Photo

    2. “Grandmother’s tale”. Automatic night mode without filters use, with IR-lighting switched on.

    To obtain such photo in a standard film or usual matrix, I would have to invent a means of making a diffused fill illumination and drawing light imitating the candlelight, and then in any case I would have to shoot the candle singly and introduce it into the frame by means of photoshop. At that I would hardly succeed in obtaining a real reportage portrait. The child isn’t an actor, he could hardly stay indifferent to the technical preparations. I put up with the large grain, it was impossible to elude it in that particular case. I began to read the camera manual anew in search of information about shooting infrared landscapes. However I came to the conclusion that Japanese engineers hadn’t planned to joy us with a camera which could shoot in IR-mode at natural daylight illumination. They were interested in the night shooting only.
Actual sensitivity of the camera in its both night modes isn’t indicated in the manual. I always set 64 ASA in the menu, in actual fact it is not less than 800 ASA. However this Sony camera can’t work properly with exposure less than 1/30 of a second; longer exposures are well possible. It’s necessary to activate P mode which is supplied with exposure corrections. Attempts to shoot indoors with electric lighting switched on resulted in terrible overexposure. I tried hanging an Cokin adapter and neutral grey filters on the camera. After that, camera began to shoot with better quality. Exposure metering in IR-mode is excellent, but it’s rather difficult to control focusing: the picture in the monitor and viewfinder is blind and so grainy that I have to duplicate the shots sometimes in order to choose better-focused variants later on the computer monitor. When this Sony camera lacks lighting, it starts to make larger grains in the pictures. I delete such pictures at once. This is spoilage. I learnt in the course of time to define these shots still while shooting and reduce the number of filters on the lens.