field monitor maybe you're doing video above that we have a headphone jack that you can use to monitor sound just plug your headphones in there and you can see when you're recording video what the sound does like you can also play it back and this other little door here we have a microphone jack here and then we have a PC sync cable you should never use a PC sync cable they are terrible and said you want to connect something through the flash hot that you hear if you look at the end of the video i'll recommend flashes for you to use i'll show you how to take a picture it's really obvious it works like every other camera just turn the camera on push the shutter halfway it'll focus and beep we'll show you how to fix that later and then push it the entire way to take a picture it will automatically switch the viewfinder when you hold the camera up to your eye that's great so that's all really basic stuff either using the viewfinder or the live view there were some different options while taking a picture notice on this directional pad here there are markings on the outside of it this serves as a directional pad so you can go up down left right but if you push towards disp this changes your display settings so you can see as I'm pushing it it's changing through different options this is an electronic level because my pictures are never level unless I use the Hat push it again and I can just view information about the scene here's a histogram here push it again and it puts up a bunch of garbage on the screen that I don't like to see so I'll hide that and push it again and now I have you know basic important information like the shutter speed aperture ISO and once again here we have the camera mode all that information and then a histogram I almost always like to see a histogram when I'm shooting even though it's previewing the exposure on the back of the screen it can be hard to know whether you actually have hit your highlights or not hold the camera up to your eye and push up like that and you will cycle through different variations in the viewfinder so those are controlled separately but they all basically have the same types of information when you are using the viewfinder you should know about the diopter which dials in a glasses prescription into your viewfinder everybody should do this even if you have perfect vision just to make sure it's correctly calibrated hold the camera up to your eye and then you're gonna twist this little dial until the numbers and letters on the screen look perfect as sharp as they can possibly be so you'll just dial it up or down little clicks until everything is as sharp as possible again don't look at the scene through the lens but rather look at the numbers at the bottom of the screen if you ever pick up your camera and it seems like it won't focus everything just is always blurry it's off in the diopter if you switch between different users if you and your spouse each use a camera you might have to adjust the diopter separately I'm going to show you how to configure RAW files RAW files just capture more information than JPEG files I'll hit the menu here and can't touch the screen I'll go up to camera one and then the first option here is file format so here you can select between raw raw and JPEG or just JPEG files so I'll just select raw here if you're not familiar with the benefits of shooting raw I suggest you visit SDIO slash Ravi JPEG for free free video where I discuss everything now before we move on there is also an option for raw file type compressed so if I select that you can see I can choose between compressed and uncompressed compressed files are noticeably smaller than uncompressed meaning they will write to the card faster meaning you will not fill up your card as fast and when you copy them to your computer you will not use as much storage space those are all good things however the Sony compression is not lossless it is a very slightly lossy algorithm and if you are really really heavily processing your images from extreme conditions you might see a little bit of difference people have pointed this out in night photos they've been able to reproduce situations where the compressed file the the lights in a night scene might have bled into other pixels a little bit as result of the compression if you're worried about that if that sounds like a nightmare then just switch to uncompressed but me personally I just use compress and I've never noticed any problem with it let's talk about back button focus most of you already know what that is if you don't visit SDP dot io / ybb it's just a way to decouple focusing from the shutter here so that you can you're always in control of whether the camera autofocus is or not it prevents the camera from auto focusing just because you want to take a picture I'll show you how to configure it there's a kind of a two-step process here first I'll hit the menu button here and on the first camera tab here I'm going to scroll over to page six and then I'm gonna go down to the last option which is AF with shutter you can see it's set to on by default I'm going to set that off this decouples focusing from the shutter button and at this point you would normally be ready to go you can see if I push the shutter halfway it's not focusing if I push the AF on button suddenly it focuses so now with the back button on I'm coordinating the focus in here and my finger on the shutter to actually take pictures with this camera I recommend adding a second back button focus option using the AEL button here to do I detect autofocus this works great so when I want to focus on a single point I push this button and when I want to focus on somebody's eyes I push this and it finds the eyes to do that hit the menu button here and then we'll have to go in and configure that AEL button so it's under the camera to tab up here scroll all the way to the right and then it's page eight and I'm gonna pick this first option here where it says custom key for taking pictures and the button I'm looking for is this button the AEL button so I'm just gonna scroll until I find that and you can see by default its AEL hold which is auto exposure lock hold I'm going to select that and instead of that I'm gonna scroll over to this is page 5 AF 2 here the last option I'm going to select iaf bang so now that I am is on I can push the AEL button and it will find an eye in the scene another option you should set while you're here is the hold button if you don't if you can't find that on your camera it's because it's not there it's actually on your lens some lenses some lenses have a focus hold button on them right here this is fantastic I love using this because I can hold the camera like this when I'm shooting and push it with my left hand and that just means that I have either a third option for focusing or I can activate I detect AF and I'm shooting portraits using either this button or this button whichever feels more convenient the G master lenses all have this focus hole button so to set that you would do the same thing you'd scroll down to focus hold button here and then set that to high AF of course you could set that to any of these other focusing options just depends on how you shoot but that's how I do just that one option and then I AF this camera has the option of shooting either in full with full frame mode or cropping down 1.5 times to 8 what they call aps-c mode or super 35 mode super 35 is just like an old film person type of a term for the same thing as aps-c you can configure this manually the reason you might want to do this it's generally better to shoot full frame and you can always crop later on your PC without losing any sort of detail but if you are shooting a lot at the end of your zoom and you know you're going to be cropping all your images you can switch to aps-c mode and your camera will throw out the outside of the frame and just give you that 1.5 x crop and that will reduce your file sizes reduce your processing time reduce your storage space so I do this a lot if I'm shooting sports or wildlife or I end up cropping anyway to switch between the modes hit the menu button here and then right on the very first page camera 1 page 1 will see the option for aps-c super 35 so scroll down here and you can select that and you can see by default it says it's set to auto so all you have to do is set it to manual and then under manual here you can set it either to on or off if it's off its full width if it's on its aps-c now auto where that comes in handy is if you have an aps-c lens aps-c sony lens that you slap on here it will