When the machines fall silent..

Posted by Paul

At the weekend I was given access to a now silenced factory..where once it was alive with the sounds of people working and the steady throb of machines it was now eerily quiet…with perhaps only the occasional plop of dropping water echoing eerily in the distance.

For this adventure we have the lovely Amy, who braved the cold to model. All images are shot using the Sony A7rii, an 85mm lens and occasionally lighting by Rotolight (Neo I and II).

See look sometimes I do shoot in colour, although more and more these days it is monochrome that colours my life! (like what I did their?)

Probably a pixie..am fairly sure a pixie…

Sometimes all you need is a pretty girl and a dingy location to create beautiful images

Sunday Mornings are for Fashion Shoots

Posted by Paul

Sunday saw a quick fashion shoot in the very beautiful spa town of Leamington, When your model suggests an early start you dont expect it to be 7am…..unfortunately the frost was not present but it was cold, so all credit to our very brave model.

For this shoot we were using the Sony A7rii and the Canon 70-200 and the Sigma MC-11 adaptor to enable everything to talk to each other.

Focus was pretty fast and face recognition worked really well, it didn’t focus as fast as the lens would on a canon body – but we never expected that it would.

Assistance on this shoot was provided by Ken Witherow – master of lighting



Locations around Leamington Spa included Jephson Gardens amongst others – the beauty of Leamington being that all parks seems to inter connect. Model is the lovely Kelly ‘Tinks’.

Playing with the Sony A7rii

Posted by Paul

I was lucky enough to be invited along to a Sony Experience Day at Phlash Works studio by London Camera Exchange.

It has not been a great secret that for the past few months I have been toying with changing allegiance from Canon to Sony. The key factor being the small form factor of mirror less cameras as well as the much lighter weight of the kit.

Sony has been extremely open about its focussing technology and this has allowed a number of third parties to make adaptors so you can use different lenses on their bodies rather than forcing you to buy 100% into the system,

I took advantage of the change to use a Sony a7rii matched to a Sigma MC11 to see how it would work with my current crop of Canon L lenses. One huge advantage of the Sony system is that the image stabilisation is built into the body rather than adding extra weight and cost to the lens.

The Images below were all shot using the Canon 70-200 L IS (version 2) and in some images there is a tiny amount of vignetting in the corner . I am not sure whether this is caused by the adaptor, the lens hood or a mixture of both or something totally different but it is only a very tiny amount visible in the corners and can easily be cropped out. Especially considering you have 42 megapixels to start with.

Canon has promised to bring out a mirror less camera sometime in 2018 but that is almost 3 years after Sony , at the moment the Sony A9 which is less than the 1Dx to purchase and offers a number of focusing advantages and resolution advantages over the 1Dx.

I dont imagine that the Canon will come in at around the same price point as the Sony and when it is released the A7 will be due for a upgrade and you can only imagine what the version 3 will offer? perhaps a bigger buffer and better battery life? Again though third party batteries for the Sony are around £10 each!