Every photographer finds their own niche and I think I have finally settled. My niches are Cabaret shows and portraiture, whether it is studio or outdoors-based. For a while now I had been thinking about selling my old Canon camera equipment to fund the purchase of a Sony α7 IV to go with my Sony α7 III. The reasons are, they share the same batteries, and lenses, and are lighter in the bag than the Canon 6d Mk II. I hadn’t used some of them in years and they were just gathering dust. I woke up one morning and thought, OK I will do it. I also sold the majority of my lenses that I don’t really use anymore.
Image shamelessly clipped from the Sony website :-)
I now only have Sony α7 III and IV. The lenses are Sony 85mm f1.8, Sony 24-105mm f4 and Sigma 28-70mm f2.8. That is all I need now.
The Sony α7 III has a 24 Megapixel sensor so with a 32gig SD Card I can get around 1200 images, perfect for a Cabaret show’s duration. The Sony α7 IV has a 33 Megapixel sensor which brings the capacity down to around 780 images. Now depending on the number of performers/image ratio, that could be ok. If they were all singers who don’t move around much that is. However, when a performance is more energetic I do more shots to capture the action so the card can fill up quite quickly.
The solution would of course be to buy bigger capacity cards. I like to have as much speed as possible when writing the files from the buffer as well as when I need to copy the files to the PC for editing. I also sometimes like to drop in a quick video test to see how the 4k image will look. This requires fast SD cards. I do have two UHS-II high-speed cards in the Sony α7 III. When I saw the drop in capacity when they were in the Sony α7 IV, I put in two 64gig SD cards.
These cards were not UHS-II high-speed cards and I believe this was the cause of the Sony α7 IV overheating near the end of a recent show. Fortunately, I pulled out the Sony α7 III and completed the work but it was still a bit of a shock. Researching the issue on a forum suggests having slower cards means more power to write to them as they take longer to complete.
Ok then I will just buy two 64gig UHS-II SD cards… let me check Amazon… ahh OK yeah that’s a bit pricey…maybe later then? There are cheaper cards but I like to stick to what I have used in the past and I have not had any issues with SanDisk cards at all.
So what can I do about this? The solution dropped into my email from Sony explaining the availability of a firmware upgrade for the Sony α7 IV which adds the ability to choose Large, Medium or Small RAW files. The Canon 6d Mk II could do this but I rarely used it.
This firmware update had me thinking… do I really need to utilise the full 33 megapixels of the Sony α7 IV? I could come down a notch and save capacity. I can put the UHS-II cards in the Sony α7 IV and leave the larger slower cards in the Sony α7 III as a backup. Hmm, this calls for a bar chart and a shot of a camel!
I took this shot of a Camel I picked up in Egypt over 20 years ago using the Sony α7 IV with the Sony 85mm f1.8.
RAW files by comparison in Megabytes
As you can see Medium RAW is less that half of the Uncompressed shot. This would result in a bigger capacity on the cards. I would not think the Small RAW would be good enough.
Image Dimensions in pixels
There was no difference in dimension size between Large and Uncompressed. So it is looking like Large or Medium RAW files are the way to go. It is all down to the capacity levels.
Capacity of shots per 32gig SD Card
Well the Small RAW wins this round but I feel the smaller dimensions could have a negative impact. Consider a model on a large stage. I could have a great shot of them at the back of the stage and I crop into the shot to make it a better-balanced image. With a full RAW shot, this is easy but with an already small dimension image? Quality will suffer in my opinion. Medium RAW equates to just over a thousand shots, which is close to my target for a Cabaret show anyway.
As per the norm, there is one more spanner I can throw into the works. I can tell the Sony α7 IV to drop down from a Full Frame sensor and emulate an APS-C or cropped sensor. This would happen if I used a lens designed from APS-C cameras on an adaptor. A drawback of this would mean the mounted lens would crop into a factor of x1.5. So my 85mm f1.8 would change to an equivalent of 125mm but still at f1.8.
The camel again, this was taken on the same settings but with the Sony α7 IV in crop mode. You can see this is a tighter shot than before.
This could be a concern for the zoom lenses. The Sigma 28-70mm would be 42mm-104mm, and the Sony 24-105mm would be 36-157mm. This isn’t so bad in some cases however there are times when I can be quite close to the stage area, so at 42 and 36mm I may be too close.
So I dragged the above bar chart back into the light for another round.
Capacity of shots per 32gig SD Card - Crop Mode
While in crop mode, I could not select Large RAW as an option. Dimensions were not far off either, nothing to worry about really. So crop mode is a possibility after all, but only in certain cases.
Having said all this I could wait a while and gather the funds to purchase bigger SanDisk cards, but after all this testing it does bring into sharp focus (pun very much intended) how I handle future shows. Is it really necessary to have such large files when the resulting images are for social media and websites? The images are very passable for printing if required. Of course, I would be using Uncompressed Full Frame shots for any studio work I attend, there would be no need for the crop mode or smaller RAW sizes at all.
Time will tell….