Cameras

Living la vida vidrio. Sony a7RII with FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM, 24mm (cropped), 1/1000 at ƒ/3.2 ISO 100 — Living la vida **vidrio.** Sony a7RII with FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM, 24mm (cropped), 1/1000 at ƒ/3.2 ISO 100

Sony G Master Lenses

March 07, 2016

When I wrote about the Sony a7RII, I included a section on lenses. The takeaway:

Sony has nearly won me over with their full-frame camera bodies. It’s the lenses that I haven’t fallen in love with yet.

Well, that just changed.

Sony a6300 with 16-70 F4, a7RII with new FE 85mm f/1.4 GM, and the also-new FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM. Just out of frame: $16 mojito. — Sony a6300 with 16-70 F4, a7RII with new FE 85mm f/1.4 GM, and the also-new FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM. Just out of frame: $16 mojito.

Sony, with their Zeiss FE lens line, has an abundance of clinically-sharp, technically unimpeachable, and ultimately rather boring lenses. Until now, the exception to that was the FE 35mm F1.4, which I bought for myself after borrowing one from Sony.

Then, just last month, Sony announced the G Master line of lenses. With the stated purpose of providing enough sharpness to match the ultra-high resolution sensors of the future, these lenses seem to represent typical Sony: an emphasis on tech specs, rather than sex appeal.

But the G Master lenses are sexy — if conservatively so. They’re not quirky or unpredictable, and they don’t exactly have character, but they are fast, sharp, and great to shoot with. And they make beautiful pictures that live up to the promise of fast glass on a full-frame body.

That's the new Sony FE 85mm f/1.4 GM on an a6300, shot with a a7RII and FE 85mm f/1.4 GM at ƒ/6.3.

There are three lenses in this initial G Master (GM) lineup. The FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM is the fast zoom you’ve always wanted for Sony full-frame mirrorless. The FE 85mm f/1.4 GM is the portrait lens, Sony’s answer to the famously magic-yet-infuritaing Canon 85mm F1.2 L “canonball.” The FE 70-200mm f/2.8 GM OSS is another fast zoom, the only optically-stabilized lens in the lineup so far, and will be joined by new 1.4x and 2x teleconverters specifically designed to work with it.

Three Days in the 305

Sony a7RII with FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM at 70mm, 1/1250 ƒ/4.5 ISO 100

Sony kindly invited me to join a group of photographers in testing the G Master lenses in Miami last week. The 24–70 and 85 were loaned to us for the event, along with an a7RII body. The 70–200 ships later and was not available. If you follow me on Instagram, you already know all this.

We also got to test the new a6300, a $1,000 APS-C camera with impressive specs for video, including 4K XAVC S video, 120 fps 1080p overcranking, and sLog-3. More on that later — but I did post one sample already.

The FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM

I basically treated this lens as a 24mm prime, but from end to end this zoom meets all of Sony’s stated criteria for the G Master line. It’s sharp, it’s sharp wide-open, and it has only minor longitudinal chromatic aberration (UPDATE: see comments below). It does distort (barrel at the wide and, pincushion at the long), so we Lightroom users should look forward to Adobe profiling the lens for a future ACR update.

It’s not small, but it’s smaller than my Canon 24-70 F2.8 L, although more expensive than even the Mark II version of that lens.

Sony a7RII with Sony FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM at 24mm, 1/125 ƒ/3.2 ISO 800

A 24–70 F2.8 zoom has long been an essential part of just about every full-frame kit, including mine. This lens will be deservedly popular as the “if you only bring one lens with you” option for full-frame Sony Alpha cameras.

Ben Vonwong (@vonwong)

Sony a7RII with FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM at 35mm (cropped), 1/1000 ƒ/2.8 ISO 100

Detail

Without my aggressive processing you can see that there is some blue/yellow longitudinal chromatic aberration.

The FE 85mm f/1.4 GM

Yeah. This is a lens.

Sony a7RII with Sony FE 85mm f/1.4 GM, 1/50 ƒ/5.0 ISO 100

My review: I will be buying one.

Jose Tutiven (@tutes) razor sharp against perfectly-round boke. Sony a7RII with FE 85mm f/1.4 GM, 1/125 ƒ/1.4 ISO 800 — Jose Tutiven (@tutes) razor sharp against perfectly-round boke. Sony a7RII with FE 85mm f/1.4 GM, 1/125 ƒ/1.4 ISO 800

Pricing and Availability

The FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM is $2,198 and will be available this month. You can preorder now from B&H. Same for the FE 85mm f/1.4 GM, at $1,798. The FE 70-200mm f/2.8 GM OSS will be available in May 2016, no price announced yet.

Raw is Not Magic

January 25, 2016

When you open a raw image from your digital SLR (or Cinema DNG files from something like the Blackmagic Cinema Camera or Digital Bolex) in something like Adobe's Lightroom, and reduce the exposure to reveal a huge amount of information in the highlights — or radically adjust the white balance to recover a well-balanced image from a murky orange mess, it's easy to feel that the raw files are somehow more than just pixels. It almost feels magic.

This sense of raw still images being a true digital negative — deep, rich, forgiving of exposure errors, and massively tunable to your ultimate taste, leads some video shooters to feel that raw is always a better choice than the other common way of capturing a high-dynamic range cinema image: log.

“Log” is a broad term to describe images images stored with logarithmic (rather than linear or gamma-encoded) light values. You don’t typically see this format available often in still cameras (GoPro is a notable exception), but it’s commonplace in higher-end video cameras. The intent of log is similar to the intent of raw: to capture and preserve as much dynamic range as possible. Like raw, log images require post-processing to “look right.”

Are your familiar with shooting flat video? Log is the ultimate flat.

A Typical Scene

Shut up, it's totally typical. And this is roughly how your eye might see it.

Raw

The same scene as captured by a still camera in raw, and processed at the default settings by photo software. Note that the image has a pleasing contrast, but the sky is blown-out.

Linear

The linear pixel values stored in the raw file. Note that the sky isn't as blown-out as it looked, meaning we can recover it later in software.

Log

The same scene stored in log pixel values. The image appears "flat," but the log pixels have the same overexposure latitude in the sky as the raw ones do.

Cameras that shoot raw are great. But so are cameras that shoot log. A properly-recorded log image can be as powerful and flexible as a raw one, and can even have some advantages over raw.

