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Sony Lens Options

Lesson 15 from: Sony A7 Mark II Series Fast Start

John Greengo

Sony Lens Options

Lesson 15 from: Sony A7 Mark II Series Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

15. Sony Lens Options

Next Lesson: Camera Menu: 1

Lesson Info

Sony Lens Options

Let's talk a little bit about sony lenses so sony has a large collection of cameras and a large collection of lenses and if you own this camera if you're new to the sony system you have to be very clear about what lenses do what on what cameras because you if you just look and you go out here's a sony lens I'll buy it and put it on my camera that may not work so this camera uses what's called an f e mount and it takes f e lenses the sony a six thousand and some of their older any x cameras are the same e mt but they're not effy mount lenses and so they're going to look very similar but you want to look for the f e on the lenses now sony also makes more traditional slr styled cameras that use an aim out now this is what they inherited from minolta ten years ago and what minolta had twenty years ago and so they have an aim out system that uses full frame and a crop frame system. Now they have not been adding new cameras and lenses to this system much over the last couple of years and the...

re's a lot of us in the industry that think that we're going to see these products slowly disappearing from the marketplace and so we have dt lenses which are designed for that came out of the crop frame sensor and then on the other side of the spectrum, we have the muralist cameras which are using the seamount we have the crop frame sensor and then the a seven siri's which is using the full frame sensor using the fd lenses. Now you can use any sony lens with this camera if you have the right adapter and so you can either use him natively straight on the camera or with an adaptor on the camera. One of the great things about marylise cameras is that they have a very short distance from the image sensor to the lens mount which is going to allow the ability to mount on many different types of lenses. So this flans distance is very small, so this is an f b lens it's designed for this short flans distance you can mount it on and it works wonderful just like the lens and camera that we have you know, on the table right here in front of me now one of the great things is that you can take other lenses and mount them on. And so if you have a cannon lands you can'tjust mounted on there because it's designed with a different flans distance so what you do is you get yourself on adapter and there's plenty of these adapters out on the market and you mount that between the body and the lands and it now mounts it in just the right place so that you can focus and work with that particular lands. Now, in orderto work with the sony lenses, sony makes a couple of different adapters thie e three and the four the four model has a phase detection focusing system in it, and the three does not. It uses the standard system in the camera, and I haven't seen a lot of people out on the street shooting with these adapters simply because they add an extra level of contraption that you have to deal with, but it is possible to use it. One of the most popular adapters out there is the meta bones adaptor because it allows you to hook up a variety of other types of lenses. You could buy these metal bones adapters for a nikon mount or a sony mt, our cannon mount pentax mount. They'd make him for a lot of different models out there, and you can put the lens you can put the adaptor on and then put the lens off. And so there are a number of issues too to deal with. When you put one of these adapters on there's, a lot of things that do not work at all or that do not work as well, when you mount thes on there and so there's a number of issues, he may be wondering, why isn't this working and let's just do a little live demo here let me pull out this one here and so we have the native sony lens on here I'm going to throw this in the programme mode let's ah put this in single focus I'm going to zoom in a little bit and so when it comes to focusing actually let's go a little bit wider angle can I see this camera here? Okay, is this a proper set up here? So what I want to dio sorry folks all right, so I'm gonna go and I'm going to change the focusing point two a smaller medium area let's go with large area and where is my focusing point let's make sure that I am in uh forgetting where my buttons are we are in single focus and so we can see are focusing point and we can change from the background to the foreground and this is with a sony lands on the camera so it's going very, very quickly and it works just flawlessly. So what I'm going to do now is that going to take off the sony twenty four to seventy f four lands and I am going to mount on and I will turn the camera so you guys can see what I'm doing around over here make it look just like the keynote talk that I all right so here we have the meta bones adapter and so this one is designed for cannon lenses, and so I'm going to take this and I'm gonna mount this on the lens now there is no optics in here. So this is no optics, it's just physically mounting the lens. And so here I've got the cannon fifty millimeter, one point eight lens and we're going to take this and mount this on the adaptor, innit? You know, listen, my first metal bones it's not quite a smooth as the camera's mounting system. I mean it. It holds it in there nice and steady. Just not quite a smooth. So now let's. Ah, amount thiss back up front and let's see how well the focusing system is on this let's change this to auto focus. Slightly different focal length so focusing on the far ground got it background got it. But I think we can all agree it's. Just not quite as fast, fast it's getting it but it's just a little bit slower. Come on, there we go and let me switch back to the other one real quickly and try to set this at a near to the same hell casino. Okay, so here we go back on the full sony system, and so I like having the option of using all the cannon lenses. But the speed of this really spoils me for when I want to put on the cannon lenses, and so it doesn't work real well when you get to some of the older, older models of products out there. And so you do have to be careful about what era of lens you're gonna put on the camera itself, and so if you're going to do anything important, test, check it out, make sure that it's going to work for what you're going to dio because it does vary, and I'm hoping that sony comes out with more and more of these effie lenses because their cooperation with zeiss their lenses on their own, they're looking really nice. I mean, they're the very, very nice lenses, but for right now, it is nice to be able to hook up these other lenses, albeit it's, a slightly handicap mode, and there were not everything is working, as, as you might might hope it to be all right, so let's go through some of the lens options on the cameras, I say you have to pay really close it it attention, so what's the difference between these lenses, other than the fact that once twenty four to seventy and one is a sixteen to seventy, and it has to do with that f e and e that's a big difference on these lenses because there's a lot of the lenses and there's not as many effie lenses on the market right now, but that is changing quickly. Thie f e lenses are designed for the full frame censor. The e lenses are designed for the cropped, a psc sensor, so this camera uses the full frame lenses to cover the full frame censor. The lenses