Sony A7Rii – my settings

Right – now we have the camera and the Really Right Stuff L bracket installed, it is time to set the camera to my liking! You would think I would be out taking some pictures as it is a balmy 83 degrees and sunny here in West Virginia, but we are looking after our grand-daughter this week (and the two dogs) and so free time is not really available!

So what do I like in a stock photography camera? A key thing for me is to shoot in Raw. Sony has a compression routine that used to run automatically on its Raw files to get them down to 43MB. A firmware release late last year introduced an uncompressed option that is roughly twice the size and there is much debate about whether you can see the compression artifacts in real life. They appear on high contrast edges – backlit blond hair against a black background, for instance. As I have always reduced my stock photo shots to 4500 pixels, I’m not sure how noticeable this would be in my sort of work and so for now I am using the compressed format, but I’ll do some tests in due course. Storage is pretty cheap (I just ordered a 128GB storage card for $43) and so I may just go with uncompressed in the long term as you never know what you are going to do with an image when you take it, but that is for a future decision!

Then I want to clearly focus on the right thing in the image, and so I turn off autofocus on the shutter and use back button focus where you focus on what you want as the subject and that stays selected as you reframe and take the shot. Setting up back button focus is pretty easy:

1. Menu > Custom Settings > Custom Key Settings > AEL Button > AF On.
2. Menu > Custom Settings > Custom Key Settings > AF/MF Button > AF/MF Ctrl Toggle.
3. Menu > Custom Settings > AF w/shutter > Off.

I did find one nuance in all this when playing about with the 70-200mm. I would set focus, and then move the lens to a different subject and it would automatically refocus – not what I wanted to see at all. For some time I thought it was my settings, but it turned out to be another feature called Pre-AF in the 3rd page of Settings. This apparently moves the focus on the lens to the “right sort” of subject especially with long lenses with narrow depth of field. I changed that setting to OFF.

With these settings and the switch at AF/MF, the button toggles between AF and manual focus. With the switch in the AEL position, the button performs autofocus.

Then you can change the focus mechanism to Flexible Spot using the Fn button and Focus mode settings.

Still on focus, you can move the focus point about easily by going to:

Menu>Custom Settings>Custom Key Settings>Center Button and setting that to Standard. Now pressing the main center button selects the focus point and the ring around it allows you to move the focus point wherever you want on the screen. Most of the time I just keep it in the center and move the camera to my chosen subject, focus and then reframe, but this repositioning could be great for a series of shots with the subject in the same general place.

Auto ISO is a great feature, especially with a camera with such good performance at higher ISO values. There is an excellent incremental capability where you can set the minimum shutter speed that you want to use and the camera will shift up the ISO to keep to that value in darker conditions. You can set this explicitly – ie 1/125th second, or use “Fast” or “Faster” where the minimum shutter speed is related to the focal length of the lens in use. I’m currently at “Faster” in those settings.

Finally, I put it into Airplane mode to turn off WiFi until I have worked out more about that. This saves battery life.

Some thoughts on day to day use of the camera and examples of high ISO performance will come in the next post.