Thad E Ginathom

There is no compromise for "normal" shutter speeds. If I remember rightly, Long-exposure NR takes a black frame, with the same shutter speed, and uses it to compute and reduce the noise in the image. Thus, it always takes at least twice the shutter-speed period. A shutter speed of 15 seconds will take at least 30 seconds to process. Working backwards, if your camera is taking 30 seconds between shots, the shutter speed must have been around 15 seconds. Thus your blur. There is a minimum shutter speed at which your camera will do this process. at higher (normal daylight) shutter speeds, the setting is not relevant. On my a6500 it is 1 second. Googling Long-exposure Noise Reduction and your camera model should take you straight to the manual entry

That animal looks deceptively innocent! Lovely composition and result.

Grim! But that's nature. Excellent photograph.

Great! It looks like it is well worthwhile changing that screen.

Just for curiosity I just tried the HDMI cable (to my PC monitor) on my Sony a6500, which might or might not work in the same way. I can see the menu via HDMI, but there is a potential problem: it depends on a menu setting. On the a6500, this is Setup4->HDMI Settings->HDMI Info. Display = On.

True, that. And some famous guy said something like "The more I practise, the more luck I get."

🤣 Join me behind the camera! But seriously. Sometimes, if I criticize a picture, I do tell myself that the photographer's idea is his idea, my idea is my idea, and this is the picture that he wanted to take. And it's his picture. 😳

Beautiful sunset. If I were you, I'd have asked that woman to move out of the way. Joke. ...Sort of.

I'm glad musicians are not like that! Wildlife photography takes some extra human qualities. And a lot of extra skill!

I'm sorry to come in at a probably unwanted tangent on this, but... the thought of being on either side of a flash gun, subject or photographer, on the street, makes me most uncomfortable. I'm assuming, of course, that "as I wander the street and snap people," means strangers. If not, then this comment is irrelevant. Anyway, please forgive the off-topic interruption

Who knows what goes through the mind of a wind turbine! Oh, wait... I forgot: you're an engineer. I love the picture too. That moon is the cherry on the cake. Super.

ISO auto, 100-1600. Aperture w i d e. Auto-ISO min shutter speed 1/250 if I can, or 1/100. I like the way the the a6500 takes this setting in a sort-of advisory way, and will use a lower shutter speed if it has to. I'm photographing musicians sitting cross-legged on the stage, getting most-of-upper-body with the 85/1.8. The "stage" lighting is not a huge amount more than room light. Some of them move their heads a lot. Like I never realised how much until I started photographing them and noticed the motion blur in the faces. If I want motion blur, eg hands on an instrument, I switch to shutter priority. Some halls are better lit than others, maybe getting 3-digit ISO quite often, but I can live with 1600. At 3200, there's a big difference with noise appearing in shadows on the face, neck etc. I don't like that, but maybe I'm too fussy!

How high is "high?" I've taken noisier pics at 3200 with my a6500, and prefer 1600 as my general limit

Well, as I said, I don't know about filming (Sometimes my wife tells me to video something, and I realise I've almost forgotten that my camera even does video!) so talking to me is of very limited use to you 😳 but... I spent more than a decade since my last "real" camera occasionally waving a P&S about. I forgot the photographer's discipline of holding a camera properly --- I'm still re-learning all that stuff! And I got older, clumsier and less steady-handed as well. I used an a6000 with a manual 90mm lens, and found it very hard work. Updating to the a6500 IBIS was a great relief with that lens, and with the Sony 85mm (no OSS) that I use a lot now. I never had that problem with the Sigma 30mm: I could always hand-hold, even badly. You should have no difficulty at all. Especially with IBIS. Maybe IBIS+OSS is more relevant with three-digit-mm telephotos. There is one thing where the 50mm beats the 30mm for me, and that is auto-focus. In low light, the Sigma will occasionally hunt, backwards and forwards, around the focus point. The Sony 50 never does that: if it can't focus it simply fails to focus. The a6500 autofocus stuff all works with the Sigma 30, but it works better with the Sony 50. This might just be a factor of focal length: much easier to grab a face, or even an eye, when it is much bigger in the frame. Which brings us back to square one: you must first decide which focal length you want. They really are very different.