Sony A7sii Test: Exploring Lake Windermere
from Simon Mulvaney on 17 Oct 2016
A few old university buddies and I ventured up to Windermere to explore the woods and lakes of the British countryside – The perfect opportunity for my Sony A7Sii’s first outing. My aim was to use as little kit as possible, limiting myself to the camera, one lens and an ND filter only.
All footage was shot handheld at 120fps, with the camera’s built-in image stabiliser turned on, Slog3 picture profile and APSC mode. No noise reduction is used in any of this, as I actually like the look of the A7Sii’s digital noise. Some of the shots are helped along with Premiere’s Warp Stabalizer effect. I’m not a colourist, so when grading, I worked from one of Premiere Pro’s built in LUT’s and tweaked from there.
I purposely under and over exposed certain scenes to test out dynamic range and noise levels. When grading, it became very clear that over exposing by two stops was key, as most correctly exposed images (according to the built-in histogram) would become too noisy when pushed in the grade. Another thing I learned is that peaking is a bit too generous for my liking, so a lot of images ended up being slightly soft – I’m going to make use of the digital zoom function in future to ensure images are sharp.
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Kit:
Sony A7Sii
Metabones EF – E-Mount mkiv
Canon 24 – 70mm f/2.8
Tiffen variable ND
Music: Kusanagi by Odesza
odesza.com