Best Sony FE Landscape Lenses for the Light Traveler and Hiker

User Characterization: Ordinary travel – by bike or car or plane -doesn’t prevent you from taking many of the lenses we have recommended here. But there’s one kind of travel which places serious demands on the weight of your equipment. Hiking for many days, taking your accomodation and food on your back. Or even (In the style that many European outdoor photography enthusiasts may be used to) walking through mountains going from refuge to refuge.

This is a kind of travel that takes you to amazing landscapes that you can’t access any other way. But also, every gram of lens is a millilitre of water you can’t carry, or a gram of food you can’t have. Travelling light through the land, keeping pack weight down, is by far the best way to do this. Outdoors people will spend a fortune to reduce the weight of their knife by ten grams, their tent by fifty grams and so on. Because we know it all adds up, and when it adds up it means less food or a less enjoyable and slower experience.

For some this means that it’s a little compact camera that goes with them on wilderness adventure. But what to take if we still want to do top notch serious landscape photography with our A7 series camera?

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Review: Kolari Ultra Thin Sensor Stack Modification

Cover glass from the Sony A7, A7II, Kolari version 2 mod, and Kolari Ultra-Thin mod (from Kolari’s website )

Most rangefinder lenses used on a Sony a7 series camera show some serious issues because of the rather thick filter stack in front of the sensor. There are two ways to deal with this. We have previously discussed the use of front filters to counter the induced field curvature. In this article Sebboh reviews another solution.

This is an extended use review of the Kolari Ultra Thin (UT, also sometimes referred to as version 4) sensor stack modification on a Sony A7. This modification removes the AA filter and IR cut filter from a stock Sony camera and replaces it with an ultra thin 0.2mm thick IR cut filter in order to attempt to provide similar levels of performance to the Leica M9 in dealing with the steep ray angles often produced by rangefinder lenses designed for film. I have shot a UT modified Sony A7 for 6 months now and can confirm that it dramatically improves performance with certain lenses (big thanks to Nehemiah for letting me use his lenses and cameras for the comparisons shown here). I will try to outline what kind of improvements can be expected here and what drawbacks there are to getting the conversion done.

Sony A7 Kolari UT | Carl Zeiss Contax G 21mm f/2.8 Biogon | f/11

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Sony FE landscape lenses – Part 1: Only the best is good enough

Introduction

Sony A7rII | Zeiss Loxia 21mm 2.8 | f/8.0 |

In this series we will explore sets of landscape lenses for different user types and at different price points. We are starting with the best performing FE lenses money can buy. The other parts will be released soon.

  1. Only the best is good enough
  2. The light traveler and hiker 
  3. The casual landscape photographer  
  4. The poor student 

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Quick Review: Peak Design Anchor Links

Peak Design Anchor Links
Peak Design Anchor Links

There is one big issue with neck- or wrist straps: Because it takes several minutes to change a strap most people have just one which doesn’t work too well for many scenarios. The Peak Design Anchor Links fix this issue. In this quick review you learn why they have become an integral part of the team’s kit.

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