I took delivery of my new Sony α7S camera body and Sonnar 50 mm 1.8 lens on Monday.

I’ve been shooting photographs as often as I can to get a feel for this new (for me) type of camera. I was attracted to the α7S by the claims and reviews that it is a low light specialist camera with a full frame sensor yet only about 12 megapixels. The ISO range is huge and my hope is that restaurant reviews will enjoy better quality images. It is a gorgeous camera and the images so far have exceeded expectations. I know I’m not using a full frame lens on it (yet) but I have a free Metabones adapter on order so I can use some of my full frame Nikon glass. I’m just hoping my manual focussing skills improve. One negative I’ve discovered is that the minimum focus distance of the 50 mm 1.8 lens is about 39 cm which means I’m going to have to sit back from the dinner table or stand up.

Here’s tonight’s dinner, viz., Chicken Maryland with a cheesy crusted skin.

Exposure 1/60 seconds, f/8.0, ISO 3200

So far I’ve customised my Sony a7S with back button autofocus. I would normally try to keep it at AF-C rather than AF-S and shoot in bursts but the target acquisition is a little slow and in the EVF it feels more like a leap of faith than knowing that you have the shot in focus. With the amazing ISO capability, I’ve set one of the memory recall modes to 1/60 seconds and the aperture at f/2.8 in manual mode so that when I’m in a restaurant the automatic ISO will give me a good exposure. The other great feature is a handy exposure compensation dial which is a dream to move. I’ve found I can go to +1/3, +2/3 and +1 which gives me nice results.

I look forward to using my new Sony a7S as my restaurant review camera over my Canon PowerShot G16 which has been a great camera as a point and shoot with RAW capability. I’ll still keep the Canon handy because it remains a very good camera.

You may ask what will happen with my Nikon bodies. They’ll still be used often especially the D7100 with the Tamron 90 mm MACRO attached. As an APS-C it gives me an effective focal length of about 135 mm which makes closely cropped food shots fantastic.