Planned Cake

Right after I got my Sony Alpha NEX-5 with Sony E 16mm F2.8 pancake lens, Azrul brought me to this fantastic Yong Tau Fu restaurant in Pudu!

I was loving the wide angle, able to capture more at close range. It also helped that the camera was so small and, surprisingly, quiet (or at least nobody seemed to care that they were being shot), even though I could hear the shutter.

16mm on the NEX-5’s APS-C-sized sensor meant 24mm on full-frame 35mm format, which was pretty darn wide! All I had to do to accentuate this was to tilt upwards to make use of perspective distortion (which is never a fault of the lens, but the camera operator…)

A thing to note though with wide-angle lenses – if you don’t frame properly, you are going to get unwanted perspective distortion and converging lines. Here, I wasn’t pointing straight on, so the lines on top were slanted.

I could just swing it and take a quick grab, knowing it will have the subject somewhere in the frame!

This is Auto HDR mode, set to the maximum – 6 EV. It takes one shot at -3 EV, one shot at 0 EV, and one shot at +3 EV, and merges them intelligently. Obviously though, it doesn’t work so well for moving subjects!

The Sony Alpha 450/500/550 had this too, but with only two frames – and one saving grace of how it’s done on the NEX-3/5 is that it also saves the 0 EV exposure so you can use it as a regular picture. Unfortunately though, you cannot activate this when the camera is set to shoot RAW or RAW+JPEG.