automatically crop it down so you seem to be using the full width but you're only going to getting about 20 megapixels or so so of course you'll lose a lot of megapixels because it's cropping on the outside I don't like to go into the menus to change that manually instead I assign it to a shortcut key the easiest key for me to push here is c2 and if I'm shooting sports and my kids on the close out of the field I'll have seat up where c2 and make it full width if they go to the far side of the field I want to crop in a little bit I'll push it again and it'll zoom in here's how to set that up hit the menu button here under camera page two page eight go to the shooting custom key the first option select that and then go down to custom button to set the focus mode now I'll select that and then I will go down to quality image size page one and select the last option aps-c super 35 full frame select would that set what I can do now is push c2 here and watch what happens as I'm doomed and as I push it it switches between super 35 and full width mode so close out of the field far side of the field just gives me a better performance when it shooting away you'll see it full width in the viewfinder which is so nice because you cannot do that with a DSLR I do want to say there is one drawback well once it starts to buffer and you push it you can see you get the writing to memory card error because you have to let the camera finish buffering before you can switch moans so just something to plan about I also want to show you how to use the focus magnifier another feature that I find really useful it'll just punch in make the viewfinder really zoom in on the subject which can help you nail manual focus it's great for landscapes and stuff not so much for sports to set that up I'm gonna hit the menu button here under the same option camera page - custom key I'll select that and I assigned this to custom button one which is a little harder to hit but so pretty easy so I'll hit c1 here and I'm gonna set that over to focus magnifier so on page 12 of the settings the first option here focus magnifier I'll select that and now when I push one up there pushed it a couple of times BAM you could see I zoom right in and that's great for allowing me to really nail manual focus as close as possible push it again I can zoom even further that's intense so push it once and then pan around to where you want to zoom in push it again to zoom and now you're gonna be sure that you nail the focus let's talk about reviewing a picture after you've taken a picture you can review a picture by hitting the play button here and it'll pop up I just wanted to point out that you have some options here so you can hit the disc again and it will cycle through a couple of different options it'll show you your red blue green histogram here and all your settings or you can just review your picture and make sure that it's okay you can zoom in by hitting the magnifying button here bang I can zoom in and then just pan around and sure enough I miss focus totally but that's fine it's just an example to zoom back out you'll hit this button here it kind of punches in all the way by default hey if you want to be able to use your finger to swipe and pan through it that's really useful but the touchscreen is turned off by default so to turn that on hit the menu button here you'll go over to the little briefcase setup setup page to the last option here is touch operation select that turn it on and so now you can't just do that like you can with an iPhone you can see it's going to change your focusing point but once you review the picture you can then magnify in and at least once you're magnified you can quickly pan it around and I find this to be a lot easier than trying to use the thumb stick here if you want the camera to automatically show you a picture after you've taken it I don't usually need this because I have an electronic viewfinder I know what I got when I take the picture but if you do want to automatically review your pictures hit the menu button here go over to camera page two and then over to page seven of that and you'll see this option here the last one auto review select that and then choose the length of time that you want to auto review your pictures and click OK I like to rate pictures as I review them this is basically in camera coaling so if I'm out taking shots and you know you get that one shot that oh you want to find it as soon as you get back to your ughter I'll rate of five stars and when I import it into Lightroom I'll be able to filter and find that picture instantly to rate pictures you can configure I configure this c3 button here to be the rating button so let's do this let's configure that custom button first I'm gonna hit the menu button go over to camera setup page two and then page eight of that go to playback custom key this third option here select that and then it's the c3 button that I like to use so it's set to protect by default I'll select that and then I'll set it to rating and so now you can see this will allow me to cycle through all the different options I'll just go down and select enter here so now when I pull up a picture there I am wow what a handsome fella I'm gonna hit this c3 button here to give that five stars you can see the rating here and you can just keep pushing it to give it a different amount of stars thanks Sony for putting that in I feel like they did as a personal favor cuz we always wanted that you probably know how to switch the modes because it's almost exactly the same as it is on most other cameras but there's a big mode dial here it has a locking center column here so you can't just twist it it won't accidentally move but when you want to twist it you push this in and then you twist it between program mode aperture priority shutter priority and manual mode these allow you to control the aperture shutter speed separately I'm gonna presume you already know how to do this if you have not mastered all of these you can follow these links here they're pretty self-explanatory I go into intense and painful detail about all these different subjects I promise even if you've been shooting for years there's probably some bit of new information and all of those we'll move on and talk about how to set up bulb mode bulb mode allows you to shoot exposures longer than 30 seconds 30 seconds is the maximum in manual mode so I'll show you how to do that first put the camera into manual mode and then you can use the main dial here to set an exposure that's really long I'm scrolling to the left you can see it's previewing my exposure and then once I get to 30 seconds that's the longest time I can pick but if it keeps going to the left once more I'll go to bulb mode now it operates like a traditional bow where the shutter stays open as long as I have my finger on the shutter like that and then as soon as they let up it's done I'm gonna guess that you probably don't want to hold your finger on the shutter button for five minutes while you're doing a nice shot or a star shot so what you can do is pick up the pick up a remote shutter trigger this is the one I recommend you can pick it up at stp dot io / a7 our three timer it's only 25 bucks it's also useful for making time lapses you'll plug it in and then you'll just push that little thing up to hold and lock the shutter down and then when you're done with your bulb exposure you can release it and go about your day taking some more shots I just want to show you a point out that there is no depth of field preview button on this camera because you generally don't need it depth of field preview is always on so if you're used to shooting a DSLR or something when you look through the lens it's always at wide open so if you have an f28 lens and you have the camera set to have 22 when you look through the lens it's at f28 it will ignore what you have until you take the picture then it shuts it down this camera works differently so I put an aperture priority mode and you can see as we look at my keyboard here that most of the keyboard is out of focus I'm at f28 you can see the depth of field is over here that's sharp if I increase the aperture to f-22 you can see everything snaps into focus in Live View whether using the rear screen or the viewfinder that's because the camera will adjust the aperture of the lens while you're shooting in other words just you don't have to worry about the depth of field preview it's basically always on unless you change it take a minute to plug my books that's what pays for this that's how you can help support me you