Sample Pics from Sony A57 and Advice Needed
SOme of you may be aware that I picked up a Sony A57 recently and a couple of lenses, one is the Sony kit 18-55mm lens and the other is a Sigma 70-300mm lens, neither of which is an awesome lens from what I have read but are there to enable me to get a feel for how everything works.
Before I go to far I have a duty of disclosure, no I haven’t hardly read the user manual at all. That out of the way there’s a couple of things that I’m not 100% on. When shooting on the 8fps mode it seems that some of the shots aren’t as focussed as others which seems odd as I would have thought the focus would have been set from the first frame. There are a couple of focus modes that I will need to read up on more thoroughly to see if they might be contributing.
The other thought was that perhaps the fact they were shot handheld and not on a tripod may have been a contributing issue as well but from memory the shutter speed was over 1/500th so I wouldn’t have thought that was an issue. Have a look at the pics below and let me know what you think.
Any softness is almost certainly because you were hand held.
I’m going to assume you were on manual and not just shutter priority. Hand held, shooting action I would have the shutter set at least x3 the lens length eg: 300mm = 1/900
With the correct setting you can shoot in RAW thus the sensor won’t have to work as hard when shooting sequence. When shooting sequence do it on a tripod and have less zoom.
With todays modern big MP cameras you have plenty of room to crop.
And read the manual - doing that was my single greatest leap in photography abillity.
Yeah Spaz I have resigned myself to the emasculating idea of actually reading the instructions to get an idea of what’s going on. I was struglgling with full manual mode trying to get to change something other than shutter speed so kinda persevered in “superior auto” which wasn’t really helping. The first shots are of me that a mate took and the last ones are of my mate that I took and both have the same difference in focus between shots so have ruled out operator error sort of.
Offtopic but not really, 4th shot of you is primo!
Cheers Deano, hopefully get some good pics when I head back to Tonga in two weeks, so fcuken excited right now ha ha!
Pay for a pro photog to come with you and ensure some really good photos.
My hand is up. 
Ha ha ha, mate of mine would probably have first dibs on that. Bit hard to ask about photography though, he’s very cagey with his knowledge and very over the current crop of emerging photogs whom he considers unworthy of the title especially considering the ability of trust fund babies to do the work for nix even if it is substandard. Probably not giving him enough credit, I might grab a coffee with him this week and bring the new weapon along and see what eventuates!
This is his website.
Definitely some Pro Pics from ya mate there!!!!! 
This probably deserves it’s own thread but it’s a bit more background on my mate and the regard he’s held in throughout the surf world.