are smaller, our coverage area designed for the smaller size sensors, and they work very good natively on their own systems. Where it gets interesting is where you want to start switching them, so if you're upgrading from it a six thousand and you put your islands on this camera, which you can do it's going to be a cropped frame that gives you a lot of the yeti. Now there is an actual option that you can go in, and you could turn this feature into an automatic mode or a manual mode where it automatically senses thes lenses and we'll crop appropriately. Or it will continue to shoot the full frame, which will have a lot of the netting going on on the image. You can take the lenses from this new camera, and you can use them on your older. A psc type cameras like any ex siri's thie a six thousand so forth you're not utilizing the entire capability of the camera but you are cropping in on a section on it and it will work perfectly fine with no visual problems later on and so do be very aware of what lenses you're looking at so the lenses I'm going to show you here are all sony f e lenses so these air lenses designed by sony for this particular camera the twenty eight to seventy was kind of their entry level basic zoom with a variable aperture on it they have their large range super zoom popular with many travel photographers. They don't have to change a lot of lenses on it there's always a lot of letters when it comes to lenses and so here's your key code for understanding what do all these letters mean? The most important of course, are the ft meaning it's for the full frame now sony does work with carl zeiss now carl zeiss, if you're not aware of this is a company in germany so knees from japan and they were both doing very different things and they decided to work together to help each other out in the areas that they were less skilled at and so sony more into electronics his ice more until optics and you will find three different levels of lenses that have sony and orzo eyes on one level you have pure sony lenses which are designed in house tested and meet sony standards then you have on the other end of the spectrum you have zeiss lenses which are designed in germany there built in the factories zeiss factories wherever they happen to be and they can be in multiple countries and they have their own design and product philosophy as faras what products they're going to bring out now sony also has their own zeiss lenses which is kind of a hybrid of the two they've worked with zeiss in order to get the quality up higher but they're following their own route as to what aperture the lens is going to be what focal length what size it's going to be? It just kind of needs to go through the zeiss quality assurance that it meets their standards and so those are the three standards full sony fulls ice and then a sony's ice lands and so these are sony on ly lenses now some of these is you can see the little zeiss label on the side indicates that it's a sony lands but it's these ice version of the lands we have the kind of the trinity of the three basic zooms and there's been a little bit of gripes from some of the hardcore pros out there because they love shooting two eight lenses and sony hasn't brought out the two eight lenses yet they will trust me, they're going to take this thing very seriously. They brought out the f force, I think, to satisfy a wider group of people and to bring out lenses that were more appropriate to the size of the camera it's a small camera these lenses are relatively small in size they have some very nice primes. Optically speaking, the testing has been going very well. People are really liking the quality of images that these air getting they all fit their own different standards, but these are all very good quality lenses. I can highly recommend anyone of them and most of these if not I don't think the twenty eight but many of them have that zeiss name on it, which, you know it just kind of gets that extra level of quality in in there. Now they do make one lens that is particularly different and this one is designed for shooting video. You are free to shoot still photos with us. It is totally fine it's just a little bit extra large for what most people would want to shoot standards still photos with the advantage on this is that is a power zoom lens, and so if you're trying to zoom in on a subject, you can turn the ring at different levels to zoom in at different speeds. We also have a focusing and zooming ring which have big neural rubber gaskets on them and this is so that you could hook up other focusing devices to help focus more smoothly and so it is especially designed for people shooting video so other companies, for instance zeiss makes really good lines so zeiss is going to be the best a third party company makes lenses because they work with sony, they have all the instructions on the electronics and how the communication goes and so they're going to know a lot about it and so they have different lines of lenses. The baddest line of lenses are auto focus and there's been some really great reviews on the new twenty five f two in the eighty five one eight so you can look for more lenses coming from zeiss if you want auto focus now there are many people who like working in manual focus and they have brought out the new lock see a line which are some very nice manual focus lenses but be aware that not everyone wants to get a manual focus lands. Of course, the beauty of this is that you could hook up almost any lens system too of this with an adaptor. There are a number of other manual focus lens is that you can get from broken on and other manufacturers that will offer a variety of focal lengths and apertures and options out there so there are a ton of options now it's it's kind of both the up and the down of this camera right now when it comes to a lens systems ecosystems that you can work with the native effie lenses are very few and far between right now because we're only a couple years into this new system but with adapters it opens up the world and makes it one of the most expandable type cameras that you can have out there and so there are lots and lots of lenses if you're willing to put up with adapters and a little bit of limitations when it comes to some of the controls on the camera and that brings to a close the first part of the classes were just talking about lenses I will mention I do have a couple of glen's classes out right now I do have and it's kind of unfair because we're talking sony but I do have a cannon lens class and a nikon lens class but it is not completely beyond possibilities that I might have a sony len's class by the time you are watching this and so if you want to learn more about lenses about eighty percent of this class is relevant to all lenses it's just that we talk about some of the cannons but we know that we have people using this with cannon lenses and so if you wanted to class particularly on lenses I have a very very this probably my most in depth technical class. To be honest with you, I designed and built this class for me twenty five years ago, because I was just kind of a lens nerd. And I wanted to learn everything about lenses. And so if you were a lens nerd, and you really want to understand everything about all the different lenses, the glen's classes that I have there are great and press your fingers. I might just have a sony one. At some point in the future. Here we want. I want to see more lenses from them.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Sony® A7II Info and Menu List
Sony® A7RII info and Menu List
Sony® A7SII Info and Menu List

