New to photography
 

noticed there's no discussion thread here,

just recently got into photography and I was wondering if you guys can share some tips with me.
( got an a7r for a good price and a f2.8 35mm lens to start ):fullofwin:


I noticed lightroom is now subscription based, so what other software do you guys use?

Any tips are appreciated, currently learning off youtube videos and trying to shoot as much as possible, haven't done any editing yet since the photos look terrible.

assuming you will take quite a bit of landscapes since you opted for the 'resolution' variant of the a7

learn to use focus-peaking

well the reason why i went for an a7r was because of the price, resale, and how small it is.. didnt think about resolution..

the person that i bought my camera from showed me how to use the focus peaking slightly - still trying to get a hand of it..

I'm trying to learn city scapes mostly

Congrat's! Welcome to the club! Time for another photo-meet!

welcome, spend more time studying composition and most importantly, lighting. Camera doesn't really matter, just don't fall into the false mindset that camera/software will make a huge difference in your photography. I've shot some campaigns with an iphone camera and VSCO before lol! Gluck!

played around with focus peaking, it really helps to see what im focusing with now.

I'm sorta having trouble manual focusing still. When I'm manually focusing on the lens, I can adjust the square to the position that I want it to focus to. However, Whenever I press the center button below DISP, the square is at a different position.
What my question is, which function is the correct way to manually focus?

Also, I'd like to know what some of your settings are when taking photos (at night, day-time, moving objects, etc)

Thanks!

your center button is probably set to something else...check the menus you can customize it

if your's is set up similar to mine, the square you see in MF is not a focus point, it's a magnifier zoomed into either 5x or 10x so you can further fine-tune the focus for critical work as focus peaking isn't perfect...but that's almost pixel-peeping anal ocd level

there is no one setting fits all, it depends on your lens too...understand the exposure triangle and you just have to trial and error. Most lenses in Sony system seem to have the sharpness sweetspot in f8-11

It's all lighting!
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I want to downgrade all my pro gear and try mirrorless. So much easier to handle... from what it seams