Gawk at this Sony A99 footage of Aurora and Ice over Iceland

Posted on 28. Nov, 2012 by planetmitch

The Sony A99 shines with this video of aurora and ice over Iceland in the hands of Enrique Pacheco. Enrique has submitted other stuff to planet5D in the past (see this video!) and he’s also leading an adventure to Iceland in March 2013 if you’re interested!

And what are his thoughts? Here’s a summary:

The Sony A99 has a full frame sensor and a resolution of 24mpx which provides great picture quality and loo noise level. Again, for me the precedent and I think the quality standard today is the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. The question for me was whether the Sony A99 was going to be able to replace my veteran 5DII.

After this two-week trip in which I have performed thousands of shots in all conditions, I can say without doubt that the A99 has everything I need, and it won the right to stay in my backpack as “A-Camera”

In both image sharpness and noise level, two of the most important things in my work, the Sony A99 shows great performance, matching much more expensive cameras. In the color representation Sony did a great job, improving by far predecessor models as A77, which I tested a few months ago.

Sony A99 Iceland Expedition

More from Enrique on the Sony A99

In his article on the Sony A99, Enrique covers quite a few items about the A99 DSLR that concern many traditional HDSLR users – like the EVF, translucent mirror, menus, video and more!

Electronic viewfinder:
The EVF was something that scared me a bit if I’m honest. After many years looking trough an optical viewfinder, like many of you, I was not 100% sure about the change. But the EVF of the Sony A99 with its high clarity and sharpness has convinced me. Maybe if you only do photography could be more difficult to adapt, but in my case, doing a lot of video and time-lapse, the optical viewfinder does not make sense any more. When recording video is blocked, and when you make time-lapse, the stroke of the mirror causes trepidation especially in long exposures, so that you always use the camera in live-view, which is the same as not having the viewfinder and mirror. With this EVF, you can still use the camera at eye level while you shoot video, and also have the screen off, saving battery. Also, and this is very important, we have the histogram, level, and other information, which is not available in optical viewfinder.

Perhaps the only difficulty that I have encountered has been framing in total darkness, photographing aurora borealis, in these cases it is quite difficult.

What do you think?

I thought it looked pretty good – but I’ve never been to Iceland so I don’t know

It seems to have some good dynamic range and there wasn’t any moire that I could see, but we didn’t see any human patterns either.

(cover photo credit: snap from the video)

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