can check out the number-one photography book in the world stunning digital photography which has 14 hours of video so you can read the book you can join a Facebook group and get peer support answering you know giving you feedback about your pictures or you can forget the book and just watch the videos there's lots of hands-on practices the e-book is only ten bucks the paperback is a little bit more if you want to get into post-processing I have books on the two most popular apps Lightroom for organizing and light editing of your phone and Photoshop for getting anything done and post-processing that you can imagine we also have the art and science video training series which is ten hours of intensive training for more advanced photographers to do things like teach you how to see the world around you how to extract the sharpest images possible and you'll see us using the actual a7r 3 in some of these videos we also have the photography buying guide which will teach you every all the ins and outs of cameras lenses all the differences on everything you need to know about studio lights light modifiers and of course that alone can save you thousands of bucks all these come with a money-back guarantee so if you don't like it just send me an email and I'll give you your money back you can go to SDP dot io slash store or go to Amazon for wherever you are and search for Tony Northrup you can read people's reviews and stuff Tim shutter modes by default the camera is configured to take only one picture so if I hold the shutter down BAM it takes some just one picture to change that you can see a little shortcut here it looks like a stack of copies push that scroll down to high-speed shooting this will be 10 frames per second which is pretty fast actually I think it's like 8 frames a second cuz high is a little bit slower notice I can't change it until after the buffer is done writing that's annoying I can go too high plus and the difference between high and high plus is high I think is 8 and high plus is 10 so it's a little bit faster but high plus does not track autofocus really does so if you want to track a moving subject for sports or something then you're going to be using high if you want to get as many shots as possible to be still subject then use high plus if high is too fast you can go to mid and you can see the pace is more like a traditional DSLR more like 5 or 6 frames per second so for my day to day shooting I'm usually at high or mid if you are shooting continuously and you're shooting sports it can be nice to know how many shots you have left before you fill up your buffer this can help you budget your shots and just make sure you save a few frames so you don't miss that like critical moment because so much action starts with lame and gets progressively more and more exciting and anyway if you want to be able to view that in real time hit the menu button here go over to camera to here page seven and then we're gonna select can't shoot length and I like to have this always display it so I'll select that and so now that displayed look at this line on the left here this bar basically gives me some sense for how much buffer I have left so you can see as I shoot it kind of drops down further and further and further and so if I kept shooting eventually it would go all the way down to the bottom as you see that bar sink and get closer to the bottom you can think to yourself I need to lay off the shutter a little bit let the camera catch up talk to you about the different focusing modes of this camera by default the camera set to AF a automatic AF where it decides whether the subject is still or moving and this seems to work fine you don't have to change this but I will show you the other modes hit the FN button here this brings up a little function menu which has lots of useful shortcuts and I'll show you how to configure it later but for now the second option here is the focus mode so I can select that select AFS single-shot AF which is good for really just landscapes we're still live for product photography or something where you want the most precise focusing possible but even with portraits or handheld shots of nearby subjects I will generally use AF see instead it's excellent on this camera so I'll select AF C and now when I hold the FN button you can see it will jump between focusing on near and a close subjects that's perfect for portraits sports just about anything else and honestly that's where I leave it on this camera about 90% of the time if you're coming from an a7 r2 the autofocus the continuous autofocus is vastly better on this camera so whereas in the a7 r2 I pushed people to use AFS here I'll push them to use AF C for just about everything by default the camera is going to try to focus wherever it feels like which is can be anywhere in the entire frame and it's often right it guesses right most of the time but sometimes it'll focus on the wrong thing and I'm a photographer I want to pick where to focus right so to change to select the single autofocus point which is where I usually shoot I'm gonna hit the FN button then I'm gonna go to the third option here which is focus area I'll select that and so I have a couple of different options for you in my day to day shooting I will select flexible spot M or flexible spot F flexible spot makes a focusing point like that and you can see you can kind of move it around with your thumb or if you turned on the touchscreen you can drag your finger to move the focusing point around the difference between flexible spot M and flexible spot s and flexible spot L is the size of the focusing point 60 flexible spot s is smaller smaller can mean it's a little more precise it's less likely to focus on say someone's forehead than it is on their eye because you can more pinpoint precisely where it's going to be however smaller focusing points might take a little bit longer I've shot a lot with the small focusing point here and it seems to be very reliable so with an a7 r2 I would tell people to use the large focusing point but for this I prefer more precise focusing points and the small one seems to work just fine that's good for day to day shooting if I'm shooting sports I will choose lock-on AF expand flexible spot and then as before you can choose between a two different options a few different options but for me it's always lock-on AF explant expand flexible spot and what this does is track moving subjects so as I hit the AF on button here you can see it's glued on to the P kind of okay the focusing point should stay locked on a single subject but it does wander it's not perfect if I use it for sports which is great because I can put those focusing points on the player I want to shoot and then as they're running from the left side of the frame to the right side of the frame it will continue to track them this means I don't have to be using the thumbstick to change my focusing point I can basically focus and then compose it however I want so long as I'm holding down that AF on button however it will jump from one player to another sometimes especially if one player runs in front of another so you have to be aware of this if you've used like a D 500 or a Nikon d5 they have a little more precise focus tracking mechanism it's not quite that good if you see the focusing points to jump to another player you'll have to release that AF on button get your focusing point back over your star and then hold it down again but for the most part in most situations I find it to work better than any other option talk about manual focusing on cameras like this high megapixel camera sharp lenses autofocus is really the most precise way to go I've done so much testing of this and I cannot manually focus better than the system can auto focus if you decide you do want to manually focus for some reason I generally find the easiest just to switch the switch on the lens from AF over to MF however you can change it in the camera body using that same function menu that you were using to set AF C or AF s let's talk about changing the ISO the camera is configured for auto ISO by default and honestly for me most of the time I just leave it on auto ISO the only times I manually set the ISO really in the studio with strobes or from doing night photography where exposure is just always kind of hit or miss if you want to manually change the ISO what you can do is push the directional pad to the right you can see it's labeled ISO so push that and then I can scroll through all the different ISOs at the top here we have auto you can see ISO 50 and ISO 64 and ISO 