Editor Note: This post was written by Sony Influencer Kyle Marquardt, all text and accompanying images have been used with permission.
Sticking to one style can be effective because it attracts people who appreciate that particular aesthetic. However, it often confines you to a specific category, making it difficult to explore beyond your usual approach.
Personally, I prefer to take photos in bright and sunny conditions, especially during the golden light of early morning and late evening. This lighting works well for the cheerful and dramatic images I enjoy creating.
Unfortunately, when the sun isn’t shining, I feel compelled to adopt a more subdued mood in my photography. I was reminded of this during a recent shoot, where the weather was consistently dreary, rainy, and windy, leaving me longing for that golden, crepuscular light.
I’m shooting with the Alpha 9 III, which is known for its global shutter, very good stabilization, and its incredible autofocus and tracking capabilities.
I set the camera to burst mode at 120 frames per second with a 1/500th of a second shutter speed, fast enough for action but slow enough to show movement with motion blur. With those settings, I had at least 90% of the images sharp and in focus.
I’m used to culling a lot of photos because I shoot and record more images than I need, just to be safe. But pre-shooting is a spectacular feature because I can indiscriminately start taking photos of everything that is moving, or about to move, but only save the photos that are actually worth keeping.
I likely shot a hundred times more photos than I needed, but because only the best ones got saved to my memory card, I found that when I downloaded my photos, I only had the best sequences and fewer images to cull than usual.
Another way to stay organized when shooting in burst mode is to enable display as Group. On Sony cameras, it’s in the menu at: Playback>Playback Option> Display as Group>On
If, for example, I hold down my shutter and take hundreds of photos of one bird, but after I take another group of photos that’s way better. The camera will display each shutter press as 2 photo groups. With one click, I can go back to the first series and “Delete All in This Group” to remove them, keeping only the second burst of photos, which turned out much better. With this trick, fewer photos need to be downloaded, and less time is spent on the computer.
For that reason, I would say the A9 III is the action editor’s camera of choice. Editors love having options, and if a photographer were to submit photos shot at a rate only a slow-motion camera could capture, they could pick which fraction of a second has the best action for their purposes.
You might be guessing where I’m going with this: I can take photos and slow-motion video at the same time. The short, fast bursts I take can be exported by my photo editor or imported by video software as a sequence. In the past, I always had to decide whether what I was shooting was better for photos or for video, and for the first time, I never had to make that decision. Culling my photos was a quick affair; it just felt like I was playing a slow-motion video, and once I landed on a photo that I liked, I edited it like normal. If you try this, don’t forget to star or label the best shots so you can easily delete the photos you don’t need to save space.
With this little trip out to the wetland, I was shooting in a new way, in sub-optimal conditions, but still capturing sights that were a joy to see as photos, and engaging to see as video. Maybe next time my shutter finger is calling, I’ll be less likely to stay inside just because of a few clouds.
Thank you to the American Robin, Common Goldeneye, and Yellow-headed Blackbird for modelling in this session.
You can find more of Kyle Marquardt’s work on his Instagram channel