New Work: Playing with the new lenses

I’ve been going out a few times with the camera bag looking for opportunities to try the new lenses, but for the most part, it’s been a case of either nothing looking interesting or terrible light. I have a few locations marked to return to, but I’m still very much in scouting mode and trying to figure out where to go to take photos I want to take.

That said, over the weekend I visited another new place, Fay Bainbridge Park on Bainbridge island to scout it as a birding location, and while I was there, I noticed what seemed like an interesting possible composition at the edge of the park, so I grabbed the camera and checked it out.

This was taken with the Sony 8-70 @ 70mm, handheld. What made it interesting to me is that white boat in the mid foreground, because otherwise it’s mjust a line of houses across the water. I think this is nice, but nothing super special. The combination of the A7IV and this lens is quite sharp, though, and I’m happy with how it performs.

On the way back to the truck, I noticed some thistles along the road, and I did some experimenting. I ended up with this:

That’s again the 28-70 at 70mm, taken at minimum focus distance. I quite like this, and I’m going to explore these kinds of shots further. it’s shot at F6.3, but I quite like how the background blurred out. It took a bit to find an angle where the light hit it well but I had separation from the plants you see to the right of it, but I think this turns out to be a really nice composition. I’ll call this my first shot with the Sony and the wide angle lenses that I’d consider “above average”.

I’m still trying to figure out how best to use the 17-28. In retrospect I should have tried it with this thistle as well, but I’m just not seeing compositions with that strong near item in it that these super-wide lenses really demand. I do expect it’ll be interesting for flower imaging, and I’ll have to try that soon.

These were both processed in Lightroom Classic and the Topaz Labs Photo AI app, which I’m rapidly turning into a fan of.