And raw? It’s not magic — but the reasons it can feel that way are worth exploring.

The Double-Edged Sword of Linear Light

Raw images are typically stored in linear-light values. A reasonable definition of raw is “what the sensor captured,” and the sensor records light in light’s own measure, meaning that +1 stop = twice as much light = 2x the numerical value in a digital file.

Linear Exposure Values

Linear (raw)

Linear (raw)

This logical arrangement turns out to be inefficient as heck in any kind of quantized digital file. Half of your available tonal range is dedicated to the single brightest stop of your image, so raw files have to have very high bit-depths to hold detail in the low exposure areas. It’s not unusual for raw files to be 12- or 14-bit. But it’s not useful to directly compare those numbers against the bit depths of log or video encoded files, where the tonal range is distributed non-linearly.

The huge advantage of storing raw files in linear-light is that no conversion has been baked-in to make them “look nice” on a non-linear display. No subjective corrections, such as contrast curves or color adjustments have been applied. This (among many other factors) means that a raw file is not inherently ready to be viewed. It must be interpreted by software and converted to a viewable state. And this interpretation process is inherently subjective — even if you, the shooter, don't get involved.

“Straight Out of the Camera” Raw is a Myth

This is a little pet peeve of mine. You’ll sometimes see photo dorks post shots from a new camera with the intention of showing “what the camera can do,” so they make a point of noting that the image has “no processing” or is “straight out of the camera”. This is only a valid notion for JPEG or other baked-in-processing formats. In the case of raw files, what they really should be saying is that they’re showing you the default processing of whatever raw conversion software they’re using — which is going to be different in Lightroom than it will be in Apple Photos or Capture One. If you don’t touch the controls in your raw software, the image is not “unprocessed.” It’s just processed according to the subjective decisions of a team of software engineers instead of you.

Often those engineers have labored to make their default processing match our expectations, by visually matching the JPEG previews we saw on the camera’s LCD screen. In Lightroom, for example, this is made possible by carefully-crafted camera “profiles,” which are essentially sets of invisible sliders adjusted to pre-process the shot into an expected appearance, while leaving the visible controls at their defaults. In these cases, the hard work of the developers actually perpetuates the myth that there’s something “pure” or untouched about a raw file left at its default processing settings. The truth is, any raw processing is subjective, and plays a major role in the appearance of a photo or motion picture frame.

Log is as Good as Linear, Maybe Better

Where a linear-light image is stored such that the numerical values directly equate with light intensities, log images are arranged so that the same number of pixel values are used for every stop in the image.

An idealized 0.0–1.0 linear image uses values 0.5–1.0 for the brightest stop, 0.25–0.5 for the second-brightest, 0.125–0.5 for the third brightest, 0.0625–0.125 for the fourth brightest, and so on. At the fourth-brightest stop, we're already down to the bottom 6% of the available pixel values. The middle-range of your image, your exposure sweet-spot, is stored entirely in the bottom 3% of the available data range.

Pixel Values per Stop in Linear and Log

Linear (raw)
Log

Linear (raw)
Log

Log, on the other hand, uses its pixel values much more efficiently. If a log image holds ten stops, then 0.0–0.1 is used for the darkest stop, 0.1–0.2 is for stop 2, 0.2–0.3 is for stop 3, and so on, up to 0.9–1.0 for stop 10. Each stop gets exactly the same amount of data fidelity.

See what I mean about log being the flattest of the flat picture “styles" or “profiles”? When I created Prolost Flat, I was aiming for something as close to log as I could get.

In both log and linear images, color adjustments can easily be natural and organic, because the number-spaces so easily invite simple math to relate directly to light values.

In a linear image, adjust exposure with multiplication. To brighten an image by one stop, multiply the values by 2. To darken an image by two stops, multiply the values by 0.25.
In a log image, exposure is adjusted with addition/subtraction, which is sometimes called offset. To brighten an image by one stop, add one stop’s worth of values to the image. In our 10-stop example, that would be 0.1. So adding 0.1 the the pixel values bumps exposure up one stop. To reduce exposure by two stops, subtract 0.2.

When someone points out that raw images are eminently color-correctable, it’s worth remembering that the same is equally true of log. And since log images better utilize their data range, they don’t require as high a bit-depth to hold a high-fidelity image. A hypothetical 10-bit linear raw image has substantially less color fidelity where it counts than an all-other-factors-being-equal 10-bit log image.

Raw Pixels are Rapidly Reduced to Regular Pixels

One myth of raw processing is that it happens all at once. This is not true. Every raw processing engine has an order of operations. And very early in that order of operations is the debayering step, where the monochrome, color-filtered pixels are cleverly interpolated into unique RGB values per pixel.

After this operation is performed, the result is a set of very nice, high-bit-depth, linear-light RGB pixels. These pixels are no different than any other very nice RGB pixels. In fact, they’re somewhat challenged, since the debayering process isn’t perfect, so the RGB values may have aliasing and other undersampling artifacts.

All of the subsequent image processing in your raw software is done to these regular, non-magic, RGB pixels.

Some raw adjustments, like sharpening and other detail tweaks, may dig all the way back to the demosaicing stage in the pipeline. But that doesn't change the fact that the first step in the image processing pipeline is to make plain old RGB pixels out of the raw file.

What this means is that the vast majority of the “raw image processing” to which we ascribe so many magical powers, is just good, old fashioned RGB image processing — that could just as easily be done to, say, a TIFF file, or a 10-bit log ProRes frame, as it could to a raw image.

Myth: Raw Images Have No Native White Balance

One of the “magic” properties of a raw image is that it is said to have no inherent white balance. You get to “white balance after the fact.” This is one of the easiest demos of why raw is so great. It’s quite easy, for example, to shoot a daylight-balanced JPEG in tungsten lighting and demonstrate how nearly impossible it is to correct it to a properly white-balanced image. Capture the same shot raw, and the process of correcting the white balance is effortless.

But the reason this works is not that the raw image has no inherent, or native white balance. It does. The RGB color filters let in certain wavelengths of light, and these are chosen carefully by the manufacturer to result in a robust, but specific, colorimetry. There’s one and only one color of light that pings the red, green, and blue-filtered pixels to the same value, and that’s the native color temperature of a bayer-pattern sensor.

