A New Camera For Ellen
For years Ellen had been using our trusty little camerra, a Canon IXUS 800. It’s a great little point and shoot. The camera begs to be used in full auto. There are a number of things that little camera does well and some that it just cannot do: low light photography and it is hobbled in back light even in manual. It is a disaster in full auto in anything but good lighting.
Sony A6000
We visited Best Buy to get our hands on cameras locally. We took our time and let the sales people (three of them) make suggestions that eventually targeted the Sony A6000. The smaller Sony cameras are to small it is hard to work the controls. The Nikon mirrorless cameras feel like toys with poor build quality IMO. The Canon were OK, but large and bulky compared the A6000. For Ellen a camera is all about weight and size, the lighter and smaller the better. The Sony has both without sacrificing quality controls for shutter and aperture. The camera also has a number of features not found in other cameras. One that I particularly like is the electronic view finder (EVF). Because it is electronic, all the information that would normally be displayed on the small led screen is shown in the viewfinder, all of it! There are a ton of special purpose features that make the camera Wow.
Next we visited Keeble and Shuchat. They were our local camera shop before we moved. Again we were steered to the A6000 and a 18-210 e-mount lens over two lenses from Sony for the same coverage. Ellen now has her A6000 and a single lens with no need to swap lenses and perhaps get dust on the sensor.
The Sony A6000 is a great camera. The Sony lenses are seriously lacking in aperture range. They do have a prime 2.8 lens, but that’s pretty much it. Oh, there is a larger 70-200 F4 lens, but it is too large for Ellen’s tastes.
This camera may be the one to ween Ellen from full auto and into the world of manual camera control.
Sony Manuals
The manual that comes with the A6000 is a joke. It does not provide any information beyond a simple list of functions. It does not describe what those functions do, how they operate, or how they affect other functions. I found a good book that describes all the A6000’s features. BUT, if you are in the market for the Sony A6000, check out Tony Northrup’s website describing the A6000. His photography books are quite good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXi2n1Nt_08