• 2 days ago
✨Get Artlist (2 months FREE): https://bit.ly/3GshKNA
📷 Sony A1ii: https://geni.us/VcupRV
🎨The BEST Lightroom Presets: https://geni.us/DIV2
📷 28-70 f2 GM: https://geni.us/B35KGdQ

📷 My Camera: https://geni.us/t93yc
📷 The Best Entry Level Cameras: https://geni.us/Beginnercameras
📷 More Cameras I recommend: https://geni.us/Mirrorless
✨ Make Money with Your Photos ➡️ https://bit.ly/PhotoLicense
✨ Limited Edition LUTs: https://bit.ly/4buszOy
🎨 More Lightroom Presets: https://bit.ly/3TDLKMx

📷 MY GEAR and Lenses
My Favorite Camera: https://geni.us/t93yc
My Favorite Lens: https://geni.us/RF15-35mm
Beast Prime Lens: https://geni.us/RF50f1-2
Budget Prime Lens: https://geni.us/RF50
Best Beginner Lens: https://geni.us/RF3518
Best Zoom Lens: https://geni.us/RF70-200mm
This Lens does Everything: https://geni.us/RF2470
Best Wireless Mic: https://geni.us/Vnew3
My Drone: https://geni.us/0NF33v
My Favorite Vlog Microphone: https://geni.us/SwPS
My Favorite Tripod: https://geni.us/jB4foVv
Fast memory cards: https://geni.us/b2r4ya
My Lights: https://geni.us/osStP
Capture Smooth Footage: https://geni.us/DL9f8G
Everything Else: https://gugliotta.one/gear

📷 My Camera Bag:
My Camera Bag: https://geni.us/Shimoda
Save 10% at checkout with code: "Gugliotta10"

🎵 My MUSIC and Sound Effects
Artlist 2 months FREE on an annual plan: https://bit.ly/3GshKNA
Musicbed (1 Month Free): https://geni.us/AOL10
Epidemic 30-day FREE Trial: https://geni.us/AGSFX
Motion Array ($50 off): https://bit.ly/3Fkwg8I

*Please note, I may earn a commission on some of the links above.

📸 INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/gugliotta.one/
♪ TIKTOK: https://www.tiktok.com/@blameanthony
🌐 WEBSITE: https://gugliotta.one

📧 LET'S CONNECT:
https://gugliotta.one/about

[Timecodes:]
0:00 I Tried the Sony A1ii
0:24 Reviewing the photos
1:42 F2 vs F3.5 vs F5.6
4:09 Sunset and Low Light
7:18 Artlist
9:20 Sunrise; why I didn't use F2
12:24 These photos are SHARP
14:14 I need MORE in-focus!
15:23 Lighting matters
16:06 When I'd ACTUALLY use F2
18:40 Image Stabilization for Stills