The reasons its hard to rescue a poorly-white-balanced 8-bit JPEG are numerous, and they compound on one another. An image shot at the wrong white balance will inevitably be very dark in one of the color channels — for example, our tungsten-lit, daylight-balanced JPEG will be so orange in appearance that the blue channel might be near-black. Fixing the image means brightening up the blue channel so much that we're going to not only experience nasty quantization from bringing up the deep shadows of the 8-bit image, but compression artifacts as well. Compression is perceptual, so when the compression engine sees a really dark blue channel, it assigns it very little of the available data values.

This is made much worse by the subjective tone and color adjustments that are baked into that JPEG. A pleasing contrast curve (or s-curve) makes a well-balanced JPEG look lovely. But part of how it does that is to create a "toe," or an area in the extreme shadows where values gradually taper off to pure black. Values in this range are quite similar, i.e. difficult to distinguish visually, and are therefore likely to be compressed heavily. When you brighten up that blue channel, you're trying to make useful, visible pixels out of this intentionally-mushed-down and mercilessly-compressed portion of the image.

Contrast curves and compression happen very late in the raw processing pipeline, but white balance happens quite early. The problem with trying to correct an improperly white balanced JPEG could be categorized as a colossal error in order of operations. So rescuing a poorly-white-balanced JPEG involves revealing the very worst of an image that was designed to be seen, but not touched.

When you adjust the white balance of a raw image, you're acting on the linear-light RGB pixels that resulted from the debayer phase. White balance is actually a very simple operation — it's nothing more than exposure adjustments in R, G and B. You’re doing this under a bunch of the other processing that goes into making a JPEG look nice, such as the s-curve and color adjustments.

So white balance is just exposure. Remember how easy exposure adjustments are in linear light? Remember also how easy they are in log?

A good log image is just as re-white-balanceable as a raw one.

I Don’t Believe You. It’s Frickin’ Magic

Not magic. But there is some really clever stuff going on in most raw processing software that can make it seem like raw images have magical properties.

Remember that white balance is just exposure adjustments per channel. For example, to warm up an image using white balance controls, you're increasing red exposure a lot, green a little, and decreasing blue.

When decreasing exposure, you can run into issues with highlights. A blown-out highlight, reduced in exposure, is not pretty.

An easy way to show off the power of raw is to use your raw processing software to reduce the exposure of a seemingly blown-out image. Often you'll see highlight detail appear as if by magic. Of course, it's not magic at all — it was there all along, but held in reserve. The reason for this is actually less about giving you room to reduce overall exposure in post, but rather for white balancing.

Reducing exposure on this raw file in Lightroom reveals a blue sky where the default settings were clipped to white.

Holding some overexposure in reserve means that when you adjust white balance, which entails reducing exposure in at least one of the RGB channels, you can bring in new, valid highlight detail in those channels. You can sense this happening as you adjust white balance in Lightroom — it doesn't feel like color correcting — It feels like something “more.” But it’s just well-designed software with a proper order of operations (the last step of which is a pleasing s-curve), working from a robust digital negative, that allows a simple thing like white balancing to reveal previously-hidden image information.

But this comes at a cost. Remember that the top two stops of your image take up 3/4 of your available pixel values. If your raw image holds three stops of overexposure in reserve, that means that the visible portion of your image is restricted to 1/8 of your pixel values. In a 12-bit image, which can hold 4,096 shades of gray, this means that the visible portion of your image only gets 512 values. That’s only twice as many as in an 8-bit JPEG.

Reducing the exposure on this Alexa Log C frame in Nuke, viewing under an sRGB preview LUT, reveals the previously blown-out detail in the sky. Screen capture courtesy of Dan Sturm.

Nope. Magic.

Raw processing software will often allow you to do extreme exposure reductions, past the point where the camera data is capable of producing usable highlight imagery on its own. And yet sometimes, seemingly magically, highlight detail appears.

Everybody clips, including cameras that shoot raw. And since cameras have native white balances, inevitably one channel is going to blow out before the other two. Many raw processing tools include clever algorithms for recovering highlights that are blown out in one or two channels. They rebuild highlight detail missing from one channel by borrowing from the other two. Sometimes this results in apparent miracles. Other times, the recovered highlights appear ashen and monochromatic. This is one aspect of the raw processing that Adobe has improved massively over time. Recovered highlights that appeared gray in Adobe Camera Raw “Processing Version 2010” (used in Lightroom prior to version 4) can have natural-looking color in PV2012 (Lightroom 4.0 and up).

So no, not magic. But maybe close enough.

Advantages of Raw over Log

Demosaicing is done in software, and can be tuned per-image in post (although almost no one bothers).
Raw software often has sophisticated highlight recovery techniques built-in.
Raw software is usually metadata-aware, and can therefore tune its processing to the specifics of the camera.
Raw files are no bigger than they need to be
Since you never see the whole dynamic range flattened into a single RGB image, you’re not likley to help popularize a terrible “flat look” trend.

Advantages of Log over Raw

Better color fidelity at lower bit-depths — you don’t need a crazy-high bit-depth to preserve detail in shadows
No special software required to view/edit
Provides a common reference RGB for all of post production (on-set LUT preview, editorial, VFX)
Does not encourage magical thinking
Unlike raw files, log files generally do not provide enough rope with which to hang oneself

So When Should I Shoot Raw?

Raw may not be “magic,” but it is often a very smart choice.

I shoot raw for all my still photos, because my photo-processing software is optimized for it. Even if Lightroom could correctly interpret and process log, there’d be no advantage in shooting log stills, because they’d by necessity be a processed subset of the camera’s capture. A nice thing about raw is that it is essentially what the sensor captured. And raw files are no bigger than they have to be, since they are usually monochromatic. An 14-bit uncompressed raw still from my a7SII is about 24 MB. The same image, at the same quality, would be about 48 MB as a 10-bit log DPX file.

While you can build a pipeline that enables color adjustments as powerful and organic as Lightroom’s for your log imagery, few people actually do this (the log grading presets in Magic Bullet Looks 3 are a great place to start if you’re interested). But Lightroom-style processing for raw is as simple as, well, using Lightroom — or any of the many other raw processing tools available.

