Recommended settings Sony a7RIV

When you look out there, you can find many landscape and wildlife photographers who tell you about their settings of the a7RIII or a7RIV. But their way of working is so different from mine that I felt the need to talk about my custom settings. My camera never sits on a tripod. And my subjects are moving. No crazy movements, but they won't rest still like a building. And I move around a lot, too, to find a nice angle and perspective for my shot.

Therefore I set the camera on AF-C, the continous autofocus, pretty much all the time. Only when it gets dark (after sunset), I would switch to AF-S, because this allows the Sony to find focus more easily. This also means, I shoot with autofocus all the time. The manual focus is amazing on the Sony. With zooming in on your focus point and supporting you with focus peaking (I set it to red color).

For me, the autofocus support of Sony was the reason why I upgraded the camera. It already was very good in the mark II model. But in the past four years, Sony has really pushed things forward. And the new capabilities of the camera are amazing. There are yet more focus point available, phase af (over contrast af) is now covering almost the complete field of view and face recognition has become much much better. This also means, you can more easily use an aperture around f/9 to f/11 while in the past the focus was pumping a lot on smaller apertures. I prefer to shoot wide open, but especially when you're outside, it does not make sense to blur the backgrounds too much. So, I go with f/5.6 to f/8 more often.

Even though autofocus is awesome, please never trust the marketing material. Sony nails the focus very often. But when someone tells you, e.g. 80 shots were taken and they were all perfectly sharp, you may question the testing environment and be reminded, it could just be a marketing stunt. And this is not necessary at all, because the autofocus system is the best I ever worked with. Like always, things work best when you have enough light available. The darker it gets, the more difficult it is for any camera to focus.

For the first time, I could set the camera to use all focus points available (setting wide) and most of the time, the a7RIV would focus on a face. But I don't want to give all control to the camera yet. So, I use a medium or large focus spot and move it with the joystick to the face area (and love that I can move it diagonal as well).

Then the a7RIV is taking over by looking for an eye or focussing on the head if the eyes are not recognized because they are closed or partly hidden by hair. This works very well. What I also really like is that I can choose to priorize on left or right eye. Humans have two different eyes and not alway the closer eye to the camera is the one that speaks. Sony focuses on your preference.

Not so well described in the manual: Menu 1, page 6. You can change af spots depending on the orientation of the camera. This basically means, you have one focus spot for landscape, one for portrait orientation and can move them around seperately.

There are far more things you can do with the camera. It is a superb machine for photographing stills. You have a focus magnifier in AF-S that allows you to shift a cross-hair pointer to select your focus. And then there's the pixelshift mode that shifts the sensor by a pixel (ore even half pixel) to create a larger image with more realistic color and resolution. This is amazing, but unfortunately a function I don't need for my type of work.

When photographing (not filming), I don't use the touch screen. Shooting while looking through the viewfinder helps to control the camera better and even though, there's steady shot build in, it's a good idea to concentrate on holding the camera right.