80 the lines around them that means those are extended ISOs they're not the native ISOs so if you shoot at a raw file at ISO 100 and then you take the same picture at ISO 50 they're basically going to be identical pictures the only difference will be that the camera will write a little bit saying hey overexpose this ISO 100 shot by one stop so ISO 100 is really the camera's base ISO and ISO 50 over exposes that ISO 100 stealing a stop of exposure from the highlights nonetheless this is okay because your camera usually has more highlights than you will ever need to cover I very rarely ever need to recover the highlights so I don't have any hesitation about going down to ISO 50 and will produce cleaner images than ISO 100 will so go ahead and treat that like a native ISO whether you're shooting raw or JPEG at least that's re my recommendation you've probably found it already but if your pictures are too bright or too dark you can dial in exposure compensation just using this physical dial here so you can see the screen reflects in real time what you're seeing so I can just brighten it up and be happy with it it's in a good place but you might want to make sure that you put it back to zero when you're done shooting I'd find the camera under exposes a little bit so I tend to dial in a tick of exposure compensation you can do this in the menus - but it's so handy that it's right on the dial that's just what I leave it at bracketing is an old film technique for taking multiple exposures of the same scene one normal exposure one underexposed and one underexposed that way if it got back to the darkroom and your meter was off or something you could pick which of the three exposures was the best and just print that one you didn't have to worry about blowing the exposure in the digital world bracketing is generally used so that you can combine multiple images together either manually to create the effect of a graduated neutral density filter or automatically using what we call HDR software high dynamic range software HDR software has a terrible reputation but not the way I use it I use Adobe Lightroom I will select the bracketed images right click them select photo merge and then merge to HDR this does not create a crazy HDR image and so what it does is expands the dynamic range of the image and virtually eliminates noise in the shadows of the image just overall producing a better image I'll almost always bracket my shots for landscapes and still life and product photography things like that so that I have the option to merge them later because you don't always have to merge them but it's nice to have that option if you do want to turn on bracketing this camera handles bracketing as another shutter mode so remember our little stack of copies here and the timer we're gonna push to the right here then we're going to scroll down to continuous bracket and we can scroll over it doesn't make any sense to bracket at point three evey you want to bracket at least two or three Evie so here make little easier to read continuous bracket three ev3 images that is a great setting for just shooting HDR if you really need to get extreme about it you go to five images but three is generally just fine so select that and then the next time you take pictures you can see at the playback button here one normal exposure one underexposed and one an overexposed when you're done of course don't forget to go in and turn the bracketing off okay if you want to try your hand at HDR you can pick up a free trial for Adobe Lightroom which handles it and keeps all your raw data go to SDP dot io / Adobe deal to pick up Lightroom classic CC that's the one I recommend and that's really the only one that's going to be compatible with this camera I also want to show you how to use the self-timer there's really two scenarios for self timers one is that selfie take with your family or you put the camera on a tripod set it for a 10-second delay then like put your arm around them so you can be in the picture the other is a two second timer where if you're shooting a macro or landscape shot and you don't want to get that shutter shake from pushing the shutter button you could set it to a two second timer push the shutter and then after two seconds usually the cameras steady and that you'll get sharper images because there will be no shake self timers are set from the exact same setting the same shutter setting here so I'll just push that let's get the camera woke push that and then scroll over to by default it'll say self timer ten-second but I can just scroll to the left and set it to self timer to second or five seconds so again two seconds for tripod shots where you want sharpen is ten seconds when you want to be part of the picture then I'll set that back when I'm done time lapses time lapses show a long period of time over a short period of time they're great for videos there are two types of time lapses those that are composed of full 42 megapixel stills that can help create an 8k time-lapse or a lower resolution time-lapse that kind of lets you like zoom in and crop and if you pan around the scene in post the other type of time-lapse is then written directly as a video file in-camera and the quality is no doubt going to be lower because it's not capturing 42 megapixels for every image but it's ready as a video file so you can copy it directly from your camera over into your cool vlog if that's what you're doing to set up a time lapse on this camera and it's different than it was in previous generations there are no PlayMemories apps anymore they just took that out for some reason it's gone the easiest way to do it is to do it as the video you'll use the s and Q feature to do this it's right here in the mode dial here so you'll push that in and then go over to s and Q this is weird bear with me now in the menu system here you're going to go to the camera to here and then go down to s and Q settings so I'll select that and here I'm going to select my rendered bitrate whatever I want the video to playback at as well as the rate that it's going to be captured at does that make sense so most people shoot or save video at 30 frames a second or 30 P so this default is probably fine but if you do 60 P videos like we do you'd select that if you can next you'll change the frame rate so this is the rate at which the video will be rendered you can always change that in post and this is the rate at which it will be captured obviously you can't change that so the default setting here records or will playback at 30 P but records it at 120 frames per second which it summarises here as 4 times slow-motion because you're capturing four times more frames than you need if you want to do a time-lapse you're going to do the opposite of slow-motion you're going to select the frame right here and then go down to as low as one frame a second that's still pretty fast for a time lapse time lapse is often only take a frame every 30 seconds or frame every minute but it's the slowest you can go on this particular camera so if you were to run the time-lapse for a full hour at one frame a second that would be 60 frames every minute or 3600 frames over the course of an hour that's ok because you can always like scale it down even further impost but you can always select faster frame rates to okay so that's one way to do kind of a quick and easy time-lapse in camera if you want to do a higher quality time-lapse made from stills you're going to need an external shutter trigger this is the one I recommend sdp dot IO /a 7r3 timer this will allow you to configure the interval between shots and then you will plug it in to the little port over here on the side set your camera settings up and probably manual mode or aperture priority or shutter priority or whatever it is for the frames and then it will start it and it will take pictures on the interval that you say and then you can render those in posts in your favorite time-lapse app let's talk about a few unique features of this camera the electronic front curtain shutter this camera has both an electronic shutter and a mechanical shutter the mechanical shutter is the one that goes clunk Clank Clank and that mechanical shutter has some physical momentum so when it opens up just the momentum of the shutter can shake the camera a very little bit and it's almost nothing but with a high resolution sensor with really sharp lenses that little bit of movement can reduce the sharpness of your images especially if you ever used the original a7r it was a real problem so this camera with the electronic front and shutter