Bay Images Blog – Photography and travel information by Stephen Bay

Sony A7RII Custom Settings

January 19, 2016 By Stephen Leave a Comment

One of the strong points for the Sony A7RII camera is that many buttons and settings are customizable. Here’s how I’ve setup my camera:

Custom Buttons
Control Wheel: Not Set (too easy to accidentally hit)
C1: White Balance
C2: ISO
C3: Eye AF
C4: AF/MF Ctrl Toggle
Center Button: Focus Magnifier
Left Button: Drive Mode
Right Button: Focus Area
Down Button: Focus Settings
AEL Button: AF On (I use back button focus)
AF/MF Button: AF/MF Ctrl Toggle
Focus Hold Button: Focus Hold

Function Menu – Fn Button
U1: SteadyShot
U2: Focus Mode
U3: Flash Comp
U4: Flash Mode
U5: Smile/Face Detect
U6: Grid Line

L1: SteadyShot Focal Length
L2: Metering Mode
L3: Selftimer during bracket
L4: Silent Shooting
L5: ISO Auto Min SS (I usually use the fast setting)
L6: Zebra

Other Menu Settings
Raw File Type: Compressed
DRO/Auto HDR: Off
Long Exposure NR: Off
Zebra: 100+
Peaking Level: Low
Pre-AF: Off
Release w/o Card: Off
Priority Set in AF-S: Release
Priority Set in AF-C: Balanced Emphasis
AF w/ shutter: Off
Remote Ctrl: On
Copyright Info: (C) Stephen Bay

Traveler’s Photo Guide

December 19, 2015 By Stephen Leave a Comment

I’m starting up a new blog at travelersphotoguide.com. I’ll be populating this site with articles highlighting some of my favorite locations to visit. In the articles you’ll find visiting information, hi-res photos, and tips for the travel photographer.

Sony A7R II News, Links, & FAQs

June 10, 2015 By Stephen Leave a Comment

Last Updated July 2, 2015 I’m very excited about this camera and I’m almost certainly going to switch to Sony from my Canon setup when it becomes available. I’ll keep updating this post as new information about the camera comes out. Pricing & Availability Retail cost $3200 Available in August Preorders from B&H starting June…

Lightroom 6 / CC Performance Benchmarks

May 7, 2015 By Stephen Leave a Comment

With the release of Lightroom 6 / CC, there has been a lot of hype about the performance speedups in image rendering. Being curious, I ran a few tests to see how much LR6/CC may have improved for my own workflow. Summary Processing and exporting from raw files is significantly faster in LR 6/CC (about…

Lightroom 5 vs 6/CC: Compute image hashes with plugin

Making a Mobile Friendly Photography Website

April 6, 2015 By Stephen Leave a Comment

Back in February, Google announced that they were going to use mobile friendliness as a ranking factor for websites: Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Basically…

Why Images Appear Blurry on Retina and Hi-DPI Screens

December 23, 2014 By Stephen 3 Comments

When I moved my main machine to a retina Macbook Pro, I was surprised to notice that the screen made my website images appear blurry. I had thought image sharpness would stay the same (or improve) since the physical resolution of the screen was much higher. I also thought that any resampling by the browser…

Safari, Chrome, and Preview (Mac native viewer) of non-retina images on a retina display.

OWC ThunderBay 4 Thunderbolt Enclosure Review

July 2, 2014 By Stephen 3 Comments

The OWC ThunderBay 4 is a Thunderbolt 2 hard disk enclosure that holds up to 4 drives. The enclosure does not have hardware RAID support (although this is possible with software) and the disks appear individually to the operating system. In other words this is a JBOD (“just a bunch of disks”) enclosure. Note that…

Serendipity at Santa Monica Beach

April 30, 2014 By Stephen Leave a Comment

I normally think about photography in terms of making pictures, where one carefully plans out the composition and light, but sometimes you just get lucky and a photo just appears in front of your camera. For this picture, I had setup on Santa Monica beach with the intention of photographing the pier and ferris wheel…

Couple at walking at sunset on Santa Monica beach.

Last Night in Prague

April 19, 2014 By Stephen Leave a Comment

I took this photo on my last night in Prague. Before visiting the city, I came up with a shooting list and I knew that I want to create some iconic images of Prague’s bridges. I had already shot the Charles bridge but hadn’t yet seen a good location where I could have multiple bridges…