I’m really excited to share this shoot I did back in August with the Japanese running and compression brand, C3Fit, and Boulder advertising firm Mondo Inc. Shiro Hatori was the CD and Emily Choi, the Alpine Stylist, styled the shoot.
We shot around Denver’s Confluence Park and Lodo, then went up into Clear Creek to get some mountain shots. We had a great team, with awesome models and, even though it was a very long day, we had a fantastic time on the shoot.
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Asking the people I met around Flagstaff, I asked for some awesome locations to shoot different sports. Someone suggested Pumphouse Wash as a nice place to shoot yoga, but on my last day in Flagstaff, I was set to shoot with Missy Verhaeghe, a runner. I didn’t know what to expect, but we found the “trail” after doing a few u-turns, not realizing you park at a bridge and just climb down to the streambed. The wash is a tight canyon, with featured sandstone walls 50 feet or less apart. We walked past a few fun looking sport climbing routes that would be awesome to go back and try.
Flagstaff hadn’t received any precipitation since September, so the wash was completely dry. I was also expecting a bluebird day, but we were surprised with clouds giving us pretty flat light, which gave us a different feel.
Still getting used to my Sony A7RIII, I was super impressed by the autofocus’s ability to keep focus. The Sigma 35 does the best of all my non-Sony lenses, with the Sigma adapter, but the Sony 85mm 1.8 really showed it’s crazy abilities with Missy jumping between the rocks.
Click on an image to see the gallery in a lightbox.
Thank you Missy, you were awesome for withstanding the cold!
One of the best features on the Sony A7RIII is the Eye AF, an autofocus mode that prioritizes the human eye. The camera’s focus tracks the subject’s eye, keeping the most important thing in the image sharp. I’d had my new camera for over two weeks and hadn’t figured out (or looked up) how to turn this feature on. I had flipped through the menu countless times and hadn’t seen it as an option. I thought that the reason it wasn’t working was I was using Canon lenses with the Sigma adapter, which was doing an alright job at auto focusing, but would regularly miss the eye as the focal point. I bought the Sony 85mm 1.8 to see if it would work with a native Sony lens, but still, no Eye AF. To Google I went. Sony had, for some reason, buried this amazing feature in the custom buttons menu – you have to assign it to one of the many customizable buttons.
Once I figured this out, I wanted to try it out. I got Israeli runner, Maor Tiyouri, to come out to a nearby trail to run, stop, go back, and run the same 100 feet for an hour. I tried out the Sony 85mm f/1.8 as well as the Sigma Art 35mm f/1.4 with the Sigma MC-11 adapter. I was blown away! The Eye AF tracked her movement, getting me far better results than what I’d had with the normal autofocus.
Sigma 35mm f/1.4, f/2.8, 1/800th & ISO 400
Sigma 35mm f/1.4, f/2.8, 1/800th & ISO 400
I would run alongside her, holding the camera out, bumping along, and even with all that movement the camera would recognize Maor’s eye and lock on. Shooting portraits were a breeze, I didn’t have to move the focal point to probably be about on her eye. The little green square danced around her eyes, chiming that it was focused the entire time. While running, of course, it missed some – I’m not mad, I just impressed with what it did get in focus.
Sigma 35mm f/1.4, f/2.8, 1/800th & ISO 400
Sigma 35mm f/1.4, f/2.8, 1/800th & ISO 400
Sigma 35mm f/1.4, f/2thoroughly & ISO 400
The sun dropped behind the mountains far earlier than I was expecting, cutting our photoshoot short. I was thouroughly happy with my new camera, but I wanted to test one lens that had performed pretty terribly on my first shoot, the Canon 70-200mm F/2.8. This lens refuses to focus in the least bit on my Sony A6300 with either the Metabones or Sigma adapters. My initial test with A7RIII and the Sigma adapter was less than inspiring, searching more than finding focus. I threw the big Canon lens on the small Sony body not expecting much better performance, but it found focus! The green square told me Maor’s eye was sharp. When she was standing for a portrait, only making small movements, it never searched once. I tried to test it with Continuous Focus, where it should track movement of the subject in any direction, with her running at me. With her a good distance away, at 200mm I could see her head to toe with a bit of room on each end, it tracked her for the first couple steps, then lost it completely as she drew closer. It’s not ideal, but it’s definitely more usable that I previously thought.
Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 125mm, f/2.8, 1/640th & ISO 400
Pearl District, Portland, Oregon
As we were leaving I saw these stairs and wanted to shoot Whitney on them. This guy, Mathew, ran up the stairs past us and stopped at the top to take a breather. I asked him to join the shot, and thankfully he obliged! Awesome to have the perfect model just run into your shoot.
