The new 16-35 FE on my Sony A7R
I was lucky enough to allow a camera shop in Toronto to relieve me of about £1000 for the brand new Sony Zeiss FE 16-35mm F4 lens earlier this week. It was the only one the shop had as they have only just been released. The price included local sales tax. This lens is just under £1300 inc VAT in the UK – why are we getting charged so much more AGAIN? Rip Off Britain is alive and well.
Lovers of the little Sony A7 series cameras have been waiting for a native wide angle lens since the cameras were released. After much searching and trying different options I’ve been using a 21mm Olympus OM manual focus lens for landscape and other wide shots – a super little lens but manual focus is not suitable for much of my paid photography where I need to work fast with moving subjects. I was also pondering getting the 35mm Sony prime lens as well, so this 16-35 sorts out both needs. Sony kept the max aperture at F4 to keep the lens relatively compact, I guess reasoning that a lot of users would be using it for landscape type work where it’s rare to work at wide open apertures (except for this sort of thing). It’s larger than the 55 1.8 but not by a huge amount, and as you’d expect for the price it’s nicely made and feels very solid.
Keeping the small-and-light philosophy without compromising on image quality is what the A7 cameras are all about, so I’m supportive of the decision to keep it at F4.
Twickenham at 16mm f/5.6
Finding myself back at Twickenham again for England’s match against Samoa, I decided to use the A7R and 16-35 as my main wide angle combination for the day. First off was a set of “general views” of the stadium. 16mm on full frame is nicely wide and gives a clean and relatively undistorted view when compared with the 15mm fisheye I have been using.
For a change of scene I walked down to the train station where most of the fans arrive at Twickenham on packed trains.
1/20th f/4 ISO 2500
It appears that the image stabilisation (OSS) works pretty well as I was shooting hand-held at 1/15th and 1/20th of a second to get some movement into the pictures. I actually hadn’t realised the lens was stabilised so clean, sharp images from such slow speeds while holding the camera way up above my head was a nice surprise.
6 sec, f/11 ISO 125 on a tripod
I doubt the OSS could handle a six second shutter speed which I used for the shot above of the stadium with some light trail action going on. Being a night time kick off, I was keen to get some different shots of the stadium so took my little but very nice MeFOTO travel tripod with me. It’s a small, light tripod which works well with the A7R. It’s pretty wobbly with the weight of a Canon 1D on it though.
1/400th f/5.6 ISO 3200
Back pitchside, ironically I ended up using manual focus for this wide shot of the team running out, prefocusing roughly where they’d be as I didn’t want the focus to jump all over the place as the players passed in front of me. There are no focus markings on the lens, but manual focus shows a distance guage on the screen, and the focus magnifier makes it all pretty easy. For sure though the A7R is no speed demon with a v-e-r-y s-l-o-w continuous frame rate.
1/100th f/5.6 ISO 1600 at 16mm Canon 580EXII flash
Post match I needed a bit of flash when shooting the player appearances so I stuck my Canon 580EXII on top of the A7R and found that ETTL won’t work but the flash triggered fine in manual mode. For this sort of situation it’s important to get the exposure set up so that the scene is visible with the ambient light, and the flash just being used to fill in the foreground otherwise you just end up with some very bright people up close and the rest of the scene is black.
Focus speed was easily fast enough in this sort of situation. It always helps to pick a spot with some decent contrast which is my normal approach anyway, but I had no problems with focus whatsoever.
From an image quality perspective, I’m quietly pleased with the output of this lens. I haven’t done any controlled sharpness tests as they are quite boring and it’s much more fun to be taking pictures of actual things. So I have taken one of the stadium shots and grabbed a centre and corner for you.
1/160th f/5.6 ISO320 at 16mm
Centre
Top left
So there you have it. There’s a bit of falloff of crispness in the corner but it is easily sharp enough. The centre is incredibly sharp. I imagine at smaller apertures it will be even better. I did notice a slight bit of vignetting at f/4 which is easily fixed.
Summary – very nice lens indeed. Must be the best wide angle for the Sony A7 series.
1/60th f/5 ISO 1000 at 16mm