Street Photography on a Rainy Night with Sony 50mm F_1.2 G MASTER _ Great for a7 IV a1 a7III a7R.

South Korea is an amazing place for street photography, especially at night. It's actually one of the perfect places to get that modern, concrete, jungle city vibes. Despite the current COVID-19 pandemic, the country's done a great job early on keeping the cases low, allowing locals to continue living their day-to-day lives with modern social restrictions. Now of course, I'm comparing this to LA before the availability of the vaccine. We sort of became a ghost town for a while, so it was a nice change of pace What often stuck out to me in South Korea was the sense of camaraderie. Every night, you'll find the streets packed with friends hanging out, drinking, barbecuing. You'll also find lots of couples throughout the day strolling along the streets on a date, oftentimes wearing matching outfits. Even individuals are unique. They have their own personal style and expression, so you'll always find something interesting to capture And best of all, I felt safe. I think it's rare to have this feeling, especially when you're traveling in a different country, but Korea is one of the few where I didn't have to worry too much about theft. Especially when I'm walking around with an $8,500 setup. In the rain. Speaking of which, the gear that I was using, or what the kids nowadays like to say, yo, check out my drip. The Sony A1 and the 50mm f1.2 G Master. I know in the last couple of videos, I mentioned the 50 G Master wouldn't be something that I would bring with me on my travels just because of the size and the weight. But in this video, we're going to ignore that and just focus on what it can do for us. Because after looking back at a lot of these images that I got with the lens, I really loved my shots. The two locations where we did some night street photos were in the Jungno district of Seoul, where there were an abundance amount of neon signs, and the Itaewon district, where a majority of the rain photos and night took place. And a big thank you to Noe for showing us some of the best spots to grab these night photos. He's an amazing artist that specializes in street photography, cyberpunk edits, and anime style edits. And lately, he's been killing it in the NFT game. So if you like what you see here, definitely check out his work. And if you want to get into NFTs yourself, he has a ton of great information on his YouTube channel based on his own personal experience that I will link down below. So 50mm. While it may not be a common lens that most street photographers would go for, in my opinion, it can definitely still be a great street lens for some folks. 50mm is already a lens that excels at environmental portraits, amongst other things, of course. But as an environmental portrait lens, it places more emphasis on the subject than the environment, thanks to its field of view narrowing only to what's important, but still giving enough context around the subject. Now, that's not always 100% true in all cases, but that's how I like to approach it. Combined with the f1.2 aperture, you can really pick out and hyper focus on your subject. This could be great for capturing someone's fashion, you know, their individual expression that we were talking about, or even a common activity that the locals do. So here in this shot, we have a gentleman smoking in the alley. And I think this is a very classic type of street style shot, someone having a cigarette on their phone being to themselves in a secluded alley. And I shot this at f1.2. So the foreground and the background are out of focus, centering most of the attention on him. And what I did was enhance the colors, obviously, and lighting on him and put this giant vignette. Now some people would think this heavy vignetting is an overkill, but I kind of like it as a stylistic choice. I think it gives it more of that seclusion feeling. And here we have a couple of examples with the f1.2 being really hyper focus on our delivery men here. Now I wanted to capture this because food delivery service in Korea is crazy good. Service is great, speedy delivery, and it's incredibly affordable. Tipping is not a thing in Korea. So these guys are doing a bang up job for no other additional monetary incentive. Other than it's just their job. And best of all, your food is still hot when it arrives. I don't know how the restaurants do it and how they package it. But it's it's amazing. You guys got to give it a try. When you guys go to Korea. We ordered way too many fried chicken on delivery while we were there. So definitely take advantage of that. And what's wild is that these guys have like four phones and mounted on their mopeds. I literally seen a dude put up a YouTube video in between a service app and his map phone. I'm just like, this is next level Asian level of multitasking right here. So you might have noticed that a lot of shots that I've been showing here are shot at f1.2. So you're probably like, oh, f1.2 wouldn't that make things too blurry? Wouldn't we lose context? Yeah, sometimes you can. You just have to be mindful of what you're shooting. This photo right here. I love this photo. I love the couple walking down the fortress, though. I would