What photography gear do you use?

I hope to write some more in-depth articles about this later, but my main camera right now is a Sony a7III. My most used lens is the Sony 12-24 f/4, but I use mid-range lenses and long-zooms quite a lot, pretty much the full focal range from 12mm to 525mm equivalent. I rarely use filters, but the ones I have are all from Breakthrough Photography. I only use lightweight carbon-fiber travel tripods, currently I like my Sirui ET-2204, but I just got a Peak Design tripod that I’m excited to try out. I also occasionally use a DJI Mavic Pro drone.

These days, any interchangeable lens camera (ILC) can take extremely high quality photos. Every single photo from my Iceland trip was taken with a Sony a6000 - pretty much the lowest-end mirrorless ILC that you can still buy new. And, with a few exceptional situations (like aurora) and products (really big, high-end prints), there’s not so much advantage between that and a Sony a7RIV, the highest-end Sony camera that you can get for landscape photography.

However, there are significant usability differences between cameras, and the right camera for you comes largely down to largely personal preference.

Do you use Photoshop? How edited or unrealistic are your images?

Yes, I use Photoshop. The vast majority of my photos are what I’d call “artistic renditions of real scenes”. If you’d like to know about my views on that topic in more detail, check out this blog post.

Any other questions?

You can send me a message from my “Contact” page, or via Instagram: @andrew.helmer.photo. I might add your question here, or maybe write an article, or just respond personally, but I will do my best to answer!