will use an electronic shutter where it just basically clears out the sensor without using a mechanical shutter and this eliminates any shake that would be in the camera giving you slightly sharper image is only useful when you're shooting on a tripod right because otherwise your hands are producing shoma shake that it doesn't really even matter but if you are doing macro landscape product photography you should turn this option on to turn on hit the menu button here go to camera 2 page 4 and you can go down to e front curtain shutter and turn that on for things like action ports the electronic front curtain shutter can show a little extra like tilt and in any sort of movement that might be in the scene so you wouldn't want to use it on for everything but it is good for more still life stuff so I turn it on when I'm doing that and I turn it off otherwise but for sports and stuff it's actually not much of an issue I've had it on accidentally for sports and it didn't seem to ruin everything let's talk about adapted lenses for a little bit sony has a great lineup of native lenses and I highly recommend you choose Sony lenses whenever you can and that's not me shilling for them that's me having spent years trying to adapt lenses from other manufacturers to work on the Sony you can do it you can get fantastic results but it's always a little bit of a pain when you adapt the lenses the focusing isn't nearly as good the will autofocus in some configurations but then when you need it most man it's just gonna hunt or it's gonna you're gonna get the pictures back on the computer and find out that it miss focused by just a little bit or sometimes it'll just completely flake out and like crash the camera and you can like twist things and whatever we've been doing this for years this is really coming from experience if you decide to adapt lenses I'll suggest some adapters in a second but there are a couple of settings that you'll want to use first is to configure it to release without a lens so at the menu button here go to the second camera tab here and then page for release without lens and make sure that's set to enable and then go to camera page two and go to SteadyShot settings and set this to manual and then choose the focal length of the lens now you might not need to do either of those things you will only need to do that if you are using a dumb adapter if for example using the smart meta bones adapters it will pretty much figure out the focal length and the lens automatically most of the time unless things flake out which they do sometimes so it's good to know where those are this is the adapter we recommend for Canon lenses you can pick it up at SDP io / mb 5 it's 400 bucks and that alone might make it worth your while to just sell your Canon stuff and and get the native Sony lenses because they just work better I promise I do some of your going to be coming from other systems like Nikon specifically I am not found a good Nikon adapter we just tested one that's supposed to be the best and it was not something I would ever recommend it was flaky and frustrating if you're in that situation with a Nikon I would really push you just to sell your gear and buy some Sony year if you find a nikon adapter that really does work well and you've been using it for like a month and you still like it please write me know because I would love to find something that actually works well let's talk about completely silent shooting that affront curtain shutter just uses an electronic front curtain shutter but the rear cut shutter the rear shutter after the picture is taken is still mechanical so your camera will still go Clank Clank Clank because it's using the shutter afterwards to turn on silent shooting hit the menu button so useful for things like weddings where you don't want to disturb everybody quiet jazz concerts I would totally use silent shooting and you're on the camera tab to hear page four and it's the first option I'm still in the wrong mode so I'll have to go over to let's say aperture priority mode here any of these modes would be fine go back into their main menu camera page to silent shooting on page four select that and then turn it on and now when I take a picture it's completely silent not only does it silent the shutter but it silences that annoying beeping I suggest you all set up your copyright info just put your name in there not because it gives you any additional rights over your pictures your pictures are automatically copyrighted but just having your name and your camera can be useful in case you lose your camera and somebody finds it hit the menu button here let's go over to the briefcase icon page five copyright info let's say right copyright info on and then you're gonna set the photographer and punch your name in there and this is so ridiculous because it has a touchscreen but it doesn't let you use it and also it has this three letters per button interface from like 90s texting you remember nine DS texting we'd have to it like five three times anyway this is my own rant I don't even have the patience to type my whole name on this thing but you get the idea you can do that enough and type your full name and then click OK and then of course you can put in some additional name here the copyright holder name you could put in your email address or phone number so that people can contact you and then if you want to view it or if you find somebody's camera and you want to see what their information is go to the display copyright info your SD cards I recommend buying huge SD cards and formatting them only when you have to because I like to use the SD cards it's like an emergency backup in case my camera fails my computer fails or my hard drives fail or whatever so I tend to leave them on there for at least a few days but there does come a time when you've backed up all the data from your SD cards put it out in the cloud so you own another backup and it's time to reformat it just show you where that menu option is hit the menu button it's under the briefcase icon page five fourth one down is format select that and then you'll have to individually format each of the two memory cards my menu is a really useful feature because it allows you to put your own menu items on your own menu tab because there's like 120 tabs or something or 120 there's a lot of tabs on this thing and I can never remember where everything is so I like to just narrow it down hit the menu button here go over to the star icon you're the star man this is your menu hit add item and then you can pick the options that you want to see on here so I added a couple of options and now under my menu settings I can go over to page one and you can see the menu items that I added here so if you're digging through all the menus to find something put it in there so you don't to dig so much talk about recording video with your a 7r3 first the mode dial has a dedicated video button to it just switch that over to video and this is going to show you a sixteen by nine crop on the rear screen or in the viewfinder either will work which is miraculous if you're coming from a DSLR you can see by default it's showing me audio levels here and I have a histogram I can cycle through a couple of different displays by hitting the disc button here when I'm ready to record I will just hit the record button there and it starts to record this camera makes fantastic video I will say just like in stills mode it's really useful to be able to switch between full frame and aps-c so keep that shortcut ready because you can record full 4k video in aps-c mode which is great when you need that extra reach let's talk about how to actually set up the file format control your video codec go over to camera tab to hear page one third one down is file format you'll see three options here you'll probably never use AVC HD for just 1080p video you'll use a VCS HD but for me I love 4k so I'm gonna select a BCS 4k and now below that I have the record setting option here doesn't have 60 P but you can see either 24 P or 30p here the default is 30 P at 60 megabits a second which gives you very good video if you want higher quality video with fewer compression artifacts you would select 30 P 100 and of course if you're making films or your European or something maybe you want 24 P if you wanted to do slow motion that would be one time when you want to want to go down to X a VCS HD because you can do 120 frames at 1080p which means hundred 20 frames a second means you could play it back at 3d P and have 4 times slow motion so for the record setting for that I would