We Will Bask In The Sun's Glow
June 13, 2020
We don’t post a lot of portraits on here1, but every once in a while we get the urge to pull out our beloved FE 85mm f/1.4 and have a bit of fun…
We have a lot of love for smaller formats such as M4/3 and APS-C for a great many reasons, not least of which are their much smaller travel-friendly sizes and the availablity of tiny fast wide primes (much thanks to Sigma and Pana-Leica) that make them much more useful for portraiture.
However, at the end of the day, when looking at the results out of a FF solution such as our Sony A7RIV + 85mm f/1.4 GM it’s clear there’s still a large gulf in performance between APS-C/M43 and FF for certain kinds of work and aesthetics.2
Now we just need to remind ourselves of this when bemoaning all the extra weight and size3 our FF kit takes up when packing our luggage4…
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We tend to reserve that for our other sites. ↩
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Because regardless of the fast primes for smaller formats, aperture equivalency is a real thing. ↩
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We should also stop and remind ourselves we used to seriously haul around a Canon 1DXmII + EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II and EF 85mm f/1.2L II and god knows how many more kgs worth of other glass.5 ↩
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Packing a FF 3-lens portrait setup (A7R/A9 + 24mm, 50mm, 85mm f/1.4 lenses) used to be pretty incompatible with our 1-bag travel philosophy, but these days given that we’ve reduced our total 1-bag setup (including a 3-lens APS-C portrait setup) to less than 10kg and 22L, we’re able to make a 1-bag setup work with a FF 3-lens setup in a 30L-ish bag6, still very well within international carry-on limitations (though the weight starts to be an issue with intra-european carriers). ↩
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Our arms were much more toned in those days…. ↩
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The issue is that the packing doesn’t scale absolutely linearly - when you’re at 22l-ish, your travel bag can also double comfortably as your EDC daypack at your destination. When you jump up to 30L (to accommodate the extra space/weight taken by the FF setup) then the bag generally is a bit too big to work as an EDC daypack at the destination, so then you need to pack an extra portable daypack which also takes up extra space in the pack, yadda yadda.7 ↩
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Okay no more footnotes inside of footnotes, we promise. ↩
