Top 5 Features of Sony A7iii For Family Photographers

I’d been eyeing mirrorless cameras for years and in January I finally took the plunge and purchased the Sony A7iii with the Sigma MC-11 adapter. Coming from Canon 5DMiii, with a lot invested in lenses, I didn’t want to change out all my lenses right away, so the adapter was a good solution. I initially thought it would just be temporary, but it works so well and I am getting amazing results, I still haven’t purchased a single Sony mount lens…

I see people asking all the time about what camera they should upgrade to, and is mirrorless worth it…I’m here to tell you YES, mirrorless is AMAZING, and I LOVE my Sony A7iii for photographing families and newborn babies at home and outdoors.

This isn’t about all the techy details, there are tons of articles online about all those details. Instead, I’m going to focus on the features that help me shoot lifestyle family and newborn sessions better and with sharper results.

1 – AUTO EYE FOCUS

Kids running around like little hooligans? I don’t care, the auto eye focus on the Sony A7iii does an incredible job of tracking focus on the subject’s eyes. I’ve got the AEL button on the back of the camera programmed for auto-eye, and the AF-ON button as my regular back-button focus incase I don’t want to focus on an eye, or there’s no person in the picture. The auto eye focus continuously tracks the eye, so even if the kids are running around and jumping, the Sony A7iii does an awesome job of keeping focus. My ration of in-focus images has improved significantly ?

2 – ELECTRONIC VIEW FINDER

Mirrorless cameras come equipped with an Electronic View Finder which shows you your settings in action – live. So, if you’re underexposed or overexposed, you’ll see it before even taking a picture or checking your light meter. It’s really amazing to get to see your final image with the settings applied before even hitting the shutter and helps you work faster without ever needing to stop and check your images. LOVE IT!!!!

3 – SILENT MODE

I keep my camera set to silent – you can’t even hear ANYTHING, it’s totally silent. This is great when working with sleeping babies and is a wonderful feature for wedding and birth photographers too!

4 – LOW LIGHT CAPABILITIES

My Canon was great in low light, but the Sony A7iii is AMAZING. I can comfortably shoot at over 6000 ISO and know I will get usable images. As a natural light in-home photographer, this is really reassuring for me as I never know what type of light situation I’m walking into when I show up to a client’s home.

I recently had a shoot in a really dark, ground floor apartment on a rainy day, the lowest ISO used was 1200, and I went up to 8000 – 8000 is certainly not ideal, but it all worked out amazingly.

5 – RECALL CUSTOM HOLD

Recall Custom Hold is SO GOOD!!!! This feature allows you to program specific settings to a custom button on your camera (shoot mode, aperture, shutter speed, drive mode, ISO, focus mode, etc.) Once set up, you can revert to those settings with the click of one button. For example, since I shoot a lot of families, I have the C3 button set to Shutter Speed 500 and fast continuous shooting – so if I’m shooting a slower shutter with my drive mode set to single shot, and a child starts dancing or spinning and I want to capture it, I don’t need to go change those settings manually, I just hit the pre-programmed button on my camera and continue to shoot!

A lot of these features are available on other mirrorless cameras too, not just the Sony, although I have heard that Sony’s eye-tracking is better, I can’t confirm since I haven’t tried the other brands cameras to compare.

Are you thinking about switching to mirrorless too? What features are you most excited about and what’s holding you back from jumping in?