just drop that down to 120 P either 100 or 120 megabytes so you probably want to do them 100 megabytes to make sure your slow motion looks good that's basically all there is to that we talked about this at the top of the show but if you want to accord your video to both memory cards you can do that just go to the setup page 6 up here do record media settings recording mode and just make sure you have the simultaneous option here so that it's recording - both Stills and video - both memory cards so if a memory cards failed you had don't lose your holes shoot right hey maybe you want to record slow motion this can do 4 times slow motion in full 1080p to do that you go back into the menu system here go to camera 2 movie one here page one go down to file format and select X AVC s HD and then for the record setting select 120p you probably want the hundred megabits per second unless that's bottlenecking on your SD card now it'll record at 120 P in your app in Premiere Pro or whatever video editing app you use just you can slow it down four times and you should should see super smooth slow motion video let's talk about the audio levels you might want to manually adjust the audio levels especially if you have a mic word and just to make sure you're not pig peaking Plus auto audio levels generally sound bad to adjust it you're going to be in the menu system camera tab to hear page two and then you go down to audio recording level and you can see my levels are displaying here now I can just scroll up or down usually I want the levels to be showing up a little bit in the yellow range like if I talk not quite there I need to go all the way up Mic Check you can adjust the levels up and down here until they look good to you and if you want to reset it there's a big button there to do that peaking is useful because it will show you the parts of the frame that are that have the most contrast that are in focus its focus peaking it's a good way to manually focus if for some reason you can't use autofocus lots of videographers use it so that's why I'm mentioning it here hit the menu button go to camera tab 1 page 13 and if we scroll down to the last option you'll see peaking setting so I'll set that I'm going to turn the peaking display on peaking level I usually peak peaking pick a pick peaking level low and then I set it to some color that contrasts with the scene so red for example and now I'll demonstrate it for you after turning it on focus peaking only works when the lens is in manual focus so switch over to manual focus and now let's try to focus on these letters on the screen you can see it here as I as that part of the frame comes in focus you see the red highlights around the letters that just tells me that that part of it's in focus focus peaking is not precise it's going to highlight parts of the frame that are definitely very slightly out of focus but it's good to just kind of get you any general range once use peaking to get roughly in focus you can then punch in with the focus magnifier that I showed you how to use earlier and just make sure that you've perfectly nailed it gonna really see the red highlight focus peaking goethe going through the scene there another feature that filmmakers often like is zebras which will highlight overexposed parts of the frame to turn the Zebras on go into the menu button here they're going to the camera tab at to page six and right here we have zebra setting it's off by default we'll turn it on and then you can pick your zebra level me I'm a fan of having zebras at like a hundred percent I like them to be really bright because I don't mind if something's almost blown out I only care if it's completely blown out so there you can see some parts of the scene or just straight-up overexposed and it's highlighting them with zebras I bet you can figure out why it's called zebras right auto white balance on this camera is awesome you might never need to change it especially if you shoot raw where you can fix it in post if you don't want to manually set the white balance no worries hit the function button here go over to third row bottom here auto white balance and then set it to whatever you want the white balance to be you can also put in custom white balance settings but honestly for me I'm pretty much happy with auto white balance it also has different metering modes and again I leave this out the default and then use exposure compensation to adjust it where I need to but you can manually change the metering modes using the same function button here so I'll select that and then it's the top row furthest right one is the medium metering mode then you can do spot metering or whatever but really multi meeting metering is generally the best if you're the type who frequently shoots different types of scenes you go from portraits to wildlife to sports you know that there might be five different settings that you need to remember to change every time and it's easy to forget something so it's really useful to assign a group of settings such as continuous shutter and a fashion or speed for sports to something like c1 where you can just switch the dial into c1 and it will pick up all of your settings I'm going to show you how to do that now it's pretty easy first put the camera whatever settings you want so we'll pretend I'm shooting my kids soccer game mode button mode dial over here to ask for first shutter speed and then I'm gonna set my shutter speed to one 500th because she's really fast and F 2.8 usually they have the exposure compensation like one third of a stop overexposed and I'll set the ISO to auto great so I'm gonna make sure that it's in continuous high so I have those settings those settings that I want now I'm going to force it to save that to c1 I'm gonna hit the menu button go into the first camera tab page three and then you'll see this here camera 1 camera 2 slash memory so I'm going to select that and I can scroll through here to select different options one two and three relate to the one two and three that you see on the mode dial here so I'll save this to one and it will say that it's registered so I saw my camera in shutter priority here let's say I change the shutter speed down to one one sixtieth and I switch over to single-shot mode now I need to shoot sports know going into all those settings I just need to switch this over to one and bam you can see it remind you what these settings are one five hundredth so you don't have to memorize what each of them are and if I look at the shutter you can see guess it's at one five hundredth of a second the shutter mode is on continuous high and I'm ready to shoot some sports pixel shift is a mode that allows you to get basically up to four times more detail out of a scene by shifting the pixel one shoot shifting the sensor one pixel up-down left-right and combining red blue and green detail for every single pixel if you want to find out everything about pixel shift visit this URL SDP dot io / pixel shift I'll just tell you how to turn it on really quickly hit the menu button here go to the camera tab 1 page 3 and you'll see pixel shift multi shoot turn that on by selecting the interval here one second seems to be fine I cannot imagine why you'd want to shoot longer than one second but I suppose it's an option now you have to have your camera on a heavy tripod and you don't want them anywhere you don't want to have any movement around the camera you don't wanna have any wind because even the slightest movement will ruin your pixel shift set you will then want to push the shutter and it will take the four shots for you and then do that a bunch of times like if I'm taking a pixel shift shot I'm probably taking five or ten pixel shift shots just so I can be confident that at least one is absolutely perfect because I do have a high failure rate with those and there's no way to review the pixel shift results in camera you can only review it when you get back to your computer and actually process them with software in my pixel shift video here I recommended using the Sony software because there was no alternative at the time I recorded it since then a new app has come out that will take your pixel shift files and combine them into a single raw file and DNG file that you can process in Adobe Lightroom if you want to check that out go here to SDP dot io / PSD ng it's in beta as I write this and I haven't spent much time with it but I did want to send you there and I also wanted to point out if pixel shift of files can't handle any motion in the scene not even moving water or blowing leaves but you