Raw files are storage efficient and allow you to defer processing decisions until after the shoot. For stills, they’re a no brainer. And for folks comfortable with the technical considerations, digital cinema raw, such as RED’s R3D format, can enable some powefull workflows. Since RED’s raw files are compressed, their data rate is low enough that you can edit them un-transcoded in many NLEs, and get realtime playback even with 5K and up material.

Not magic — but maybe close enough.

However, that luxury comes at the cost of deferred processing. Someone has to make the pixels someday. After all that real-time 5K editing, you have to render — a process that can make you think of the term “progress bar” as a cruel joke.

Not all raw files are so bandwidth friendly though. Cameras like Blackmagic Design’s various offerings and the Digital Bolex, among many others, shoot to losslessly-compressed DNG, an open raw standard crated by Adobe. DNG sequences may or may not be supported by your NLE, and if they are, you’ll need some major throughput to work with them in real time.

Log Looks Great and Is Often Prudent

With log files, you can often be bringing back just as much exposure information as raw, but in a format that’s far less likely to cause headaches.

There are caveats, of course. As with raw, not all log is created equal. There’s a big difference between compressed 8-bit s-log3 from my a7S II and 10-bit logC from an Arri Alexa.

One tremendous advantage of capturing log is that you are bringing RGB pixels to an RGB pixel party. No transcoding is required to work with your footage anywhere and everywhere. You can apply LUTs on set and expect those LUTs to do exactly the same thing in post. You can provide camera originals to your VFX team and expect them to hand back matching files that will cut right into your DI without any fuss.

With log, you’re far less likely to make a crucial mistake with setting up your camera that results in a catastrophic exposure error. These days are mostly over, but it was only a few years ago that I shot a commercial for an agency that had a no-RED policy after a day’s worth of footage was ruined by underexposure. What they’d seen through the viewfinder and tap had looked fine, because the camera’s ISO was cranked up. In RED raw, ISO is just metadata, so their footage was actually horribly underexposed.

Log, in its many flavors, is a smart, flexible, and powerful way of storing high dynamic range digital cinema imagery. It’s closer to raw than you might think, and often much easier to work with, for results of the same or better quality.

Acknowledgements

I started writing this post in July of 2013, but laziness got the best of me. Since then Squarespace added these cool live charts, so it got a lot easier to bore you with numbers visually. Thanks to Paul Schneider for the tweet that got me to dust this one off and post it, to world-famous colorist and gentleman Dave Hussey for corroborating it, to Dan Sturm for the Nuke screen capture, and to all the folks on Twitter who expressed interest in reading more nerdy stuff about pixel values.

Update 2024-07-17

Over a decade has passed since I started writing this post, and an update is overdue.

What’s Still True

Raw is still great, better than it was in 2016, but still not magic. Log is still also great — and thankfully gaining in popularity and accessibility,

What’s Outdated

Many “raw” formats now store values in much more efficient log encoding. The popular BRAW format used by current Blackmagic cameras is a great example. BRAW therefore flips the file-size/efficiency equation, giving better quality for smaller files than lightly-compressed ProRes log when shooting on something like the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro. Folks using these cameras with Resolve have a hard time imagining why anyone would shoot log. But log ProRes still offers many advantages, notably the ability to preview video in the operating system, and directly use the camera-original files in apps other than Resolve, such as After Effects and Nuke. And a million others.

Is a “raw” file that’s compressed and re-encoded still truly raw? I’ll leave that argument to the internet.

As camera resolutions increase past 4K, compressed raw makes more and more sense. You’ll still probably want to transcode to ProRes or something similar for exchanging files with collaborators (or your own VFX/graphics workflows), but the extra workload of creating and managing these intermediate files will likely be worth the advantage of the more compact camera originals, especially considering that render times have gotten much faster for this kind of stuff since this article was first published.

What’s the Answer?

This post was never meant to claim that log is always a better choice than raw. There were, and are, myths about raw that needed some busting. My assessment of the current landscape is that raw is an equally great choice for solo shooter/editors who live entirely within a supportive ecosystem such as Blackmagic’s, and for the very high end of film production where dailies are processed by a post house. For those of us in the middle, or those mixing and matching formats and workflows, log still has all the compatibility and flexibility benefits listed above.

S-Log3 Grading Looks for Sony a7S II

October 17, 2015

The Sony a7S II is shipping now from B&H and soon from Amazon. I haven’t gotten my hands on one yet, but Gordon Laing from Cameralabs has, and his ongoing review is off to a great start with some sample stills, and even a couple of S Log3 4K video clips.

The Hue/Saturation and S-Curve tools are all it takes to emulate Sony's S-Log3 to Rec709 LUT.

With Gordon’s permission, I used his footage to test a few S-Log3 presets for Magic Bullet Looks 3.1. I matched these to Sony’s own LUTs, but unlike a LUT, these are completely editable. They come with a 4-Way Color Corrector already poised to make the look your own, and you can even edit the S-Curve and Saturation tools that make the conversion from log to video color.

Get the Free Looks

Read the Review

The Light L16 prototype spills its guts.

Exclusive Details on the Light L16 Camera

October 14, 2015

This is a follow-up to last week’s post on the Light L16 camera, a computational camera that claims unprecedented big-camera performance in a small-camera form. Light launched a pre-order campaign last week, with intent to ship the L16 in late Summer 2016 — and yesterday they announced that the pre-orders have been so successful that any placed after this Friday will ship later, in Fall.

On Monday, I visited Light’s offices in San Francisco. I saw their working prototype, their mock-up of what they intend to ship, and had a delightful and thorough conversation with their co-founder and CTO Rajiv Laroia.

I write this with some circumspection, as I look back with some regret in participating in breathless speculation about previous camera announcements that ultimately fizzled. But Light shared some interesting information with me that hasn’t been available elsewhere, so I felt I’d be doing a disservice not to share it here.

So here’s what we talked about.

These guys are the real deal. That’s maybe the most important takeaway from my visit. I’m impressed with what they’re up to. I still have a few concerns, but these guys are smart, they care about the right things, and from what I can tell, they have a sound plan. Check the About page on their site — they’re being very open about who they are and how much money they’ve raised.

Speaking of “open,” they showed me all the blueprints. Using a 3D-printed model of the insides of the camera, they showed me the five direct-firing 35mm-equivalent cameras, and the 70mm- and 150mm-equivalent cameras that surround them on their sides, shooting through mirrors. You can probably figure out which are which in the photos. There’s a lot of thought to the layout, including accommodations for rolling shutter, and even placing closest to the handgrip the lenses least likely to impact image quality when occluded by a stray finger.

