I recently got a bit more serious with my photography, and it has prompted me to have an incentive to bring my absolute best skills to the game.

I've used Canon DSLRs for six years. But the features of the new Sony A7 III were just too much for me not to be interested in, and I thought that such a camera might help me.

Long story short, I'm experimenting using an A7 III with adapted Canon lenses. I was less than enthused with the performance of this setup in very low light a couple weeks ago, so I put the Sony back on the shelf for a while, opting to fall back on my tried and true Canon 5D.

But admittedly, the time that I was using the Sony, the lighting was so poor that even the Canon was struggling to lock on with focus.

Yesterday I went to an event in the city that I knew was going to be a really quiet affair... It was mostly going to be spoken word and such, so I cringed at the idea of popping off the shutter of the 5D over and over, even in "silent" mode which deadens the noise somewhat, while someone was trying to speak.

So, reluctantly I grabbed the Sony, armed with a "silent" mode which is truly, completely silent, with absolutely no moving mirror or shutter. I did my best to set up the Sony's autofocus mode similar to how I like it on the Canon. Initially, I had been curious about the face detection and eye-detection autofocus on the Sony, but I'm realizing now that when you're in a fast moving and dynamic environment, the face detection is still pretty hit or miss. It's not that it's slow necessarily, but in the fractions of a second you have to capture an unstaged moment, and the varying angles that someone's face may be pointing in that moment, the face detection really can't be relied on.

Anyway, once I learned to not expect to rely on face detection, instead treating the autofocus system like an old-school DSLR, and just putting a small, focused point right on the person's eye that I wanted to focus on, the camera started working. The autofocus seemed to work pretty well, even in low light. And the silent shooting is mind-blowing. I sat there and rifled off ten full resolution raw photos per second, with absolutely no noise from the camera, and zero anxiety about putting wear and tear on the moving parts of a DSLR that this kind of use would result in.

After the event was over, my friend that was sitting next to me asked if I was actually taking pictures, because she just saw me holding the camera up to my face with no noise coming from it. She said it was the "quietest camera ever" and I happily agreed.

I was unsure about the technology before. Looking at a screen in the viewfinder as opposed to straight through the lens is still a little disorienting. There is at times a weird focus hunting issue that I can only attribute to the fact that I'm adapting Canon lenses to the camera, which obviously it wasn't designed to do.

However, Sony's menu system is still horrible. It's still clearly stuck in a consumer electronics mindset, not one that recognizes the camera as a professional tool that needs to be able to provide quick access to important settings within fractions of a second, so as not to miss an important moment. The only redeeming quality being that it allows a pretty good amount of customization.

But overall, the accuracy of focus when the camera does lock on, the insane frames per second with absolutely zero noise from the camera, and the in-body image stabilization that allows every lens to function as an image stabilized lens makes me feel as though I'm going to keep this camera around. In the end it just leaves me hoping that Canon gets their stuff together and produces a camera with similar functionality, a menu system that makes sense, and native support for all of my expensive Canon lenses.