Category

🗞
News
Transcript
00:00The Sony A1 Mark II and the 28-70mm F2 G Master are an amazing combo to capture photos with,
00:07but is 50 megapixels too much? And do you actually need an aperture of F2?
00:14So in this photo, I'm going to dive into some of the photos that I was able to capture
00:17with this lens and camera combo, because unfortunately I do have to send this back.
00:23So I'll show you some of the photos that I've shot over the last two weeks. And if we take a quick
00:26look at my Lightroom gallery, you can see it's a combination of portraits, which I think a lot of
00:33photographers who are interested in this lens will be looking at. They're going to be wanting to
00:38shoot at those super low F2 apertures to isolate your subject from the background. But we also
00:43have some landscapes shot at F2 and some at other apertures and some city shots. So we'll jump right
00:49in. Some of these photos, disclaimer, were shot by Stefano, where he actually had the camera at
00:54the same time I did. So we were both shooting on an identical setup, the A1-2 with the 28-70.
01:02So this is at F2. Now, in some cases when I'm shooting landscapes, I want to see a little bit
01:08more of the background. So with this unedited photo, you know, it's probably a little bit more
01:12cropped than I'd want it to be. I'm missing the top of the mountain. You can see, obviously,
01:16it nailed focus. This is not a camera that I would at all be worried about missing focus
01:20with the AI detection and the auto focus mode. Top of my hair, probably going to be a little bit
01:26out of focus because we are shooting at a little bit of a tighter 51 focal length. You can see that
01:32these edit up very well. I think in this case, I may have used one of my presets. There's windswept,
01:39white cedar. Thunderbird is always one that looks nice. But an aperture of F2 reacts differently
01:44in different scenarios. With that last one, you could kind of still see some of the texture on
01:49the mountain. With this one, the mountain is completely gone. So that is probably a little
01:53bit too low. You can see here, Stefano opened it up to 3.5 or closed it down, probably a little
01:59bit underexposed here. But when you're dealing with a lot of highlights, a lot of white snowy
02:04textures, you don't want to blow those out. One of my favorite couple of photos that we captured
02:10was at this point just outside of Lake Louise. You can see how nicely these photos added up.
02:16In this case, I did actually use one of my presets. I believe I used my yeah, my South
02:22Shore preset right there. I did tweak the blues a little bit just to bring them down because it
02:27tends to be a little bit more of a tropical preset. You can see that's what it looked like.
02:32Again, we're underexposing because we don't want to blow out those highlights. Look at I got some
02:38snot freezing on my mustache there. The depth of field looks pretty much exactly where I would
02:44want it to be. So in a case like this, and with that last photo, you saw that F2 was probably a
02:51little bit too shallow. So don't be afraid if you're shooting portraits, if you're shooting
02:55a subject, and you want to make sure that more of it is in focus. Let's go back to the edited
03:00version here. You can see I'm getting some nice texture, some of that Cordura fabric. And we've
03:05got that kind of shoulder to shoulder here, which is why a photo like this just looks so nice
03:12because we're not blurring out our subject, but we're still far away enough from our background
03:17at a 28 millimeter focal length that everything just renders really nicely. And if you saw the
03:23short that I did at this photo spot with the landscape shots that I shot in the Hasselblad,
03:28you would know that we had this mist. So you can actually kind of see it in the background
03:32floating through the mountains. The lighting from the sun was also being misted by a little bit of
03:38clouds, and that's why the shadows on my face aren't super harsh. They're kind of just like
03:44perfect. Like this type of lighting, if I could have it 24-7 all the time, I absolutely would.
03:49Stefano also shot some burst photos of me with like, what is this camera shoot, like 30 frames
03:54per second or something crazy like that, where I was skating. Obviously I am not, I'm not an
03:59NHL player, so I don't skate the most gracefully. As I was skating around, didn't really miss any
04:05of these. I think I have like 200 of these photos that were in a burst. But later in the day, we
04:10went to the top of the gondola at Banff, and this is a great lookout point if you ever go to Banff.
04:16Highly recommend. There's a little bit of a fee to go up the gondola, but once you do,
04:21go up for sunset, because that's what we did. And I think if I set the time on the camera right,
04:27no, it is not, it was not 12-19. Just go to the unedited photo here. So if I reset it back to
04:32zero, that's what the exposure was. I'm looking at my histogram, probably want it to live around
04:38there, or I probably could also just hit auto in this case. The thing with auto is it tends to
04:42expand everything a little bit too much. But to give you another example of, you know, maybe we
04:47underexposed too much and just how much you can get back with a camera like this. One thing you'll
04:51notice is that we actually shot this photo at f4. So one of the things that Stefano and I did while
