
I recently completed a week long photography trip to the San Juan Mountains of Colorado to photograph the mountains at peak fall color.
I packed three camera bodies in my kit. The Nikon D850, the Nikon D810 and the Sony a6700.
Normally, I use my full frame sensor Nikon D850 as my landscape photography body. It has great dynamic range and a boat load of resolution at 45 megapixels. But, on this trip I wanted to see if my APS-C sensor Sony a6700 at 26 megapixels could produce a compelling landscape photograph using a Sony E 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 OSS kit lens.
Now granted, the cropped sensor camera and lower resolution sensor is not going to stack up to the infamous D850 when it comes to high resolution images for very large photographic prints. But, The difference isn’t as great as you may think. I’ve made many a landscape photo using APS-C sensor cameras over the years, and some of those photographs are my best selling photos to this day. The Sony a6700 has more resolution than any other APS-C sensor body I’ve used in the past, and well, I think Sony sensors are pretty good, so I wasn’t too concerned with using the a6700 in this situation to tell you the truth.
The above photo is a jpg image I created from the master raw file, scaled down to 1500 x 1000 pixels and with no other processing other than using the ST creative preset for the Sony a6700 in Adobe Lightroom. Was going to put the full resolution image on my server but the 20.2 megabyte jpg image would take forever to download and would use up valuable server resources, so this resized image should give you a pretty good idea what this camera can produce, without having to do any editing.
The bottom line is that the a6700 produces a very nice landscape photo with the ST (standard) Sony preset with good color rendition and good resolution and sharpness. I had no trouble with exposure and was able to utilize the in-body and lens image stabilization for just about everything. I never put the camera on a tripod. Everything was hand held. This particular shot was at 1/500 sec, f/10, ISO 250, at 28mm which equated to about 42mm focal length, close to a standard focal length. At 26 megapixels, I could make a 24×36 inch print from this photo and it would look excellent.
So here’s the math. The resolution is 6192 pixels x 4128 pixels. I know from years of printing experience one can make a very good print at 160 pixels per inch. So, divide 6192/160=38.7 inches on the long edge. That means, a 24 x 36 inch print is totally possible with excellent results from this camera.
So to answer the question; Is the Sony a6700 a good camera for landscape photography?
The answer is yes. You can get fantastic results with this camera and the standard kit lens. And it won’t break the bank.