can still use pixel shift in those situations by taking one of the original images and blending it into your stacked image to remove any of that motion but check that video out for more information this camera has Wi-Fi built into it that can transfer pictures from your camera over to your old smartphone you know why so you can post them on Instagram real quick when you're out traveling you can also use your smartphone as a remote so let's try that out the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to open up the App Store on my phone and install the Play memories app this seems like a ridiculous name for an app that controls such a high proCamera but that's what it's called it's called play memories there we go PlayMemories this is available for both Android and iOS and notice that it has two out of five stars it's because it doesn't work great honestly like most of the apps on your phone probably have four or four and a half stars this one is a 2 star app I just want to set your expectations okay it's not the most reliable app the connection here can be kind of flaky it can be kind of frustrating but it's not bad it's not the worst so I just ran that app I'm gonna agree and proceed and then there's a little thing photography is my main profession okay start it's going to ask for some permissions yes you can access my photos yes you can send me notifications and now we're going to actually connect to the camera so not connected to a camera it's going to walk you through this process so if they update the app in the process is different than refer to the app do with the abscess now what I say right now is saying to active on activate the Wi-Fi function by operating the camera so I turn the camera on I'm gonna hit the menu button and Wi-Fi has they use a little globe for Wi-Fi that's it's a word thing we're gonna select the first option there send to smart from func menus are the worst right and then the first option here is sent to smart phone and you can pick to select the pictures on your camera or on your smart phone I would generally rather use this smart phone and now it's showing me a QR code so my phone you can see it says it gives me the option to connect by scanning a QR code so I'll select that yes scan the QR code of the camera yes you can access my camera ok and then I'm gonna point the camera on my phone to the cam the QR code scanning complete and you can see it configures the Wi-Fi network using that information so I'll click OK this might be different on an Android device but it'll basically be the same thing I mean nacelles profile on my iPhone on my watch and then I'm gonna click install here user profile is not signed still I want to install it so after all those prompts the profile is now installed I can hit done here and then return to PlayStation mobile at this point in this version of the app I have to go into the Wi-Fi settings and manually connect to the Wi-Fi network that the camera has created you can see the name of the Wi-Fi network here so I'm gonna have to go into my settings settings Wi-Fi and then I should see the network here the camera is acting like a wireless access point because I've already installed the profile it will connect automatically it is a secured connection but I don't have to type the password so I'm connected that Wi-Fi I'll switch back to the app now you can see it's connected to the camera you can see I can now browse the pictures here here my fancy passport pictures that I took the other day however these are RAW files so I cannot copy them directly to though I can it is actually transferring a JPEG version of the file here if I hit this if I hit settings up in the upper right corner here I can change the copy image size to be the original or two megapixel version so both those are both really low resolution if you want to get even decent looking pictures on Instagram you'll probably want to switch back to the original kind of wish they had something in the middle but you can see when I copy the original takes a little bit longer but it's still okay it's Wi-Fi after all now the pictures are just saved on my smart phone so if I go into Instagram I could oh there it is I'm definitely not gonna put this selfie on Instagram but I could when I'm done with that I'm going to select cancel from the phone to stop it this will shut down the Wi-Fi network it will disconnect my phone there are some other things you can do you can use the Wi-Fi network to remotely control your camera and to do that you'll hit the menu button you go to the globe icon here and then you go down to control with smart phone and then control with smartphone and then select on then you'll go down to connection here and it's going to do basically the same thing where it shows you the QR code here you really shouldn't need to scan the QR code again after the first time because it will have installed the Wi-Fi password however you at least on iOS you will have to go into the Wi-Fi network here and once again reconnect to it an Android phone you might see it automatically pop up if you're away from Wi-Fi networks if you don't have a home network that is connecting to it might work for you automatically so now I go back into the plain memories app and it automatically figures out that I'm trying to do remote control shooting so you can see it's showing in near-real-time the feed through it so you can see me and my cameraman Justin and I can hit the playback button to review my photos but I cannot transfer them from here I'd have to disconnect and then start up the send pictures to smartphone process there's no reason that that should be the case is just not a great app I can rotate photo here by clicking that in the upper right corner and for save saving the options here I can hit the menu button and then go in and add in some other information one useful feature here is the location information which will tag images with GPS when I'm done remote controlling my phone that's great if you need to record yourself and you want to make sure that you're in the frame your head isn't poking off the frame I'm gonna do the same thing I did before to end it I'm gonna hit the menu button go into control with smartphone and then turn that off now I'm gonna pick up my smartphone and go back into the PlayMemories mobile app and I'm going to select location information linkage and this will tell me that it happens via bluetooth so I'll click OK I'll turn on the location in linkage it tells me that it's going to use some extra batteries and stuff and I'll click OK and then I will set this camera and you can see there's a non paired camera that's currently broadcasting so I'll select that it will complete the pairing now over on my camera it wants just for security reasons to verify that this connection is legit so I'll click OK and then on my phone it's gonna for security reasons verify that the connection is legit so I'll click pair and then I can click OK on both of them and then on my phone it cannot automatically use my location so it wants me to set the allow location access in the settings page this could happen automatically but the app just needs to be updated so location I will set this to always this won't happen on Android this will just be an iOS thing so now with in the settings for the app location is set to always I can scroll back here one more setting that you have to do inside the camera same page here page 2 of the network 2 location information link set select that select location information link and then turn this to on now it'll automatically adjust the time and the area that you're in and it should GPS tag your images now the camera and the smartphone should communicate like I mentioned before this is going to use a little bit of extra batteries from both your camera and your phone so make sure that you watch those things and of course it'll only work when the phone actually has its own location information and I'm gonna go over a few settings that I modify from the default that we haven't covered so far just my preferred configuration first of all I turn the beeps off on every camera this will only make a difference when you're not using silent shooting but I'll show you where that is hit the menu button here go over to camera page tamra camera tab 2 page 9 audio signals and set that to off audio signals suck you definitely don't need those I also like to turn off the AF illuminator the AF illuminator is this light here if it's dark and it can't find focus it will just make a light but it only does this in dark rooms where it may blinds everybody