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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I put a 90mm prime [1] on my Sony, set it to aperture priority, put the strap over someone's head and deputize them to get headshots ("frame it up with the viewfinder and push the button") and they do OK so long as the light is predictable. I wish I could tell the auto mode to let the ISO go higher than it will because I do noise reduction in developing such that there is no real quality loss at 6400.

[1] takes lovely portraits and no focus to deal with

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Viltrox, Sirui, Sony themselves, and Samyang have all kicked out really nice 85mm fast primes. $600 down to $400, listed in decreasing weight order (down to 270g!). Yes, whatever you have: it's a massive amount of gear to carry compared to a phone. But what results!

The past 2-4 years have been amazing for lenses: Sony's willingness to let other people make lenses has been an amazing win for photography.

What has changed is the last four years is that Chinese and Korean lens makers have caught up in a big way, and are now producing excellent optics at a fraction of the price with AF and weather sealing (as of now, primes only). For example, the Viltrox Lab and Pro series, or the Samyang 135/1.8. The other Chinese manufacturers are a cut below.

Also, Sigma and Tamron (both Japanese) are putting out more higher quality lenses compared to a decade back. With optical quality rivaling Sony's own G Master series and the Zeissen.

I would love to do: - set aperture priority (fully open for most cases) - set shutter speed to AUTO with a limit (never open for longer than 1/100 s) - set ISO to AUTO with a limit (never go above 6400)

If there is insufficient light, then by all means, the camera should adjust the shutter speed past the limit, but not until it has used all the available "reasonable" ISO range.

It's a shame I have to wrestle my Sony a6400 to get something even remotely close to this.

My entire photography career I was incredibly frustrated that there was no good way to change the minimum shutter speed in aperture priority.

Sure, I could go into a menu and change it from the range of 1/60 or a second to 1/200th (or 1/250th, depending on the camera), but that was it. This is on Nikon, btw.

But yeah, give me more options damnit. It’s something that comes up so frequently when shooting that it blows my mind it’s not an option.

On Sony, one can use ISOAutoMinSs in aperture priority mode to influence the shutter speed https://helpguide.sony.net/ilc/1540/v1/en/contents/TP0000829...

Does this help? https://old.reddit.com/r/SonyAlpha/comments/1dzr9oy/psa_mini...

I love the idea of that 90mm prime.

But usually when I have passers-by take photos, the context is that we are posing in front of a church in Europe or something, and space can be limited.

I can't very well ask people to take a photo and but first to take 20 paces back and then do a crouch!

My wife wants to see our shoes as well as the church spires in the same photo. Maybe a 35mm or even 28mm would work well in our case.

Definitely thinking of getting another prime but a ‘normal’ one with autofocus doesn’t really do anything I can’t with my zooms, I like 7artisans primes and might get one that is crazy wide but those are manual focus and take more skill —- I was so happy to get home and see I nailed this one

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114042752203552070

I find that photos from a prime look better in some undefinable way. Maybe it's because there's more light coming through, or maybe it's just easier for them to make a prime with great optics than a zoom with great optics.

I shoot on manual with auto-ISO straight to JPG (I don't have time for RAW editing), so my prime photos tend to have lower ISO's and I end up with a faster shutter.

I’m suspicious that a lot of the apparent inherent benefit of a prime lens is that it can’t zoom, which forces the person holding it to think a little bit more about composition.

It would be an amusing experiment to compare a prime lens to a zoom lens that it somehow fixed to the same focal length. Maybe level the playing field a little bit by applying distortion correction to both lenses.

There's measurements to support your feeling that primes are better than zooms: https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2019/11/stopping-down-some-... and https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2017/02/things-you-didnt-wa...

There’s a lot more to it, but I attribute a lot of ‘better in some way’ to microcontrast followed by how the lens handles the transition to out of focus detail.

Yeah, back when I had a Canon my only lens was a wide angle prime. I really like that Sony 90mm prime, DxO says it is Sony's best lens and I think it is.

Ever since I started shooting sports indoors (often w/ that 90mm prime or a 135mm prime) and started to depend on noise reduction I process everything with DxO and tend to use a lot of sharpening and color grading. One day I went out with the kit lens by accident and set the aperture really small and developed the "Monkey Run Style" for hyperrealistic landscapes that look like they were shot with a weird Soviet camera.

The lens I walk around with the most and usually photograph runners with is the Tamron 28-200 which is super-versatile for events and just walking around, I used it for the last two albums here

https://www.yogile.com/537458/all

but for the Forest Frolic I used my 16-35mm Zeiss but it was tough because it was raining heavily -- I was lucky to have another volunteer who held an umbrella for me, but I couldn't lean in. The last one (Thom B) was not color graded because I'd had some bad experiences color grading sports when I got the color of the jersey wrong but now I use color grades that are less strong -- at Trackapalooza the greens just came out too strident and I had to bring them down.

To give you some idea of how powerful noise reduction is, this shot

https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3lv32zudu2c2d

was done in ISO 80,000 with that Tamron -- I wouldn't say it looks perfectly natural for a picture of cat that was not standing still in a room in a basement that is amazing.

Incredible, in the 90's I could barely take a picture of my dog in broad daylight, and it cost money for the film, and I had to wait forever to get the photos back, and then the dog was blurry.

BTW your yogile album is private.

See these

https://www.yogile.com/forest-frolic-2025#21m

https://www.yogile.com/trackapalooza-2025#21m

https://www.yogile.com/thom-b-2025#21m

I have no nostalgia for film, I could not afford to take 1500 film photos at a sports event -- even a photo like this which doesn't seem that remarkable

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114401857009398302

wouldn't have come out that good handheld with a 35mm back in the day.

All your points are true, but primes tend to have more character as well. I’m no optical engineer so I can’t speak as to why, but it seems like they have more choices on prime design than they do on zooms.

> I like 7artisans prime

Just got their 10mm M43 (~20mm equivalent) and it's doing a good job[0] - focus peaking on the OM helps a lot with manual focus and aged eyes.

[0] Excepting that it's still wide enough to capture your fingers when adjusting focus or aperture[1] or holding the lens.

[1] Which is the wrong way around to "normal" - clockwise should close the aperture, not open it!

Pro tip: 28mm on full frame (or equivalent) is exactly the same focal length as iPhone 1x ;)

On many Sony models, you can set the camera to aperture priority instead of auto, set ISO to Auto ISO, and then change the max ISO to whatever you want; this is what I do in your situation.

If I set aperture priority to "maximum possible light in", I often have an issue that when there is insufficient light, the camera decreases shutter speed instead of cranking up the ISO (to the set upper limit), which would be much more desireable. This results in blurry images due to the longer exposure. I would much more prefer a grainy image over a blurred one in this case.

Do you know if there is any option of setting a limit on shutter speed while in aperture mode?

(I understand I can go full manual, but that just doesn't allow for the same point-and-shoot experience in changing light conditions.)

Sony a6700 can. https://old.reddit.com/r/SonyAlpha/comments/1dzr9oy/psa_mini...

Yes, many cameras have a setting called "ISO Auto Min SS" which lets you set a focal length - minimum shutter speed multiplier.

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