For nearly a quarter century, I’ve tested every digital camera that crossed my path to see how well it handled infrared photography. Some didn’t pass muster, like my beloved Minolta Dimage A1. Its APO zoom lens’s optical design and internal coatings threw a bright “hot spot” into every IR photo. And the problem would have persisted even if I removed the camera’s “hot mirror” to allow hand-held infrared shooting.
This camera will teach you the meaning of tough love. It has a very low tolerance for shooting outside of its comfort zone and is quick to remind you of its limitations. Many of the online reviews will quickly point out its flaws and they aren’t necessarily wrong. Let’s start with those flaws and my “real world” experience.
Battery life? Yes, as the reviews will tell you it’s terrible. I usually have at least four batteries on me when I take this camera out. On the bright side the battery is shared with the Ricoh GR digital which I already owned and had plenty of spares.
The screen? Yes, that’s bad as well. It’s only useful for composing and that’s also a real challenge in bright daylight. No Chimping here folks. What you see on the screen is not an accurate representation of what you actually captured.
Or, twenty rolls of Ektachrome and the lies we tell ourselves. Or, how to be wrong. Preliminaries Why this mad thing? I’m a photographer who uses film and makes prints in a darkroom: I like to make things which live on bits of paper, not screens. And of course I also like slightly impractical tools, …
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Film has always been the standard I measure against on the quality and color of digital imagery. The texture of grain with higher ISO, the colors rendered from the film — these are the characteristics I want my photos to take on. If you shoot RAW with digital cameras you get what most call the “digital negative”. This RAW file has all the data stuffed into it with no compression. The result is a larger image that you can fine tune more precisely.
Me and my family recently spent a week driving around North Wales in my wife’s van. Me being me, I wanted to take a lot of photos. I also took a lot of cameras. 3 more than I actually used – which is unusual for me. The ones I did use were a Hasselblad SWC and a Pentax 110 auto film cameras, and the subject of this article, a Sony ZV-1 compact digital.
The Sony ZV-1 is punted by the brand as a “vloggers camera” – as such, it is supposedly designed more for video blogging, or in simple terms selfie-video. In fact, shooting video is what I bought it for, though not for me, but for work, and not for pointing at myself. As a creative agency producing a lot of video content our team has greatly expanded in the last year. We’ve bought some new kit too. A couple of new lenses, a drone and this ZV-1 have increased our capabilities. The Sony ZV-1 was specifically bought to capture little off the cuff mini-interviews at events. It’s small size makes for a camera that isn’t as threatening to people we point it at, meaning we can get little snippets and sound bites out of more nervous people as well as capturing people who have less time etc. We also bought it because unlike our bigger cameras which top out at 100fps for 1/4 speed slow motion, the Sony ZV-1 does 1000fps for when we want to capture something much more fast moving etc.
Of course, before I could give it to the team, I felt I needed to try it first. In short, I decided to take it on holiday. Not for video, I should add – though I did take a few slow-mo clips that I’ll never likely do anything with – but for snaps.