They showed me the mockup, which you saw in their promo video. It’s neither small nor big, and felt good in my hand. They also let me try a detachable oversized handgrip that I hadn’t seen on their site, which helps with balance and is planned to contain a larger battery as well. VP of Marketing Bradley Lautenbach told me that this grip will be included with the pre-ordered cameras.

They showed me the functional prototype — which still requires lots of help to do its work, but is ambitiously similar in size to the mockup.

Rajiv Laroia is an imposingly smart guy (you met him in this video), yet was more than generous with his time, and open about the challenges that face his company. He understands optics, and has no interest in defying the rules thereof — rather, he’s excited about harnessing them in new ways.

All in all, I was impressed.

They don’t need our money. They have $35M in investment and, in a detail absent from their site, are partnered with Foxconn for production of the L16. The $200 pre-order is designed to measure demand, so they can both begin a dialogue with a commited community, and set up their supply chain accordingly.

Speaking of supply chain, Foxconn makes iPhones. The L16 is a camera with high-end photography aspirations that will be built on mobile phone production lines, which is unprecedented. Rajiv stressed that the “why now” of the L16 is that, in the past five years, there has been a revolution of quality for cost in these smartphone camera modules. The quality is so good that the tiny plastic lenses in the L16 prototype are diffraction-limited, meaning they can resolve as much detail as the theoretical limit imposed by their size.

Which is why I was wrong about superresolution. I theorized that the L16’s megapixel claims were a product of interpolated resolution, but Rajiv set me straight on that.

The crazy resolution comes from tiling, which means those little mirrors actually move. When you shoot at the 35mm equivalent zoom, the five 35mm cameras fire, as do the five 70mm cameras. The 70mm cameras are oriented by their mirrors to tile the FOV of the 35mm cameras — one for each corner, and a fifth in the center.

The result is fused (not tiled) into a combined, simulated exposure.

An L16 photo at 35mm is made up of five 35mm (equivalent) images, plus five 70mm image tiles, all taken from slightly different perspectives.

What happens when you shoot at 150mm?

The mirrors angle the fields of view of the 150mm cameras to overlap completely, and the 70mm cameras fire too.

The details about the individual cameras that make up the Light L16 have been right there on their own web site since launch.

Video is a matter of bandwidth, storage, and heat. And processing time. The L16 will generate about 50 megabytes of losslessly-compressed material per exposure. Light could aspire to do that 24 times per second, but the camera would have to look a lot different to accomodate the requisite processing power and storage. Light is not setting their sights there just yet. For now, 4K video comes from a single camera — but which camera is determined by your zoom choice, so you should expect 4K at any focal length from 35mm to 150mm.

They really want to work well with Lightroom, which is great. Light’s software (which does not exist yet as shown in the video) is promised to output DNG files, but they know that closer integration would be better.

You do focus the L16. All the lenses focus together. Your range of refocusing in post centers around the focus point you selected when shooting.

Close focus distance depends on zoom, just like in reality. Expect about 10cm minimum focus at 35mm, 40cm at 70mm, and 1m at 150mm. Let’s not hold them to these numbers, but it’s nice to know.

The cameras use electronic shutters. Which means the L16 will be prone to rolling shutter artifacts, just like your phone. In other words, it’s probably not something to worry about. Long shutter durations are created by accumulating multiple readouts of the sensors.

Light needs light. The L16 is a light-gathering device. Thats why it’s as big as it is — just like my Canon 50mm. There is an ISO, but no control of aperture. They may promise great low-light performance, but you’ll make better photos with more photons.

There’s a depth map, and you can have it. The L16 outputs a depth map of the scene, and Light expects folks to use this to great effect in post processing. A high-quality depth map makes it easy to cut out foreground objects, or insert imagery into a photo.

The sample images on their site are not representative of the final quality they intend to ship. They know their gallery needs work. They realize the images are biased toward showing off sharpness, punch, and resolution, rather than meaningful refocusing and DOF-simulation. They know their low-light example isn’t great, and they know they’re not yet impressing anyone with the dynamic range.

As one might imagine, they scrambled to get these images shot with the prototype in time for their launch. Many features are not implemented yet in the prototype, most notably varying the exposure from camera to camera for single-shot HDR capture. This should improve dynamic range dramatically.

They know they need some soft-focus, non-blown-out sample shots, and they plan to shoot some.

But I’m still worried about their ability to make super sexy shallow DOF photos. I brought my Canon 5D Mark III with 50mm F1.2L lens along, hoping maybe I could do the Pepsi challenge between it and their prototype. That didn’t happen, but we looked at some ƒ/1.2 photos I’d shot recently and spent a good deal of time talking about that shot from Nocturne. We talked about what makes for pleasing boke, and what kinds of creative possibilities emerge when boke is simulated. Rajiv confidently assured me that they could do everything a real lens could — but he also repeatedly referred to my ƒ/1.2 photos as “corner cases,” which is engineer-speak for “not the problem we’re solving for” — and that concerned me greatly.

Light claims the L16 (mockup shown here on the right) will do everything the full-frame Canon 50mm F1.2 rig on the left does, and more.

I pushed back and told him what he already knew — that when I buy a lens that says “F1.2” on it, I’m not spending $1,500 to shoot at ƒ/4.0. Photography is all about corner cases. We buy full-frame cameras and fast glass so we can push them to their extremes. The cake I want to have-and-eat-too with the L16 is the shallow DOF of my Canon, with the promise that I’ll never miss a shot due to focus.

A portrait I made at 50mm, F1.2 on Saturday. This is the kind of image I'd like to see on Light's L16 gallery page.

The biggest complaint I’ve seen about Light’s marketing is that they talk about ƒ/1.2, but don’t show it. Ironically, their own site is full of shallow-DOF photography with sexy boke — but it’s all the shots of the camera, not made by it.

The biggest risk I see facing Light with the L16 is that they’ll be able to produce perfectly acceptable photos with it.

We can already do that with our telephones. The challenge is clear: They need to bring the sexy.