04:58we were out in Banff was we would shoot a lot at f2 and then a lot at like f4 and maybe like f5.6
05:05because you have this amazing mountain range in the background. And of course, with depth of
05:10field and with hyperfocal distance measurements, that's pretty much always going to be out of
05:15focus unless you're focus stacking or shooting at a really high aperture. That's not what we want.
05:20In this case, a little bit of bokeh, a little bit of out of focus in the background is nice
05:25because it helps create that depth and separate those layers. I didn't really take too many detail
05:30shots with this lens, but this is one of the ones that I did capture just to kind of see how the
05:36fall off and how the sharpness what that's all like. So right now we're zoomed in at 200%
05:41inside of Lightroom. You know, the details that we're capturing are awesome. They're what you'd
05:46expect from a 50 megapixel sensor and a lens with this price tag and this level of image quality.
05:53And then another view just past sunset. This is where you can look down Banff Avenue and all the
05:59lights start to turn on. So this again is unedited. You could play with it to maybe make it a little
06:06bit less blue one eighth of a second. So not super long, but F2 ISO 400. So there really shouldn't be
06:12any noise in this at all. Obviously, there's always going to be a little bit of noise in
06:16the darker areas. This is really cool. Whether you have like a 45, 50, 60 megapixel sensor,
06:22this is the type of stuff that makes a difference compared to having like a 24 megapixel sensor. You
06:28can see like all the streets and the cars and the people again, we're zoomed into 200%. Very cool
06:35that from a photo like this, we can zoom in and like probably make an awesome full size print.
06:41Now, here's the edited version of that. And I think if I had to guess, is this my windswept
06:47preset Thunderbird? I may have edited this one from scratch, but you can kind of see with these
06:52darker photos, a lot of those the color grading from the shadows starts to pop up like rustic
06:58dawn doesn't really have too much of a heavy shadow adjustment. Whereas you know, windswept
07:03has a lot of greens in the highlight that start to get pulled up. That's the edit that I went for
07:07kind of like this green or this blue orange split. I think it looks really well. And I still need to
07:13post that one on Instagram. So that one's getting posted for sure. So some of the photos that you've
07:18seen, I've already posted over on Instagram, but some of the others I'm going to be editing into
07:23Instagram reels and YouTube shorts to share with you. But in order to create videos and shorts and
07:30YouTube videos like these, you kind of have to add extra layers of music and sound effects,
07:37which I get from the sponsor of today's video art list. And you've heard me talk about art list
07:43before. It's great. If you're looking to add all those extra bits and pieces, like for this video,
07:48I kind of wanted it to have that chill, hanging out with a friend, sharing some photos and talking
07:54about cameras together. So I went on to art list filtered by their lo-fi lounge type music. And I
08:01found exactly what I needed. But if you're someone who likes to keep everything inside of your
08:06editing software, inside of premier pro inside of final cut, you can now do that because art list
08:12has added an extension. So in my case, I go into premier pro open up the art list extension and all
08:19of the resources that you're used to seeing on their website, you can now get right inside of
08:24your editing software. And you never have to feel like you're missing out because art list is always
08:28adding new things. Last year, they added AI voiceover and their LUT features this year.
08:34They're going to be doing a little bit more with like AI generation and video, but it's not out yet.
08:40So kind of keep your eye out for that. But one of the coolest things that's happened is I've been
08:46sitting down watching a television show and then a commercial comes on and I'll recognize the song
08:51from the commercial as an art list song because art list isn't just for me or for you. It's also
08:57trusted by a lot of big name brands. So if you're ready to dive in and get the best deal on art list
09:03or just check out what they're up to, you can do that using my link down in the description,
09:08which will also get you two months free off of an annual plan. So big thanks to art list for
09:14continuing to be a supporter of this channel and everything that I do. Now back to some photos.
09:20The next morning we woke up and my friend Matt Littlewood took us to this spot. I believe this
09:25is Bow Lake. Bow Lake and Palo Lake are right beside each other. So again, we're not shooting
09:30at F2. In a case like this, a lot of kit lenses do shoot at F3.5. And then without a subject,
09:36this is what it looks like. So you can see me thinking that the sun's going to come up
09:40and it's going to be super bright. I intentionally underexposed this photo. So that's what I was
09:45sitting at. I probably could have gone a little bit brighter. If I go to my presets, was it
09:50Atlantic Highlands? Atlantic Highlands 2. That's what that one looks like. But also zooming in
09:55really quick, I don't usually add too much sharpness, like any sharpness adjustments to my
