This is my little slice of mountain heaven up near The Lodge at Woodloch. There are a series of creeks and streams pouring down the mountains that are hard to get to. Some amount of climbing and sliding are required to find them. I shot this with my Sony NEX-7 while clinging to the stream bank.
Jumped on Trey's google hangout the other night and realized I didn't have many photos to share on the show. So I grabbed my Sony NEX-7 with a 14-24mm lens and headed out to the lake to snap a few quick sunset photos. There's not too much green yet from the harsh Winter so I felt like this deserved a black and white treatment.
Red Rock Canyon, Nevada
Yes the rocks are really this reddish orange. I wish the sky was better on this particular evening but sometimes you get what you get and then have to add something in post processing. I didn't do much to the sky here but I did add a hue saturation layer in Photoshop and masked in a little more color.
Also I ran it through Nik Software's Viveza, a great plugin that my friend Scott Kublin recommended. It lets you pick a targeted area and really play with the structure, brightness, contrast, saturation. I tweaked the structure a tad bit and also played with the contrast.
I used my Sony NEX-7 on a pretty terrible tripod. I did a series of 3 bracketed photos. Boy have I learned a lot since I took this photo in early January.
by Clayton Morris
I just received my new 50mm f/1.8 Mid-Range Prime Lens for my Sony NEX-7 and here's my early review. Wow! It is stunning that it's this good for under $300. It's even more impressive because it's just as outstanding as the more expensive 50mm Prime I'd been using before. And I've heard from fellow photographers that even it rivals the $4,000 Leica Summilux 50mm f/1.4.
Sony 50mm f/1.8 Prime Lens
The only reasons I kept my Canon D-Mark II camera for as long as I did was (a) I loved that camera (b) the 50mm Prime lens I had to go with it was just a gorgeous piece of glass. But I've moved onto to different cameras with more advanced lenses. The new Sony lens is a perfect substitute. And there's simply no reason to be using an older 50mm lens other than cost at this point.
I got this lens to shoot portraits, plain and simple. I wanted a crisp shot with shallow depth of field and this lens gives you that creamy Bokeh that brings out the subject beautifully. The reason for this is because of the large aperture of the lens and what Sony calls its 'circular aperture design'. Who cares what they call it, it takes amazing pictures.
It's also really light and compact. My older Canon 50mm Prime could be used as a paper weight it was heavy.
I'm going to add more to this post over the next few months as I spend more and more time with it. In the meantime please enjoy a few of these photos that were shot with the new Sony 50mm lens.
My daughter
My son the photog.
Play time.
I had a rare weekend day off and my wife and I decided to hike up Mission Peak in Fremont California. We got up at 5:30 in the morning to get to the peak by sunrise. It was a 2.5 mile hike straight up.
There weren't too many great shots because the sunrise happened from behind. But I managed to get pretty low to the ground for this shot. Not bad. It was a series of five exposures on my Sony NEX-7.
Sunrise at Mission Peak, California
I am so excited that my new 50mm lens from Sony just arrived! I cannot wait to get out and start playing with it. I had been using a 50mm lens for my Canon D Mark II but it was time for upgrade.
