MANHATTAN – I’ve been experimenting for the last few days with simplifying my equipment. I’m carrying my Sony a7riii with one lens, the Sony GM 24-70 f2.8 zoom.
I generally don’t like zooms, they suffer from image quality issues relative to prime lenses, and they tend to be bulky. This lens is indeed bulky but it’s easier to manage than three primes and it covers the focal lengths that I use on a daily basis. Also if I want tighter than 70mm the camera’s 42 meg sensor facilitate cropping in a pinch, and for wider than 24 I can stitch frames (which I do all the time).
It turns out that this lens performs well corner to corner by f4.0 at focal lengths 35-70mm and at 50 to 70mm is actually fine wide open (“fine” is high praise from me). It’s very good corner to corner at 28mm but much less so at 24mm, so a decent strategy is to limit wides to 35mm and stitch. I’ve been torturing it with back lit situations and shooting bokeh oriented images – it’s actually excellent to my eyes in both respects. So I’ll keep going with it for a while to further understand its quirks in actual use. The images below are both at 24mm.
Day 3420 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
On this date nine years ago (day 133 of one photo every day): Times Square at night.