have liked it a little bit better at the end tower in the distance right here. It's just a little more in focus. The end tower is an iconic structure to Seoul's landscape and that would have helped make this place feel more like Seoul. So while this photo may not be perfect, you know, it's close to perfect. I mean, you can still largely tell this is Korea because of the fortress wall. But for this photo, I wanted to capture the classic Asian squad. Just another guy taking a smoke break on his phone. But I really wanted to squeeze in this bottle right here in the corner in this is a bottle of soju. And as you may know, soju is the top alcoholic drink choice in Korea. And this is really culture nightlife capturing right here. But because I was shooting a little too close to the bottle, I wanted to shoot I wanted to avoid shooting at f1.2. I wanted to avoid shooting at f1.2 because it would have been way too blurry. You wouldn't have been able to tell it's a soju bottle. So at f5.6, we can start seeing a semblance of that bottle did jack up my ISO to 12,800. But hey, I think it works the grain help add a little bit of grittiness to the photo. You see when you get close to something with your lens, especially at f1.2, you'll definitely blur the background to oblivion. But that's not always a bad thing. You know, sometimes you got to satisfy that bokeh quota in your system. Sometimes you just got to take it for the bokeh. I mean, come on, you have an f1.2 lens got to have fun with it, right? Oh, so buttery, so smooth. It's especially fun to shoot portraits of your friends in front of those neon lights and signs. There's no denying that. So for portraits, go ahead, lose the context, who cares that bokeh looks amazing. But f1.2 doesn't always mean super blurry backgrounds. When you're shooting wider scenes, you'll find that f1.2 won't blur as much as you think, especially at the 50 millimeter focal length. Now speaking of wider scenes, some of you know that I love trying to capture wide landscapes with a telephoto lens just because I love the compression effect just love how it squishes everything together. It just makes things look more clean, more professional. And while the 50 is not a tele lens, it can still yield a little bit of that compression. For example, these neon signs here. I love all these neon sign images. I love how closely packed they are just so in your face. I love it. Now this shot right here is a very interesting shot to me. I just love how the bar above is shaped like a bus and I actually got a bus on the bottom of the frame. The people inside of the bar are sitting almost identically to the people sitting inside of the bus. And I just thought that was really cool. You can see the silhouettes in the windows in the panels. I think this shot would have worked equally well, maybe even better with a 4 just because it's a little bit wider. Maybe we could get away with a 35 but any wider than that I just don't think it would have the same effect as the 50. So I love the 50 for being able to frame in all the necessary elements. Here's another example of capturing all the necessary elements. I first took this shot by accident and I noticed this nice expression from this lady's face. She sticks out, she's perfectly in one panel of the window pane and she's well lit, coincidentally. She's having a great time having dinner with her friends and I wanted to frame this better because the first shot was the horizon was not leveled. So I just kind of waited for another great moment and it so happens that this person with an umbrella walked by. I don't know why I just really love the blocking right here just added something interesting to the shot. It was way better than just having all the window pane and a door to frame the shot by having this person right here with the umbrella. I don't know I just added that extra foreground element that made the shot a lot more interesting. So looking back at a lot of these photos I actually like the 50 millimeter for street. Like for most photographic application the 50 millimeter just feels right in terms of framing all the necessary elements. But I think where the f1.2 really came in handy was just giving me that extra boost of light in these low light scenes. Not so much for the extra creamy bokeh although that is nice. I think the extra stops of light really helped me kept my ISO relatively low so I didn't have to worry too much about grain and noise. Again I think South Korea is an amazing place to do some street photography especially in the Jongno and the Itaewon district. So you ever get a chance to visit the country definitely hit up those spots especially when it rains and while we were there it rained pretty much every week. So you'll get your chance to do some rain photography when you're in Korea. Now before you go if you enjoy this video and you want to support the channel the best thing that you can do is just to stick around and listen to what my sponsor has to say. Vivian and I always strive to bring you guys the best and most unique image and video samples whenever we talk about cameras and lenses and oftentimes we have high production costs to make this all happen. 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