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Boring Brick wall shots.

 

OK Part 1: seeing how different shutter speeds go on the A7r -- handheld Pt 2 will be tripod)

Method: boring brick wall, side light, five exposures taken with care OSS on @ 70mm on the FE2470 at each whole stop  shutter speed from 1/30  to 1/4000

 

First finding: there's a lot of variation viewed at 100% at all speeds up to and including 1/1000 (1/1000 was best with least difference). And that's with OSS on!

I attribute this to camera shake; if you are shooting 36MP in a lightweight camera, you really need to pay attention to technique.I'll try again with my L plate or vertical grip or both to see if it helps.

 

Second finding: I chose the best exposure at each speed to be indicative of as good as you can get handheld, to see if there were differences. If so I'd attribute them to shutter shock.

 

Well the best 1/125 was just visibly worse than any other speed (including 1/30) at 100%. Not visible at 50%

 

I couldn't be sure if say the 1/250 was worse. Well within placebo range.

 

Conclusion: I'm sure shutter shock is real, but in the field handheld it's not I think the main problem. The main problem is that's a lot of pixels, and a very light camera, and you have to be very careful (and shoot multiple frames where possible). 

 

The variation within a shutter speed was much, much, more significant and the variation between shutter speeds.

 

This variation lasts until 1/2000 at which point on there's not difference within a shutter speed.

 

It's quite possible that shutter shock is worse on a tripod (maybe holding dampens, and in any case the tripod will get rid of the camera shake variance and expose the ss. 

 

But my take home message if you are handholding is unless you can use 1/2000 of a second there's no need to worry much about which shutter speed to use (except maybe 1/125 but even then it's not a biggie) but you do need to take a lot of care and shoot multiple images where possible and if the image is a good one.

 

So it's a challenge to handhold, but that's part of the fun....

 

Interesting findings. It indicates that in most situations you're throwing away a large number of these 36M pixels... In order to really take advantage of this resolution, you need to shoot multiple frames and keep the sharpest one.  IMHO A lot of time and energy not worth it if you don't print big or crop much. Plus a lot of wasted space on disk with quite a bit of useless information. In this case, you might be better off with a lower resolution camera. That's basically my conclusion and why I'm now using MFT. If one doesn't make huge prints, the difference is really unsignificant.