Playing sports aside, my favorite hobby as a kid was photographing them. My father even converted our laundry room into a darkroom. We would go to hockey games, football games or golf tournaments, use up a roll of film, and then come back home and develop it. The next night, we would review the negatives on the enlarger and see what gems we captured. My only problem was that our old Konica camera was never fast enough to really freeze fast action from close in.
If only I’d had Sony’s α9 CMOS sensor full frame mirrorless digital camera back then. Perhaps I could have been a professional sports photographer. Seriously. I recently had the opportunity to test out this new camera for two weeks. It’s billed as being ideal for sports and wildlife photography. And it has a silent shutter on it, so I could be on the golf course and not disturb golfers while capturing their swings.
In my testing, I took it to some local kids’ football games as well as to the tennis court. I was armed with the body, as well as a professional grade telephoto lens. The football games were at night, and I set up my tripod up above the field and at a distance -- simulating the view and proximity a fan might shoot a game from the upper deck of a stadium. At 20 frames per second of continuous shooting -- thanks to the high-speed BIONZ X image processing engine -- the images I got were nothing short of spectacular. Everything crystal clear. I was able to read the writing on the ball while it was in mid-air -- again taken at night in a poorly lit park. What impressed me most was how fast the auto-focus was -- no matter how I panned the camera, focus seemed intuitive and instantaneous. The company claims the auto-focus system provides a focus point coverage over 93 percent of the image area.
On the tennis court, I was able to photograph my daughter smashing serve after serve. When I showed the photos to people, many of them instantly assumed I had hired a professional to take the pictures. As expected, she and her grimace at the point of impact showed up perfectly crisp in the foreground while the background was gracefully blurred -- it was perfect depth of field to make a strong impact on a sports photo. Shutter speed can operate at up to 1/32,000 of a second. Color was vibrant, as well.
I admit that being used to Canon cameras, I experienced a small learning curve in using the Sony. But nothing that I couldn’t reference on the company website, see in a YouTube video, or figure out on my own.
Photos come out at 24.2 megapixels, and the camera of course lets you choose between various formats and resolution. It features a 5-axis image stabilization with an effectiveness equivalent to 5.0-stop slower shutter speed. I also tried the video mode in high-resolution 4K mode, and the results looked great.
This camera has reinvigorated the hobby for me. At $4,500, it is an investment no doubt. But the joy it will return may be priceless.
