Text and photos By Albert Pedrosa The color tones were spot on. Sony a7R III, FE 24-105mm F4 G OSS Instead of talking about mirrorless and how Sony revolutionized professional mirrorless camera, I’d rather go straight to what really matters and how I find the Sony a7R III in a studio environment. I had my apprehensions and expectations, but I was also excited on how this widely talked-about camera would perform. I had the chance to use the Sony a7R III for the first time during a recent vacation in Baguio and I found it heavy—maybe because I had a 24-105 G lens on it. I don’t think it’s the best camera for travel or maybe I’m just lazy bringing a camera when travelling. I did enjoy, however, the X-E1 from Fujifilm that I tested years back. My qualification for travel cameras are those that you can forget that it’s strapped on you. When shooting two models, there’s an option to register the faces of your subject and prioritize which face and eye to focus. I was shooting low angle so I just flipped the LCD screen. Sony a7R III, FE 24-105mm F4 G OSS (Sam and Riona of Farah Models, Victoria Din for Makeup and Sophia Curia for Hair, GRP Studio) So how did it perform in the studio you? You may ask. It’s impressive! I don’t easily get impressed. I’m a Canon guy and I have my biases. But this camera is something to seriously consider. Since I haven’t tried a lot of Sony Alpha 7 camera, it was painfully dragging to understand the mountain of settings that I had to go through. It’s quite normal to adjust to a new system but I think the Sony a7R III is the first camera that I tried where it challenged me from the settings alone. After a week of trying to get familiar with the many dials and custom buttons, I was still using it like my typical Canon 5D Mark III. When I finally figured out how to use the Eye AF, I was blown away. Focusing is not an issue with my DSLR even the fact that I use tripod a lot when shooting in studio. Tripod limits your camera movement but shooting at F8, maybe around 50m focal length is quite forgiving even if you set the focus area in the subject’s body for full-body shots. If I’m shooting handheld, I’d always focus on the eyes and reframe but all of those extra steps are really not necessary with Sony a7R III. The camera automatically looks for the eyes with precision accuracy. Just frame it and let the camera worry on the focusing, allowing you to focus on other pressing matters during the shoot. I actually reviewed all my shots if the camera really got the focus and impressively, no miss. Captured raw and edited in Lightroom and Photoshop CC. Sony a7R III, FE 24-105mm F4 G OSS The colors and tones are quite acceptable given the fact that I love the tones of Canon. It’s a bit different during editing though. The whites where I normally add during post-processing are not as much as responsive with the file I get from Sony a7R III compared to my Canon output. The highlight slider, however, did it for whites slider and worked very much as I expected it visually. I’m a tethered guy and it took me awhile to realize that Sony can’t work with Lightroom when tethered. You need to purchase Capture One for Sony to do the tethering. You also have an option to download its free Imaging Edge software which works well by the way. I tried to work with a hot folder in Lightroom to get the images live from Imaging Edge and it worked. I just don’t like the idea of extra step. I chose to work with Capture One for Sony during my tests. Another thing to consider when using a7R III is SD card. I don’t know but I thought that the fastest card in the market is still 95Mbps. Well, to get the most of this camera, you need the fastest card to write 80MB of raw file plus a mammoth 20MB-ish JPEG shooting at 10 frames per second. I was happy to know that the camera has a really large cache of up to 30 frames but when I filled it up, my slow SD card took years to finish writing. Full resolution of JPEG files after export from Raw is between 11-15MB per file. Sony a7R III, FE 24-105mm F4 G OSS Since you are dealing with very large files, you need to consider that it will put your computer to a test. RAM and scratch disk need to be maxed to work on the large files. I tried working on a 16-bit raw file and my Macbook 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 quickly raised an eyebrow. Few moments later, I started getting warning about scratch disk being full. You’d probably want to consider a fast workstation to digest the output of this camera. The battery was a non-issue. I didn’t finish the battery the whole day. In fact when I checked, it was still 100 percent full after a day’s session. It took me awhile to realize that the camera was actually charging the battery when tethered. But yes, I tried shooting the entire day, not tethered and it lasted a day with almost half the battery power left. There’s a lot of other features that I haven’t really dug in from this camera and I’m sure it’s made with the photographer in mind. I think that the Sony a7R III is as professional as it can get for the demanding commercial and advertising photographers. Keep on shooting everyone!   Albert Pedrosa is an advertising photographer who loves to shoot fashion. He teaches fashion photography and High-End Retouching at PCCI and maintains a studio in Malate, Manila for both commercial and creative works. Visit www.albertpedrosa.com; Instagram: @albertpedrosaph