Sony A7ii - 2018 onwards

In October 2018 I wandered in to a camera shop while waiting for my wife at the mall and handled a Sony A7ii full frame camera. I had been wondering for a while whether for botanical scenes a full frame camera would give me better colours and textures and handle difficult light better. There was a very good cashback offer and after thinking about it and discussing with my wife I decided to take the plunge into the full frame world. Rather than buying lenses I bought an adapter that would let me use my Canon EF fit lenses, which included the Sigma 105 Macro, which is what I would use to explore botanical subject matter with the A7ii.

I did two series of like for like botanical comparisons between the A7ii with the 105mm macro and the G80 with 60mm macro. These are written up and discussed in this thread and this thread at dpreview.com. I was disappointed to find no advantage to using the A7ii. There were however some disadvantages - with the 105mm macro the A7ii was heavy and awkward to use, and it did not do aperture bracketing, focus bracketing or post focus. As far as botanical subjects were concerned it seemed that full frame was not the way forward for me. So, instead of spending a lot more money on two or three native lenses for the A7ii as I had envisaged I decided that the only way forward I could see which might improve my botanical images was to move to a top of the range micro four thirds camera. Given my desire to have post focus available, that meant a Panasonic G9, which I bought only a month after buying the A7ii.

I bought several legacy lenses to try on the A7ii. I had discovered that legacy lenses were popular with some Sony-using landscape photographers and thought they might be an inexpensive way to try out the A7ii for cloudscapes and sunsets over the estuary. They were indeed inexpensive, but I did not get on well with them, for example experiencing a lot of flare. By early 2019 I had not done thorough tests but I had strong indications that the A7ii would be better for cloudscapes and, especially, sunsets over the estuary, with better handling of pre-sunset high dynamic range scenes and post-sunset low light scenes. In early 2109 I bought a Sony 24-240 lens to use with the A7ii for this type of scene.

At this point I have no examples of images that appeal to me from the A7ii.