The Sony A7 II: The Unofficial Quintessential Guide

Some photographers claim that UV filters degrade image quality and offer minimal protection. We disagree with this viewpoint.

AWB is automatically chosen when you use Intelligent Auto, Superior Auto, or one of the SCN modes. Many photographers use AWB because it is the default setting.

There are two major categories of tripod heads: pan and tilt heads, and ball heads. Pan and tilt heads are heavier and less expensive (about $65 for the Manfrotto 804RC2). They allow you to pan across the scene (horizontal movement) and tilt the camera (vertical movement). To lock the head, you must tighten two knobs: one for the pan and one for th

For our work with telephoto and closeup lenses, we rely on MF in the Focus Mode. We’ve found that when the depth of field is shallow, AF mode often fails to lock on to the correct region of the subject; instead, it focuses on a background or foreground structure.

When we shoot outdoor scenes, we turn off AWB and set WB to one of the preset values. For example, when we photograph sunsets, reds are more saturated when we set the WB to Daylight.

But, like all statistical sampling techniques, it is not foolproof. This is most evident when you work with indoor lighting, which can give your images a ruddy color cast. Another example is when you photograph a sunset and the rose-colored clouds are not recorded properly; they look washed out and lack the deep, saturated colors you saw when you c

If we do not need this level of performance, we use the noise reduction feature in Adobe Photoshop CS. Although it is not as good as what we can obtain with DxO, it operates faster, works on RAW files, and is superior to the a7 II High ISO NR setting.

The camera will track the subject so you can take shot after shot until one of the following conditions is met: the subject is no longer in the field of view, you turn off the Center Lock-on AF command with the menu, or you turn off the camera.

a scene has a wide range of intensities, HDR photography frequently results in an image with oversaturated colors, which gives it a surreal appearance. For example, when you merge three exposures in third-party software like Photomatix, the final composite image can have dramatically different colors than the original scene.