There are so many more possibilities to come. The potential of cameras like this is mind-boggling. The depth map could well be so accurate that you could usefully measure objects in a photo. You could accurately place 3D objects into an L16 photo, with automatic occlusion. It’s an ideal tool for lightweight 3D scanning too — extracting a decent 3D model from a depth map and corresponding RGB data is trivial, and technology exists to merge a few such samples into one very nice textured 3D model.

But back to photography: When it comes to simply processing your photos, much more than simple selectable focus is possible. You could design your own boke pattern. Create a plateau of focus in an otherwise shallow-focus shot. Tilt or even bend the plane of focus to hold two sharp eyes at ƒ/1.2, or simulate a tilt-shift lens. Because you can center the synthetic aperture anywhere on the virtual imaging plane (just like Lytro), you can do parallax tricks, or render a stereo pair of images from a single shot.

The L16 may or may not be able to make photos as appealing as those I routinely make with my bulky, expensive Canon rig — but it may not have to either. It might carve out an important niche for itself as a camera that is much more than just a camera.

But I hope it does more than that.

Last point: We’re not done. They’ve invited me back for another visit. This time, we’re going to take some pictures.

Impressions of the Sony a7R II

October 02, 2015

Sony loaned me an a7R II to try out. It’s an awesome camera, but not the one for me. However, Sony has nearly won me over with their mirrorless full-frame line.

Sony is On Fire

I heard a story somewhere that, several years ago, Sony realized they were no longer a major player in the high-end photography market, and they decided to change that — even if it meant doing some crazy things, like putting unprecedented resources into the division, undercutting some of their own gear, and challenging their own assumptions about cameras. Whether or not this story is true, whatever Sony’s been up to in the past few years has worked. Among every photographer I know, Sony is the manufacturer that has them excited. Switching camera platforms is a complicated, expensive ordeal, and I see many of my friends doing it.

The a7R II is the sequel to the a7R of course. I don’t completely understand Sony’s naming convention, but the “a7” line (or ɑ7, depending on how typographical you’re feeling) are full-frame mirrorless, and the “R” stands for Resolution. In other words:

This is Sony's new specialty camera for people who prioritize megapixels.

Sony a7R II with Sony FE 28mm F2.0. 1/500 ƒ2.0 ISO 100.

ENHANCE.

For context: I’m not one of those people. I don’t pixel peep, or print prodigiously. When it comes to photosites, I choose quality over quantity. As I recently wrote, the 12-megapixel a7S that I ostensibly bought for video has captured my enthusiasm for stills, often traveling with me instead of my Canon 5D Mark III.

Personal preference aside, the perennial question about a high pixel count is whether or not it increases or decreases image quality. There are so many factors at play here that it’s impossible to rely on rules of thumb, but in general, because smaller pixels get fewer photons when all else is equal, you can expect more noise. And because the noise is smaller, you can expect to see it less.

If it sounds like you could find yourself in a break-even position here, you're right. In general, and within reason, pixel count is not a strong determiner of perceived image quality. And yet here we are discussing a camera with resolution as its claim to fame.

The Deets

Here are the details about the a7R II that I think matter:

42.4 megapixel sensor. That makes for a pixel resolution of 7,952 x 5,304, and lossy-compressed raw files that are about 41 megabytes in size.
4K sLog 2 video recording in-camera, full-frame or 1:1 crop.
On-sensor phase-detection autofocus
5-axis sensor-shift image stabilization
Everything that was already great about the a7 line, refined — including:
- The magnesium body (slightly larger than the a7S’s) looks and feels great
- The perfect articulated rear 3“ LCD screen
- Razor-sharp OLED viewfinder
- It comes with a battery charger and an extra battery! Yay! And boy, will you need them. Boo.

With that covered, let’s get something out of the way right away:

For Stills, Mirrorless is Totally Here

I don’t know exactly when it happened. Maybe it was way back in 2013 when Trey Ratcliff switched, or maybe it was later, when Sony threw enough processing horsepower at the full-frame line that autofocus started to work as well as we’d come to expect from DSLRs — but mirrorless has totally, resoundingly arrived.

...except for auto review.

There are still some adjustments if you’re coming from the DSLR world. A big one is image review — that thing where the camera shows you the photo you just took. It’s on by default, but you’ll quickly spelunk deep into the byzantine menus to turn it off, because it keeps you from seeing through the viewfinder.

Pause to absorb how stupid this is.

On a DSLR, when you snap a photo, the LCD is free to show it to you. It’s up to you to chimp it or not, but if you keep your eye to the viewfinder, you get an uninterrupted view of your subject, and your brain stays in shooting mode where it belongs.

Reviewing shots in the EVF is not just disconcerting, it will actually cause you to miss great shots. It’s a terrible idea.

However, it’s also not so great to run in full-macho mode with no review at all. There are so many settings available on these cameras that it’s easy to get some wrong, and I’ve blown many shots by blasting away without the rear LCD alerting me to my mistake.

The obvious solution would be to enable review on the rear LCD, and not in the viewfinder. But this option is not available on any of Sony’s Alpha cameras. Until it is, you have to choose between the review blocking your subject, or sacrificing any kind of auto-review at all.

...and battery life.

DSLR shooters generally don’t turn their cameras off, because there’s no reason to. Unless you’re using an unusual continuous autofocus mode, a DSLR left on is using almost no power. We think about how many days we can go without charging, not how many shots.

Not so with mirrorless. These cameras chew through power. The a7S came with an external charger and an extra battery, ostensibly because of its video emphasis. The a7II (the Alpha that nether specializes in Resolution nor Sensitivity, and that I got to play with in San Diego thanks to Sony) ships with only one battery and no external charger, which is crazy. Sony is wise to include both with the a7R II.

...and cost.

Recently, folks finding my How to Take Good Photos for Under $1,000 article have asked me if I still recommend a DSLR over an entry-level mirrorless for getting into serious photography. The answer is yes, largely because of price.

This isn’t a tremendously germane point to a discussion of the a7R II, a full-frame flagship camera body — but it is worth mentioning in the context of mirrorless adoption in general.

Sony a7R II with Sony FE 35mm F1.4. 1/250 ƒ/1.6 ISO 800.

On Compressed Raw

Sony compresses their raw files using a clever locally-adaptive bit-depth reduction system that you will never notice unless you try very hard. And lots of very vocal people have done exactly that — if you’re a paranoid pixel-peeper, the internet will happily indulge your efforts to manufacture dissatisfaction with the photos this camera makes.

