How to avoid horizontal stripes (banding) in your photos when using silent mode on Sony (and other mirrorless) cameras

As a professional wedding photographer who has been using Sony mirrorless cameras for many years – starting with the A7s, a7ii, a7r2, a6300, a6400, a7r3, a7iii they all have one thing in common that can cause banding to appear on your images if you shoot in silent mode (the a9 is largely immune from this but not completely immune). This is caused by the slower readouts of the cameras meaning that you can get bands appearing on your images.

See this image here – you can see at different shutter speeds you will see banding, with faster speeds like 1/400 being the worst and slower speeds being better!

banding in mirrorless cameras

As you can see at 1/100th the banding is gone even under this awful old scout hut lighting.

How to get banding free images when shooting in silent mode – tips

That’s the secret. Shoot at 1/100th and you will pretty much always get band free images, well mostly this is true for the UK, in the US/other places with 60HZ mains then 1/125 should be the magic number! For this I shoot in manual mode so I can control shutter speed at 1/100 and open my aperture to the correct f-stop for the dof I want. Typically this is wide open as if a scene is lit by mainly artificial lighting it will typically be dark.

Note that this doesn’t solve flickering issues with uneven illumination over the frame as this IS solved by shooting in mechanical shutter and anti-flicker mode set to on.

I will also be covering how to shoot with HSS (high speed sync) and avoid banding in another article about how to shoot with HSS and avoid banding (catchy title huh?)

If there is anything else you’d like me to add or cover then just send me an email to greg @ thurtlepower . com

Thanks!