The Picture Desk: Low light shooting with the A35

I mentioned to a guy at work that I was looking for a game to shoot to try out a new camera I was working with, the A35 Alpha from Sony. His son was playing later in the week at 6pm. Usually when you shoot at this time of the day, the light is great, with a nice direction and colour. This night was dull and it looked like rain.

Even thought it wasn't late I had to shoot the first half at ISO 3200 just to get the shutter speed above 1/1000 second.

In the second half it got darker yet and I had to push the ISO up to 6400. I've included a number of images so you can get the feel for the camera at these high ISO settings.

This first shot is at ISO 3200. It has a bit of a crop.

This shot is at ISO 6400 and is full frame, uncropped.

The rest of the images are cropped a fair bit, and are at ISO 6400.

These next three shots were possible because the camera has such fast focus and frames per second. The camera would shoot 12 frames before the buffer was full. Then it would miss one frame, then shoot another two. It continued like this until I stopped shooting, then the buffer would clear right up. You can get a lot of images out of a single play, and most of them are sharp. These three are cropped and at ISO 6400.