You might even find some examples where the artifacts seem genuinely troubling. But if your reaction to this camera is that you wish the 41-megabyte raw files were twice as large, you and I disagree profoundly.

However, I can easily imagine how a person to whom the insane resolving power of the a7R II matters greatly (i. e. not me) could also be the person to whom any lossy compression in the raw file is anathema. Luckily for you, Sony has announced a firmware update that will enable losslessly-compressed 14-bit raw on the a7R II. Enjoy your 80-megabyte files.

Sony a7R II with Sony FE 28mm F2.0. 1/3200 ƒ/2.0 ISO 100.

This is not a review.

These are my impressions of using the camera in real-world situations. I brought it to two birthday parties and a birth (well, the day after a birth). In fact, I met two brand-new babies with this camera in hand. I brought it my son’s first day at a new school. But I intentionally left it home for a wedding. I shot about 2,100 stills and a handful of video clips. I almost exclusively used the three loaner lenses from Sony.

Here are some review-ish observations:

I love that you can set a minimum (i.e. go-no-slower-than-this) shutter speed in aperture-priority mode. I wish my a7S had that.
So many menus. You will get lost. It’s worth setting up the programable buttons to access common adjustments.
The autofocus is amazing, but there are so many options for it, tucked in so many places, that you will always be certain you’re using the wrong ones.
This camera is the perfect size.
Sony’s focus peaking for video is the ideal focus assist for stills. You’ll take the best manual-focus shots of your life with these recent Alphas.
Big files are slow. Everywhere. Shooting, ingesting, processing, sharing.

You Say You Wanted Resolution

Big files are also big. Here are some examples of the a7R II doing what it does best — impressing you most when you don’t look at the entire photo (click/tap to embiggen):

Sony a7R II with Sony FE 35mm F1.4. 1/250 ƒ5.5 ISO 160. Uncropped.

Cropping in to reveal Hunter's Point...

The disused gantry crane at Hunter's Point Naval Shipyards, built in 1947. Behind it are the hills above Milpitas, CA — 36 miles away.

28mm ƒ2.0, uncropped

Nice sharp detail, but wait, what's that?

You can read the speed limit sign reflected in the glasses.

Sony a7R II with Sony FE 35mm F1.4. 1/250 ƒ/1.6 ISO 500.

How many smiles are in this photo?

Two!

This kind of showing off is fun, but if you think the extra resolution of the a7R II is going to imbue your shots with an intangible je ne sais quoi when you’re viewing them edge-to-edge like a sane person — well, you’d better free your mind instead.

This is a stunt camera, and as with any stunt, the correct conditions are necessary for success.

I tend to shoot pictures of moving objects, specifically people. I tend to shoot wide-open, with fast glass. My photos are full of artifacts and my subjects are rarely perfectly in focus. So I wasn’t expecting to capture many shots that show off the strengths of the a7R II.

Turns out I was wrong — because one of the best things about this camera is its autofocus. Quite simply, it rocks. I actually got some razor-sharp shots of unpredictably-ambulatory objects (i.e. children), wide-open, with fast glass.

That’s the a7R II with the Sony/Zeiss FE 55mm F1.8 lens. More on the lens below.

If you’ve got an eyelash thing, this may be your camera. But you won’t always get as lucky as I did in that one shot. Often, you’ll make a perfectly lovely shot like this:

Sony a7R II with Sony 28mm F2.0. 1/80 ƒ/2.0 ISO 6400.

I was told there would be eyelashes.

By my standards, a nice shot — but in this low-light, moving-subject situation, the extra resolution is buying me nothing.

When resolution buys you nothing, it costs you a lot.

That just-slightly-shy-of-sharp photo is taking up 40 megabytes on my hard drive (compared to about 27 MB per frame from my 5D Mark III, and 13.2 MB from my a7S). Not only does this fill up your computer drives awfully fast, it can also make you miss shots.

When you blast away in multi-shot mode, even though the a7R II is speedy, you can still get stopped from shooting as the giant raw frames write to even a fast card. I got my best performance from my SDXC card, which is also necessary for high bit-rate and 4K video.

$28.99

$31.99

$44.95

$58.93

Shooting a one-day-old baby with this camera, I had a few moments where the card-writes slowed me down. I’d grabbed the wrong card, so this was my fault — but that’s a habit I learned from using my a7S, where the speed of the card doesn’t matter as much. I missed some shots, and it really bummed me out. So when I traveled to Los Angeles for a friend’s wedding, I left the a7R II at home and brought my a7S instead. It’s smaller, it’s designed for low light, and I knew it could keep up with me.

This is what it feels like to hang out with @lonelysandwich. Sony a7S with Sony FE 35mm F2.8. 1/1250 ƒ2.8 ISO 2000. A 12.9 MB raw file, instead of 40.

Glass? I give a shit about glass.

I mentioned that Sony has nearly won me over with their full-frame cameras. The nuance there is that they’ve more than won me over with their full-frame camera bodies. It’s the lenses that I haven’t fallen in love with yet.

I own one Sony E-mount lens so far: The FE 35mm F2.8. As I’ve mentioned, it’s not sexy, but it’s small, and the ƒ/2.8 aperture happens to be perfect for street photography, which I enjoyed tremendously on a recent trip to New York. I didn’t put my Metabones adapter to work, because I wanted to test the a7R II’s much-vaunted autofocus unfettered.

Sony sent along three lenses for me to try out with the a7R II — two I requested, and one pleasant surprise.

My issue with the Zeiss FE lenses for Sony E-mount is not that they aren’t perfect. They are precisely perfect — mind-numbingly so. Look at this shot, taken essentially straight into the sun with a 70–200 zoom on a Sony a7II. I can tell you who’s who on that balloon. Try that with a Canon lens.

Zeiss makes perfect lenses. This means they are actively choosing not to make imperfect lenses — which takes a lot of the fun out of things, if you’re me. Canon seems to have a much more liberal idea of what constitutes a sellable lens. They’ll happily take your money for an F1.2 lens that you probably shouldn’t shoot with past ƒ/1.8, or a 16–35mm zoom that you probably shouldn’t push past 24mm. I have both those lenses, and they rock. But they’re a bit like a house cat — when they’re done cuddling with you, they’ll claw you to shreds without warning.