10:00photo. In this case, I did. And I think it worked really well. I actually applied it in a mask to
10:06this area here. And if I zoom in to 300%, you might be able to see a little bit of it. Let me see if
10:13I can turn the masks off. Yeah. So you can see there's a little, probably a little bit of clarity,
10:18a little bit of sharpness, super fun photos. When you get the edge of the sun, just peeking
10:22through and hitting the peaks of the mountains, you have the sun on the right half and the moon
10:26on the left half. And I think this composition just looks awesome. Maybe the only thing I'd like
10:31is, you know, a guy, some guy on a, on a dog sled. Maybe that guy could be my friend, Matt here.
10:37Matt posed up, was wearing this really nice yellow jacket. So that is the before again,
10:42F 4.5, because I want to capture more of the background. Although, you know, even at F 4.5,
10:49it is a little bit blurred out, but that's the thing. When you are creating your compositions,
10:54you need to think about how the texture of your subject conflicts with the texture of the
10:58background. And so in some cases, if the background has a lot of texture and your subject has a lot
11:04of texture, like in this case, maybe like Matt's hat has a lot of texture, but then the background
11:09also has texture. I don't want those two things competing. So shooting at a lower aperture of,
11:15you know, in this case, 4.5 works, but probably could have gone a little bit lower. I think this
11:20balances out really well, but those are the things you need to think about. Not only just depth
11:24separation, but how the depth separation affects your perception of the textures and the colors
11:32and the lighting that is hitting your foreground versus hitting your background. Again, just some
11:37quick landscape shots. These aren't even edited. So this is an example where the textures don't
11:42conflict because if, you know, if I had done this and just raised the shadows all the way,
11:49now all of a sudden you can see the textures on the tree and they start to be the same frequency,
11:54the same level of detail as the textures on the rock. So in this case, I don't even really need
11:58to edit this photo. Like maybe, maybe I could apply a quick preset just to get it looking in
12:04like the color, the colors, the color grading style that I want, but really I would take that
12:10photo and post it straight to Instagram without any editing. Got to capture some landscapes
12:15with a human subject in it. I like this one, but it's almost a little bit too contrasty. We had
12:20lost some of that, maybe like nicer light at this point. This one I love because we have
12:27really awesome side lighting. Again, I'm not shooting at F2. I've chosen to shoot it at F3.5.
12:33A lot of the time, the sharpest point for a lens is like, you know, one or two clicks up from the
12:38lowest aperture. In this case, we had Matt walking through the scene. So we've got him there, you
12:44know, not quite in focus because I probably chose a focus point that was around the middle of this
12:49frame, but we have side lighting hitting this mountain and just looking awesome. This one's
12:54already posted on Instagram so you can go check it out. And then we shot a little bit later in
13:01the day as we were going up the ice fields parkway. This was not really an intended photo spot,
13:07but we just kind of stopped, popped out the lens, didn't need to shoot it at F2 because this is one
13:11of those things where, you know, you would really like to see a little bit more of the texture of
13:15the mountain. The nice thing is I have Stefano nice and sharp and in focus, almost to the edge
13:22of his shoulder. You know, it's probably focused right around there. Ear to nose at F4.5 and 28
13:28millimeters. I used my Atlantic Highlands preset in this case. There's F4, there's F2. You can see
13:37what the edge of the mountain is doing and you can come into Lightroom and say, you know, select the
13:42sky. And I always do find that Lightroom kind of has a little bit of a challenge. Sometimes you can
13:48get some banding at the edges. Obviously this is very extreme, but there you have that haloing,
13:53that banding versus if you had a little bit more of a sharper background, like you do in an image
14:01like this, sometimes Lightroom actually performs better because the edge of that mountain is easier
14:06for Lightroom to find. And of course, you always need a few candid, unplanned photos. This is one
14:18of those photos that Stefano snapped of me. The tricky thing with a photo like this is the lake
14:25is known for all of the bubbles. And when you're shooting at even F4.5, you can see that the
14:31bubbles aren't quite in focus. I did another version of this photo on, I believe it was the
14:36Canon where I focus stacked and I did a series of three photos, one for the foreground, one for the
14:42background, one for the subject and kind of like one in between. And that way you can actually get
14:48kind of all that texture, all that detail in focus. In this case, F4.5, I'm not complaining
14:55about this. I think this is perfectly fine. A photo like this looks great. I might just,
15:01you know, maybe composite it with another shot where I could get more bubbles in focus.
15:18So this is a great example of how lighting can make a huge impact on your photo. This
