I Purchased a Mirrorless Camera and I Have No Idea What I’m Doing
Hello Midlife Crisis
What is it about reaching middle age, that compels us to drain copious amounts of hard earned dollars into something we had zero interest in, throughout the first half of our lives?
Forty is fast approaching for me. So here I am to tell you all about the first serious camera I’ve ever owned. So long smartphone cameras (at least for now)! I went ahead and purchased my first mirrorless camera: the Sony A7IV. Let me tell you what I’ve learned about it.
A7IV with Lens kit
As I mentioned above, I don’t really know what compelled me to make this purchase, and for me, it was a pretty big purchase. Mirrorless cameras aren’t exactly cheap, but so far I’ve had a blast learning and taking shots any chance that I get (They primarily consist of Megatron’s soccer games).
If you happen to be considering the mirrorless camera route, rest assured there is a lot to study up on if you’ve never owned any kind of professional camera. That’s not to say it’s boring by any means, but there are a lot of knobs, menus, and settings that can feel daunting to the uninitiated (ie me).
The Holy Trinity
Having come from strictly using smartphone cameras, where all I had to do was tap on a button, this felt like a steep learning curve, albeit a fun one. The first concept I had to get my head around was the holy trinity or the trifecta of image composition: ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. The best way to understand it (at least, for me), is to make a direct comparison to the best visual tool you have readily available: the human eye!
ISO
Ever been in a really dark room, only to walk outside into a very sunny day? You need to slam on the breaks and cover your eyes right? Well you can think of ISO as the ability to adjust the sensitivity to that light within the camera. If you are taking a picture inside, and it’s a low light situation, cranking up the ISO will help you see the image a bit better, however, this comes at a cost. The higher the ISO is, the more artifacts, or noise, you will introduce into the image. So if you zoom in to a picture with very high ISO, you will see grain. But what is considered high ISO vs low? Well generally speaking, the floor is 100 ISO in a sunny outdoor shot. Some cameras go up pretty high, to 10k ISO and even higher. But generally, your lighting conditions will dictate ISO levels in conjunction with the other two parts of the trifecta.
Aperture
The aperture works just like the iris and the pupil within the eye. The muscles in the iris expand or contract the pupil, to allow more or less light in, respectively. The aperture also expands and contracts within the lens the same way.
(Just to take a step back here, as I need to mention something before going forward. When I talk about comparing a mirrorless camera to the eye, and when talking about the trinity, I am talking about the camera system holistically. That is to say, the camera body in conjunction with the lens. You can’t have one without the other. But you can have multiple lenses with one camera body, and swap them out as needed. Clear as mud? Perfect.)
Let’s say, as an example, you just bought a fancy new mirrorless camera, and you want to take it out at night and capture an image of the night sky. There are several things to take into consideration when taking a shot like that, which I can get into in another post if there is any interest. But when looking at the aperture, you would want it to be pretty wide. Yes, yes, I hear you. “But Carlos, what’s a wide aperture?” Well a wide aperture is anything from f2.8 to f1.2. The lower the number, the wider the aperture, which sounds counterintuitive, but I didn’t make the rules. You would also want a wider lens to capture more of the night sky.
Something else to think about when talking about aperture, is bokeh. “Good lord man, if I knew I needed a dictionary for all this, I wouldn’t have bothered reading this far. What the hell is that?” Patience, young padawan, I’m getting there. You ever see those pictures that has a person in sharp focus, but then the background is super blurred out? It emphasizes the subject and makes them pop. Well that is called bokeh. It is how an image can look when you have shallow depth of field.
Let me paint an image for you: say you have a giant square that has been drawn on the ground (lets call it 10’ by 10’). As you look at the square in front of you, the bottom most edge (the one closest to you), we are going to place a small table with an apple on it. On the furthest edge of that square (directly across from the table, and furthest away from you), there will be a lovely tree with bright orange leaves on it. In the center of this square, is your cousin Vinny. Now, Vinny isn’t easy on the eyes, but with the magic of bokeh, we can get a pretty good image. If we set our aperture to a low f-stop, say f2 or lower, and we focus on Vinny’s face, both the table with the apple in the foreground, and the tree in the background will be blurred. The amount of blur is determined by how low the f-stop is. If the f-stop is higher, then the table, the apple, and the tree, come into focus along with Vinny, and it’s hard to separate him from the background. So you can think of bokeh as increasing or decreasing the invisible field inside that square, that blurs foreground and background, assuming you are focusing on the middle object.
Shutter Speed
Now, let’s talk about shutter speed. Inside the camera body, is a shutter, which opens and closes as you take your pictures. You can think of it like blinking. Except, within a camera, the speed at which it blinks drastically changes the image that you get. I believe the shutter in my camera can go as slow as 15 seconds, and as fast as 1/8000th of a second. Generally speaking, you probably don’t want to be at either end of the spectrum, but somewhere in between.
Have you seen those cool images of a highway at night, with various headlights and taillights streaking along the cars path? Well photographers who take pictures like that, use a slow shutter speed. Same deal with images of waterfalls, or streams that look almost cloudy; slow shutter speed. So now you might ask: well when would I use a high shutter speed? Well that’s pretty simple: When there is fast movement, and you want to freeze the action with as little blur as possible. A kids soccer game for example. Or if you are into taking images of birds in flight. Anything outdoors with fast movement is a prime candidate for high shutter speed.
Conclusion
Again, I am by no means an expert at this stuff, but I’ve enjoyed trying to get spun up on it, and I’ve tried to simplify things with this post. If you are ever interested in making this a hobby, just know it’s expensive. Lenses range from $700-$2000, depending on the type and manufacturer. That’s not including the body of the camera. But it certainly feels rewarding to know what settings to use for various shots, and even more so when you start taking shots and people actually like them (I’m looking at you Blue Devils and Phantoms!).
Also, if a person who is new to mirrorless cameras stumbles onto this, and can take something away from it, then I am happy. And on the flip side of that coin, if someone who knows their stuff sees this, and finds any errors in what I’ve tried to explain, please feel free to correct me in the comments. It’s all about learning and sharing knowledge. With that said, I’ve purchased several lenses that I will try to talk about in another post. Til then, happy geeking! Feel free to peek below at some images I’ve taken throughout this year.
