Sunday Read: Streets, Shoots and Leaves

Sunday Reads

Laura Currie and Alex Parker 
30th October 2022

Autumn shooting – landscape and street photography

It's that magical time of year – autumn. The light is beautiful, the air is fresh and the colours are glorious. With nature putting on its annual display, we thought it would be a great opportunity to venture out with two different cameras and attempt to capture the spirit of the season!

Alex – Sony a7 IV with Sony FE 24-70mm F2.8 GM II

With summer a distant memory and Christmas ads already in circulation, you’d be forgiven for wondering where 2022 has gone. Personally, I think the amount of ‘stuff’ I've crammed into this year in comparison to the last couple has made the months disappear more quickly than usual – it turns out time does tend to move faster when you’re able to leave your house.

Happily, Autumn is in full swing. By far my favourite time of year, it offers great conditions for finding good compositions, and the mild weather means you might actually want to go out and look for them. Rainy days are expected, sunny days are a bonus – it’s the ultimate glass-half-full season, and the colours are incredible.

For landscape photographers, boring blue-sky days are less of an issue through October too. Days are shorter, conditions are changeable, and colours pop like nobody’s business. Shooting in wooded areas means plenty of interest at all four corners of your image, and no giant voids of sky to contend with.

If you’re looking to test a new camera or different system, you can do worse than a day in a leafy town as the trees start shedding, so Laura and I decided to leave the office and head out with a couple of fantastic cameras from the Hireacamera ‘arsenal’, to do just that. With a mix of nature and urban shooting in mind, we decided to limit ourselves to a single lens to keep ourselves as light as possible. Width for landscape, a little reach for street, my setup was Sony’s excellent a7 IV and the incredible Sony FE 24-70mm F2.8 GM II. It turns out this combo is a touch more powerful than the Nikon D80 I’m using to learn photography techniques with...

I found Sony’s base a7 an absolute treat to use – whenever I flicked it on it was just ready to go. I shot primarily in aperture priority with the LCD screen hidden, choosing to point and shoot with the EVF and see what a mess I'd made of it later. I carried the camera and 24-70mm all day without ever feeling it was heavy, and as a big-handed gentleman, I had no problems with the size of the camera’s buttons and dials, which stick out a little more than on the previous model.

I found the viewfinder needed a second to adjust to sudden shifts in light. As it tried its best not to burn my retinas out in dazzling sunshine, it needed a beat or two to bring the brightness back up when I moved into sudden shade. Shooting with a DSLR as I normally do, this isn’t something I’m used to, but I’m sure I’d adjust in no time, and you can manually set the brightness when shooting in manual.

Overall, I found the EVF sharp, detailed and crucially, very fast and with no visible lag. I’m delighted with the quality of the images I got with the a7 IV. 33 megapixel feels like a real sweet spot for a multi-use sensor, detail levels are fantastic even when cropping and zooming in edit, but the file sizes aren’t completely mental, and as you’d expect from a Sony alpha camera, low light performance is exceptional.

Laura – Canon EOS R5 with Canon RF 24-70mm F2.8 mk II

When we started to discuss locations for an autumnal shoot my mind went straight to Sheffield Park Gardens in East Sussex, but I quickly dismissed the idea as a cliché. Then Alex piped up with Tunbridge Wells, it seemed daft at first, but that’s only because I’ve never strayed off the beaten track there, usually I just go shopping! But ‘Tunny’, as the locals appear to call it, has a wealth of beautiful parks, country walks and the charming, leafy streets of the Pantiles.

As I drove there, the morning light was gorgeous, it was a crisp, clear day and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. This time of year offers such dreamy, almost evocative light, the sun is lower in the sky so ‘golden hour’ lasts much longer. However, a cloudless sky can be pretty unforgiving when it comes to highly contrasty images, you’ve no natural diffusion, so I was keen to see how the R5 would fare.

Street and landscape are my favourite photographic genres, I don’t tend to shoot fast moving subjects like motorsport or wildlife, I prefer a slow and considered approach, so I set the autofocus to my favourite mode which is single point AF. Like Alex, I spent most of the day in aperture priority – I like to have control over the depth of field and let the shutter speed figure itself out (yes, I’m a heathen!).

With the R5 I opted for Canon’s RF 24-70mm f/2.8 L IS USM. It’s a wonderfully versatile focal length and perfect for street photography, especially when the light starts to fade. It’s a superb quality lens, with rapid autofocus and weather sealing. The only drawback is the fact that it’s quite a lump to carry around all day.

We headed off in the direction of Dunloran park, if you’ve not been I would highly recommend it if you’re in the area, especially at this time of year! It offered a huge spectrum of colours but the scenes before us were, as expected, very contrasty in the bright morning light. I started putting the R5 to work, after a few minutes I had a look through the images and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing from the histogram – virtually no blown highlights or crushed shadows. The abilities of this camera were already getting me excited and we’d only just gotten started! After this we headed to the bustling Pantiles, golden light poured almost horizontally towards us through the amber leaves on the trees, so I whipped off the lens hood for a bit of artistic lens flare!

One thing I found a bit strange was that the colours when looking through the viewfinder looked a bit muted, nothing like the fiery colours around us. The DSLR fan in me put it down to the fact it was an electronic viewfinder, but it was a bit discouraging. After a couple of hours I decided this couldn’t be right and I stopped to investigate. I found that there is a setting to change the vibrancy of what you see through the viewfinder, sounds stupid now, but it didn’t occur to me to look because I didn’t see any reason you’d want to see anything other than accurate colour reproduction! Of course, when we reviewed the images at the end of the day on Alex’s Mac, the colours were perfect. It goes to show just how customisable the R5 is, you can completely mould it to suit your every preference and need.

The build quality of the camera is faultless. As I mentioned, I am a big DSLR fan (Nikon is my brand of choice), and I still find some mirrorless cameras too small, angular and sort of… Soulless. To me they just feel like a utilitarian tool built to ‘get the job done’ rather than something that’s been designed to create art. (I’m well aware that I’m in the minority here!). But the R5 definitely has a special feel to it, it feels more like a ‘proper camera’, the electronic viewfinder is really very good. I do still prefer the immediate visibility of an old-fashioned optical viewfinder, but it’s one of the best I’ve used so far.

So in conclusion, for stills, the R5 is a joy to use. It offers beautiful, accurate colours, lightning-fast AF, sublime build quality and ergonomics, an unbelievably lifelike EVF and it’s fully customisable. It really makes you want to create. It’s hard to image how they’ll improve on it when they release the next version (this is not a spoiler alert). Bottom line, if it’s good enough to tempt a stubborn, bloody-minded DSLR fan like me to switch to mirrorless, then it really is good!