that you're trying to take a picture of and draws a ton of attention to you especially in things like weddings and events you definitely don't want to be distracting people with it and if focus is fine for the most right even when you turn it off so I always turn it off hit the menu go over to camera tab 1 page 6 if illuminator from Otto I'm going to turn that off I'm happy with that I also like to change the options when I cycle through the disc here you know how it shows different groups of information I like to have the option to turn the rear screen off that's because if I'm shooting in a dim environment like a concert or something I will use the viewfinder and then I don't want this turning on and lighting up the whole room because even in dark rooms it's going to be very very bright really distracting it can blind you and throw off your own vision so I turn that I enable the option to turn it off a lot the menu button here go to camera tab to page six for a disk button the first option here I go to monitor this is monitor this is finder I select monitor and then I select the monitor off checkbox and then scroll over to enter make sure you do that and now if I hit the disp button enough it will turn the screen off completely I can still hold it up to my eye and see stuff so if I wanted to turn it back on I just hit the disk button again just a convenient way I also like to customize my function menus the function menu pops up when you hit this FN key here and there's a bunch of options here but as I mentioned I never ever change for example the metering mode and I rarely change the white balance so I can assign these to more useful features this is going to depend on how you shoot which features use most often but to change it with the menu button you go to camera page camera tab - page 8 and then go down to function menu set and you can see function upper function lower from one to six just set those to whatever options you like to use whoa that is finishes the instructional part of this you now know how to use your camera be sure to get stunning digital photography to figure out how to actually take good pictures but now you know where the buttons and dials and stuff are I'm going to go over my favorite Sony gear in case you're looking to gear up a little bit my experiences with each of these lenses because I've used a lot of the lenses the best kind of all-around general shooting lens is the Sony 24 to 105 and G remember G means good another option is G M or G master that means great you'll definitely want to get at least G lenses but the GM lenses are generally preferred this is AG lens which means it's good it's $1,300 it's a great all-purpose lens if you have used a Canon 24 to 105 or the Nikon 24 to 120 this is way better it is way sharper than those lenses you will be shocked it's a great lens you can pick it up at this link here a step up from that is the 24 to 70 f28 that's what I've had on my camera this whole time if you're a pro shooter shooting events or weddings or something this is probably what you're gonna get everybody loves to have their fast f28 lenses and that's in twice as much light and let you get more background blur but it's 2,200 bucks pick it up at this link here s 24 GM another great lens that's more wide-angle is the 16 to 35 f28 this is an incredibly sharp lens it is sharper than the 24 to 70 if you have both these lenses and you're shooting between 24 and 35 millimeters where they overlap use the 16 to 35 uses whenever as possible it's way sharper it's also 2200 bucks pick it up at s DP done io / s 16 GM shooting sports and portraits my favorite lens is the 70 a 200 f28 GM also a fantastic and sharp lens pick it up here you can even stop a teleconverter on there if you need a little extra reach with sports depending on the sport to shoot that's what we use all the time that's what the close-up camera has been filmed with this whole time that lens on a a 9 I also loved the 100 to 400 for like light wildlife stuff for further sports stuff it's also very very sharp it's a G master lens 2500 bucks s DP dot io / S 400 I'm gonna suggest my favorite flash system for that this and this camera I don't recommend the Sony native equipment instead what I recommend is picking up a godox flash in the US it's known as a flash point but you can pick it up known with the go docks or a flash point name and they're exactly the same gear just rebranded in the US the flash point is supported by adorama you'll get better support out of a dorama than you will from go dachshund but I don't think they make a flashpoint branded version of this so you have to get the go Doc's version the best flash you can get is the go Doc's v8 62 s the last S stands for Sony because you can get versions for Canada Nikon or whatever you can for $225 you can get an awesome flash with its own lithium ion battery that stores like the same amount of power as three sets of double a's and you can get a wireless transmitter that will let you remotely control it so you can attach the flash directly to the flash hot shoe and it gives you TTL and high speed sync and all that or you can take it off camera and use that transmitter and still get TTL and high speed sync so if you were trying to buy sony or canon gear you'd be spending like 600 bucks 700 bucks for this setup 225 is outrageous we use this it's fantastic if you want more of a studio light where you can attach a Bowens mount to it like big soft boxes and stuff this is what we use in our studio in the US it's the flash point Explorer 600 in other countries it'll be the go Doc's Explorer 600 they're exactly the same the transmitter and a flash are 750 did they just announced the Explorer 600 Pro which is just a slightly newer version of this that has better color control so this is still in the market it is a little less expensive the color temperature will vary slightly from shot to shot but otherwise it's basically just as good as the new pro version so I am still using this but if you see the pro version it's know that it's just slightly better I want to suggest a couple of tripods for you my travel tripod is a Manfrotto bfree tripod it folds up into a tiny little package of weighs almost nothing I have the carbon fiber version and I just carry it with me everywhere cause it's nice to have a tripod pick it up at stp dot io / be free if you want something heavier maybe for doing your pixel shift photos which do require a heavy tripod this is the Manfrotto tripod that I recommend pick it up at that link there I'm also going to provide some suggestions for mobile processing I showed you the Wi-Fi app it's kind of clumsy that's not how I work I transfer my images directly from the SD card to either my iPad or my iPhone works just as well with an Android using one of these inexpensive dongles hero links for an Android version and for an Apple version the images transfer faster the whole process just goes much better than trying to use Wi-Fi I've also switched over from using a laptop to using an iPad pro I use that little dongle send them into my big old 2 456 gigabyte iPad pro and then process my images in Lightroom mobile it's fantastic search our channel for iPad prone to find a video where I review it but you can pick it up at this link here and with that I use the Lightroom mobile which you can get a free trial for at SDP dot io / Adobe deal whoo this was a monster tutorial I hope it helps if you want to support us if you want to learn the art and science a photography check out my book stunning digital photography with 14 hours of video also at this link SDP dot io slash store you can check out my art and science video training series which gets more serious for you serious photographers it will teach you the art of composition how to make sure you never forget a key element in your photo little mnemonics like belts BLTs the the e-book started at ten bucks with tons of video in them we also have books on Lightroom and Photoshop and my photography buying guide which shows you the ins and outs of all the gear of course subscribe for more free videos that doesn't cost you anything at all we have lots of tutorials and camera reviews coming out soon thank you very much bye

Channel: Tony & Chelsea Northrup

Views: 849,351

Keywords: training, how-to, how, to, photography, tutorial, dslr, picture, pictures, sony, sony a7r iii, sony a7r3, a7r3, a7r iii, sony a7r, sony alpha, camera, video, guide, overview, user guide, user manual

Id: ExqpymyUFt4

Length: 76min 21sec (4581 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 31 2018