One of the most common questions I get asked is what camera equipment I use to get the beautiful photos you see on my instagram.
I’m a self-taught professional photographer, and I’ve always loved taking photos. I’m not technical about my photography, so I’m not going to talk to you about aperture or sensors or f-stops, but I am going to tell you what I use in my personal photography. I love using a photo to tell a story about a place, and remember a memory of a vacation or destination. And I think a high quality DSLR photo is the best way to do that.
Until I bought my Sony a7rii.
The Sony A7R II is the world’s second full-frame camera with optical 5-axis image stabilization. Most image stabilization systems compensate for camera shake by correcting yaw and pitch. Sony claim that camera shake is actually caused by five different kinds of motion, and their image stabilization mechanism additionally corrects for horizontal shift, vertical shift and rotary motion (rolling) for both still images and movies. Since I have focused more on video this was one of my main concerns.
Next up, Lens!
Now I realise I’m making a generalisation here. I know that the perfect lens is the one that’s right for what you’re shooting (a landscape photographer isn’t likely to have the same needs as a portrait photographer or a wildlife photographer for example). I understand that if you’re shooting on a crop sensor then you might have different needs than if you were shooting full frame but humour me. For me, the 50mm prime lens is perfect. It’s the lens that lives on my camera. It’s my safe zone, my happy place.
50mm is about as close as we can get to our eyes field of view*. When you shoot at 50mm, the image feels natural and you can make the viewer feel like they’re inside the image looking on at the subject of your photograph. We feel at home in the image.
So ideally this is what we see with our eye. Even though we may see this on a daily basis, we tend to notice different details within.
