In July 2018, on the recommendation of my former colleagues at Guave, I bought my first Sony camera gear from Digitec. I chose the a7R II and the 35mm 2.8. It did not take long to realise that I had underestimated Sony for years. The a7R II delivered images unlike anything I had seen before. Forty two megapixels with a level of sharpness that made me look twice. Raw files were around 90 MB in size, or about 45 MB when using compressed raw. That still left plenty of room to crop an image without losing too much image size.
To keep using the Canon lenses I had already bought, I went with the Metabones adapter. With the setup of the a7R II, Metabones, and the Canon 70 to 200mm 2.8, I photographed, among other things, Frontend Conference in Zurich.
The second lens
Since I was planning to make the a7R II my travel companion, I started looking in January 2019 for another lens that could handle both wide angle and zoom. In the end, I came across an article on fstoppers, which claimed that Sony’s best lens was not a G Master, or GM, but “only” a G lens. What I saw there in the sample images from the 24 to 105mm f4 was hard to believe. Bokeh despite an aperture of “just” 4, and even in low light situations. Once I took my first photos with it, I understood why the lens costs close to 1300 Swiss francs.
Around the same time, I was also thinking about replacing my Canon 1D Mark IV with a newer model, because I had become increasingly unhappy with my floorball photos. Floorball arenas often have poor light, which means working with high ISO values. ISO 3200 is nothing unusual. My ageing 1D produced noise in the images that I was no longer willing to accept. A switch to the 1D X Mark II seemed likely. If it had not been for my Sony a7R II. Sony’s image quality had impressed me so much that I wanted to give the brand a proper chance. In the ratings, Sony’s a9 outperformed Canon’s flagship by a wide margin, and both were priced at roughly 4800 Swiss francs.
A few dilemmas
There was one problem, though: using Canon lenses with a Metabones adapter was not an option. The adapter is limited to a maximum of 10 frames per second. That would have taken away the a9’s full 20 frames per second.
The solution was to trade in everything from Canon. Luckily, Sony was still running a promotion at the time, which brought in a bit of extra money for the Canon gear. And so, just a few days after buying the 24 to 105mm f4, I bought an a9 together with the 24 to 70mm 2.8 and the 70 to 200mm 2.8 from Digifuchs. At this point, a heartfelt thank you goes to Mr Fuchs for the great advice and the very fair support.
It was an expensive move, but one that has fully paid off for me. It did take a few training sessions and matches to get used to the zoom rings, because Sony lenses zoom in exactly the opposite direction. But with the a9, I can comfortably shoot at ISO 4000 with hardly visible noise. More importantly, I can now choose the single most action packed image from an entire burst.
The firmware update
On top of that, about two weeks ago I experienced something I had never seen in all my years with Canon: a firmware update that pushed the camera to a completely new level. The a9 can now automatically detect eyes in sports mode and keep the subject in focus, all while shooting at 20 frames per second.