15:28version of the photo looks kind of okay. You know, F4, whatever, it's probably a little bit dark,
15:34probably could bring it up. But literally 30 seconds later, the sun came out and look at this.
15:41Now all of a sudden it's hitting the bridge perfectly and creating that separation,
15:46which adds extra depth and extra interest into our photo. So now what I'm still at F4,
15:52but really it doesn't require too much editing. And if I zoom in to the final product, you can see
15:58the bridge looks great. The detail on the mountain looks great. Everything in this photo,
16:03the lighting, the composition just lines up so well. Where an F2 lens makes a lot of sense
16:09is if you are someone who's really into prime lenses. In this case, this was shot at F2 and
16:15is a perfect example of when I would use a shallow depth of field to isolate a subject.
16:21So I focused on the logo, all the detail on the handle, the main thing I wanted to capture. Of
16:26course, I could also have focused maybe on like the GFX 50 logo over here, but then we have that
16:32really nice fall off. You can see all the dust around Kofi's camera here, the Kofi camera. I
16:38believe, yeah, that is my Thunderbird preset. Urban heat kind of gives it a little bit more
16:43of a vintage warm aesthetic. Same deal with these photos. These look absolutely awesome.
16:47Same sort of F2 setting, isolating that subject. Or in this case, I actually did shoot some wildlife
16:53with this lens. And the thing that we want to see with wildlife is of course, feather detail. Can we
16:59see the texture? Yes, we can. We can see that feather texture. It looks really cool. And luckily,
17:04I was fortunate enough to get really close and capture these swans without spooking them.
17:10Another good test of this lens is this image, which I've captured on multiple cameras. So it's
17:16a good test to see how the fall off of the highlights occurs in areas around the CN Tower.
17:23So if we bring that back, I clipped it. I can tell you for certain this photo is clipped. I'll
17:30go to the unedited version. Usually with sunsets, you don't have to do too much. Maybe just bring
17:35back a little bit of color in the sky. This is the challenge, right? So when you start to adjust,
17:39make those adjustments, you get that banding. You get that hard edge where the depth of field
17:44causes the fall off around the edges of objects. But considering I shot this at ISO 800, I did apply
17:52some masks. So you can kind of see, you know, there's without masks, there's some masks.
17:58Obviously, there's going to be some noise texture in the skin and in some of those shadow areas.
18:03I think my favorite photo that I shot is actually this photo of the Hasselblad at F2,
18:10because if you own multiple cameras, the thing that you got to do is shoot photos of your other
18:16cameras. In this case, I believe I focused on the Hasselblad logo at F2 ISO 800. And yeah,
18:23of course, you can see a little bit of noise in this area. That's not unexpected for a sensor
18:27like this, but you can see I underexposed it, right? Because I want to make sure I'm not
18:31blowing out any of the details that are in this area. So when I do edit it up, all of that color
18:38information is going to be available to me. Another final one that we'll talk about is
18:43this set of photos. The nice thing, of course, with the A1, the Sony Alpha 1 II, is the fact
18:50that the image stabilization is great. So these photos, 1 over 10. If I zoom in, you can see,
18:56of course, it's probably a combination of Taha moving as he's standing there because humans are
19:02just naturally shaky. There is a little bit of shake to them. I don't want to say it's the camera.
19:09In this case, I do probably want to just say it's the human subject. Same deal when he took a photo
19:14of me. I am just a little bit blurry. 1 over 10 again, probably because I was moving, probably a
19:20combination of, you know, there is a limit to the resolving power of a sensor plus the image
19:25stabilization and all that sort of fun stuff. This one, I think I used my frozen ride preset
19:30because it tends to have a little bit of blue in the highlight. Gives it that downtown Toronto
19:34subway type of vibe that I was going for. So that is all of the photos. You see that some of them
19:40we shot at F2, some of them we shot at F4 and F5.6. I don't think we did any super high aperture
19:48like to get any starburst effects or anything like that. But overall, really impressed with
19:52the quality of the images that you can get out of a camera like this. I know this video was a
19:57little bit of a longer one, a little bit different than maybe what you would see when I talk about
20:00camera specs or I'm out in the field. But I think it's important to actually go through and see
20:05what it is that you capture with the camera. So it's not just in studio, boring, whatever shots
20:11we're actually getting out shooting with this thing during the two weeks that Stefano and myself
20:17and my friends were able to kind of, you know, I hand them the camera, they take a photo of me,
20:21I take a photo of them and everyone has a new profile photo for Instagram. But hopefully you
20:26enjoy this video. There will be another video after this where I actually talk about Canon
20:31and Sony and my thoughts on the Sony system. So stay tuned for that. And until the meantime,
20:38grab your camera, get out and go shoot photos.