Hello Everybody! Hope you're having a great week.Me? Not to bad its early in the week and looks like its going to be a hot one with the heat index well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit .  If you've been following me for a while you know that last year I vowed not to buy any photography gear. I'm glad to say that held to that vow. Well it's a new year and I've sold a lot of gear and bought new gear. My main camera has changed from a Sony full frame to a crop sensor Sony. My EDC (Every day Carry) camera changed from a Canon to a Leica. So lots of new. I spent most of last year researching and deciding what I will have in my kits. For my main kit I went back to a Sony crop sensor A6700. I was an early adapter to mirrorless cameras when Sony introduced the A6000 15 years ago. I have used and owned the A6000, A6300 and the A6500 which was my favorite of the series and used it for many years. Most of my photo's in this website were taken with these cameras. I liked them so much that I sold my Nikon Full frame DSLR and never looked back. I am very familiar with this model of camera. When I decided to make a crop sensor camera my main camera I decided to choose the Sony because I was familiar with it physically  and the menus and I had lenses that would fit. So I chose the Sony A6700 the latest version with all the new gismo's and AI capabilities. I researched and made a great kit with APSC lenses that are smaller but had better specs than my full frame that I just replaced as my main camera. So what's the problem? Well I got complacent. I thought that I could just pickup where I
left off with my last and beloved A6500. But a lot has changed. Here is a link of a video from my YouTube channel I made on the subject Max's Kitchen Gear Talk "Familiar but Frustrating".  Please feel free to like and subscribe it really helps out the channel and doesn't cost you a dime.

First of all the menu's have changed. Sony has always been know for complicated and hard to navigate menus .  But I did pretty well with the older models but this was a different beast altogether. The menus have totally changed and even more things to choose from. Things that the older cameras couldn't do either because of hardware or software in the camera. Or they just hadn't been thought of yet in the older cameras. My first couple of outings I struggled getting the settings correct or finding things in the menu. I did a night shoot and I had problems focusing because I couldn't find the bright monitor setting in the menus. There are also touch menus on this camera that the others didn't have and I usually have the touch screen turned off because during shooting my nose would change the focus point. So I did the same on this one but there is a way to turn off the touch focus and still have the touch for the menus. The camera is Familiar but Frustrating. The frustration comes down to me not knowing the camera as much as I thought I would because so much had changed. Not to mention stuff that it can do that that the older ones couldn't do. Like Focus Bracketing. Lots of other cameras have this feature but the older Sony's didn't. So on the older camera's I would have to manually do the focus stacking by changing the focus point manually but now you get it set up and press a button and it takes all the shots and moves the focus point for you. The same with long exposures with the camera's shutter in bulb mode. On the old cameras you would just have to hold the shutter button down or have a remote release that you could lock and use a timer to do long exposures past 30 seconds. With this camera you can dial in the time you want say 2 min. and it will show you a countdown on the back of the screen. Now these features are buried in the menus. There is a way you can save the settings to a favorites tab so you can find the things you need . 

What is going to help me the most? Taking my time with this camera and going through all of the different senecios that I can think of and practicing them over and over again. Things like exposure bracketing. Focus stacking, and focusing in Low light like when doing astro photography. I need to practice over and over again until I can go through all of the settings and procedures in my sleep. Thats the advice that I would give anyone else. I have some trips coming up that I want to be on the top of my game with. The first one is with my camera club for our fall trip. I want to be able to handle my camera with no hiccups and it be just an extension of my hands. I also have another epic trip coming up next year that I won't talk about but it will rival the trip that I took to Utah 4 years ago. I don't even want to think about the how to's of photography on that trip but it to be an extension of my hand and eye. So practice I will and get the controls and menus under control so all I have to do is think about composition. So until next week Get Out and Shoot!

Hey if you want to check out my photography go to my instagram account Max Stansell Photography there are over 2000 posts there. Here is the link

 Max Stansell Photography Instagram Link

If you want to check out my YouTube Channel you can see it here Max Stansell Photography