Ski Tour With The Sony Alpha A55

[Photo-John]

I chose the Sony Alpha A55 as the 2010 PhotographyREVIEW.com Camera Of The Year. The choice was mostly based on the A55's unique "transparent mirror" technology. The camera is sort of a hybrid of a digital SLR and a mirrorless system camera. Anyway, I've had one for review for a couple of months now and I'm wrapping up a review, which will be done very soon. This weekend I took it out on a really nice ski tour above Salt Lake City. It was my friend Greg's fiftieth birthday ski outing and we were blessed with 10+ inches of fresh snow overnight (plus the snow that fell the day before) and reasonably safe avalanche conditions. As far as variety goes this was a pretty good photo outing with a nice variety of scenery and lighting conditions. These photos were taken on the climb up.

[Photo-John]

Here are a couple landscape shots taken from the trail. These are pretty unique views since you have to work so hard to get them. One is looking up Little Cottonwood Canyon at Snowbird ski resort and the other is looking down the canyon and over Salt Lake City.

[Photo-John]

Like I said, we had 10+ inches of fresh overnight snow on top of a bunch that fell the day before. It was better than any of us expected and Greg celebrated by attacking it

These are both cropped a fair amount and pushed hard in Lightroom and Photoshop to pull out snow detail. I don't care what camera you're using, overcast skies make it really tough to get snow snow detail. Shooting RAW with a good camera ensures you've got plenty of data to work with though. Then it's just a matter of squeezing the detail out of your files. For these I used Lightroom's Recovery tool and masked curves and levels adjustment layers in Photoshop to bring out the snow detail. Without that extra effort the snow would either be blown out white or mucky gray. Since I shot RAW and exposed to hold the highlights, I had plenty of detail to work with.

I shot all my action photos on this tour with the A55's continuous auto focus. Timing and framing are important with ski photos and continuous auto focus and high speed burst (6 FPS on the A55) allow me to get a bunch of shots and choose the best. The A55's auto focus worked great, although the EVF (electronic viewfinder) blacks out during bursts and that made it hard to keep my skiers in the frame.

[Photo-John]

Sometimes you see stuff in your photos that you didn't catch when it happened. In this photo you can clearly see that Zach nearly lost it here. Too bad - it big powder yard sale would have made an awesome photo

[Photo-John]

Here's a telephoto shot of the slope we skied, taken on our way up. Pretty, huh? Note the small old avalanche on the upper left side of the photo . I skied right over that

I will upload a larger version of this one to my member gallery. I think it's a good image quality sample. It looks super clean.

[Anbesol]

Ski, Utah!

Awesome stuff man, love the trails on your last.

[Photo-John]

Ski, Utah!

Awesome stuff man, love the trails on your last.

Glad you like those photos. That was a good day. And yes, those tracks were enticing. I shot that photo on the way up. Those tracks sucked us in and we ended up skiing that shot instead of what we'd originally planned

[NoKnees]

Nice tour John. Thanks for sharing, and keeping the interest in that camera alive... It seems to really be hanging in there as a solid performer... Can't wait to see what the improvements are for the EVF when the a77 hits the market later this year...

And yes, the apparent details in that last shot (from what I can tell in the small version) make it poster worthy... Would be a great big print..

[Photo-John]

Nice tour John. Thanks for sharing, and keeping the interest in that camera alive... It seems to really be hanging in there as a solid performer... Can't wait to see what the improvements are for the EVF when the a77 hits the market later this year...

Yeah, I'm curious to see if they can solve the EVF blackout problem. If they can, the one major problem I have with this camera will be eliminated. Other than that, it's a serious all-around performer.

And yes, the apparent details in that last shot (from what I can tell in the small version) make it poster worthy... Would be a great big print..

Do you mean the last photo of the tracks on the slope or the photo of Zach almost crashing?

[NoKnees]

The photo of the tracks.... Nice, clean, good lighting.... I like my eye wondering through it, picking different lines to ride... It's just relaxing to look at.. Nothing in motion, but the curves of the tracks make me feel motion as I imagine riding through the snow... I guess it's just a photo I can relate to... Something I could look at more than once and daydream about..