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

INCREDIBLE Class! I couldn't find anything on the internet that truly explained this camera, explained what it can and can't do and what accessories would work with it. I have had my Sony A7II for awhile now, but was so overwhelmed by it, I rarely even took it out of its case. It was just easier to use my Canon 5D III. After this class, I am so excited to finally practice with and use my Sony. John is an incredible teacher. He is thorough, professional, fun and knowledgeable! Buying this class was the best investment!!! I feel like I just got the gift of a new camera because I can finally use my Sony!!! Thanks John and Thanks Creative Live!!!

Enrique Vega es
 

I stored my Sony A7II for more than a year since I've been Canon's user for 7 years and I felt unsure of taking this new camera which implied a different menu system, different functions, a little bit intimidating. Finally, I took a bit of valor, put my camera next to the computer monitor for then start watching this guide and I spent a great time actually. I'm amazed at how helpful and clear is the sequence of the chapters. It was enough to get to chapter ten to know all the basic controls and start taking pictures with an equivalent confidence of my good old Canon, or even better since in the chapter 8th I learned how accurate and easy to use is the focusing system, either, manual or auto (For stills I've always used manual focusing). Very informative, enjoyable and now I became a new fan of the mirrorless cameras, at the point that I'm considering to buy another two :D

VeraInAlbania
 

John is an excellent teacher! In fact his Fundamentals of Digital Photography 2014 was the first ever class I watched on CreativeLive, and since then I'm in love with his teaching style as well as with CreativeLive! I bought my Sony A7II in March 2015 and when I found out that John is giving a class on it I was very excited! As I expected I learnt many secrets about my camera which I had been using for 9 months already. For example about the option of focusing on the eyes, setting the buttons, making panoramas etc. The camera is still smarter than me I must admit. I am enjoying my Sony even more now since after the class I feel much more confident. Thank you John and CreativeLive for such an opportunity! I would recommend to everyone who has a Sony a7II camera and the other cameras in this line to watch this class. It's a concentrate of useful information, very detailed and to the point. I spent two days just watching the class and practicing new knowledge with my camera straight away. I had to postpone all the other life chores. And I would be ready to watch the class again after some time as it's a professional camera which needs a lot of practice!

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