Canon is crazy. And I kinda love it. I can just imagine the German engineers at Zeiss sneering at the famous 85mm F1.2L cannonball. There’s so much wrong with it. I still totally want one.

The Zeiss lenses I tried with the a7 II in San Diego all impressed me with their performance, but none of them were any fun. Except one — the FE 35mm F1.4.

Sony a7R II with Sony FE 35mm F1.4, and Sony a7S with Sony FE 35mm F2.8

This comparison never gets old to me, because it says so much about what it takes to gather light — two different 35mm lenses, one F2.8, other other F1.4. I mentioned that my little 35mm lens is not sexy? This big one is sexy. Such an awesome lens. A huge, physical, clickless aperture ring. Tack-sharp wide open, but with buttery soft boke. I took this shot with it, and it breaks my heart:

Sony a7R II with Sony FE35mm F1.4. 1/320 ƒ/1.4 ISO 100.

The 35mm angle of view with this kind of shallow depth of field is an arresting combination that perfectly captured my son’s first day of Kindergarden. Sony, please make more lenses like this.

I also wanted to try the Sony 55mm F1.8. At about a thousand dollars, it’s the closest thing in the Sony lineup to a “nifty fifty,” although at ƒ/1.8 it could be niftier (or, at $250, Sony's 50mm F1.8 offering could be thriftier). My main concern was that, at 55mm rather than 50, this lens is veering toward portraiture rather than the wider street (or birthday party) focal lengths I’ve been preferring lately. Still, it can make the pretty if you learn the ways of its half-a-notch-tighter-than-normal AOV.

A shot that would be utterly boring without the shallow focus directing your emotional empathy. Ah to be young and pummeled with cubes by girls. Sony a7R II with Sony FE 55mm F1.8. 1/250 ƒ/1.8 ISO 640.

The surprise lens was the FE 28mm F2.0. A little wider than my 35mm F2.8, and a little faster — but not a ton larger. I rapidly grew to love this weird little lens. It’s a great pairing with the a7R II, because you probably will crop many of the shots you make with it. I found it an intoxicating mix of size, speed, and breadth of stage. It kicked ass at my kid’s 6th birthday party, and then, when that was over, and the birthday boy was all hopped up on cake and LEGO, running around the backyard like a lunatic, I snapped this — almost daring the a7R II’s autofocus to step up:

Sony a7R II with Sony FE 28mm F2.0. Sony a7R II with Sony FE 28mm F2.0. 1/250 ƒ/2.0 ISO 250.

You have to believe me that this kid is a projectile in this photo. Like, I feared for my life. In a million years I never would have tried this shot with my Canon. But the a7R II — in essentially braindead let-the-camera-do-all-the-work focus mode — found his face, tracked it, and made a rapid burst of three usable shots in a row.

Sony SEL35F14Z Distagon T FE 35mm f/1.4 ZA Standard-Prime Lens for Mirrorless Cameras

$1,598.00

Sony 35mm F2.8 Sonnar T* FE ZA Full Frame Prime Fixed Lens

$798.00

Sony 55mm F1.8 Sonnar T* FE ZA Full Frame Prime Lens - Fixed

$998.00

Sony SEL28F20 FE 28mm f/2-22 Standard-Prime Lens for Mirrorless Cameras

$448.00

Who’s it for?

Eric says the a7R II's front curtain shutter helps make his photos noticeably sharper, and the silent shutter option is great for shooting in public spaces. Combining the silent shutter with the highly-configurable continuous bracketing option (up t… — Eric says the a7R II's front curtain shutter helps make his photos noticeably sharper, and the silent shutter option is great for shooting in public spaces. Combining the silent shutter with the highly-configurable continuous bracketing option (up to nine exposures!) is his favorite way to capture HDR — the lower bit depth that continuous bracketing forces is overcome by the exposure-averaged shadow detail that HDR processing introduces.

My buddy Eric Staudenmaier is a professional photographer specializing in architecture. He’s crazy talented, and puts a lot of work into prepping his shoots, testing his gear, and making sure he’s got everything perfect before pressing that shutter. His subjects don’t move around a lot, and his clients need big pictures.

In other words, he’s the anti-Stu — and the a7R II is perfect for him. Especially because his clients are starting to ask for video too.

Oh yeah, video too.

I have to be honest — I did shoot some 4K video with the a7R II, but it’s utterly unremarkable. You can see just how boring it is by looking at my right hand in this tutorial.

Maybe what’s remarkable about the 4K video on the a7R II is just how unremarkable it is. It’s there, and it’s exactly what it should be. Aliasing is minimal, rolling shutter is about what you’d expect, and now that both this DSLR-replacement and my telephone shoot 4K video, 4K is now pretty much table stakes for any semi-serious video camera — even if the reasons to use it have little to do with audience experience.

But I suppose the real reason I didn’t shoot much video with the a7R II came along on the opening night of IBC 2015.

The Elephant in the Waiting Room

The Sony a7S II is available for pre-order now. Dammit.

The week after I received the loaner a7R II, Sony announced the a7S II. Since I suffer from Next Camera Disorder, this was kind of a strange buzzkill — like being told you’ve won the lottery in the middle of a nice massage.

The a7S II promises to bring many the “II” improvements of the a7R II — image stabilization, OLED viewfinder, form factor, and internal 4K video (but not the on-sensor phase detect autofocus) — and pair them with the crazy low-light S-is-for-sensitivity of the a7S. Its 4K video is made with a full readout of the pixels from its bravely minimal 12 megapixel sensor, and it will shoot sLog 3 video with — and this I dreamed of but dared not ask for — a Rec709 preview LUT.

Do I want the a7S II more than the a7R II for these real reasons, or because it doesn’t yet have the burden of being a (blech) currently-available camera?

Yes. More on that later. In the meantime, anyone want to buy a lightly-used a7S?

Recommendations

The Sony a7R II may not be a camera that you want, but I think it's an important camera for this reason: From this day forward — if you're anything like me — there will always be a Sony full-frame camera that you do want.

If you’re Eric, get the a7R II. It’s awesome. If you’re me, pre-order the a7S II. If you’re a normal person looking for a great Sony full-frame mirrorless camera, consider the now-quite-affordable a7II.

If you’re Canon: Pay attention.