Shot with the 18-70 mm kit lens, which seemed to do a fairly good job with moderate closeups.

Shot with the 75-300 mm "kit" lens. (It's not clear that this lens will actually be bundled into a kit with the A100, but the Sony staff referred to both it and the 18-70 mm as the "kit" lenses. It did look like a relatively inexpensive lens, of the sort that you'd expect to find bundled as part of a kit.)

Another shot with the 75-300 mm "kit" lens. "Unreported EV" in the captions here means the photo was shot with the default exposure setting. (As do many cameras, the Alpha just omits the EV field from its EXIF data when shooting at its default setting.)

The 75-300 mm lens again.

Shot with the 75-300 mm kit lens. This was apparently one of the "local" killer whales, it breached several times near the boat. There's a little motion blur in this shot, despite the relatively high shutter speed: I had to slew the camera around pretty quickly to catch the whale as he breached, quite a ways from where he last appeared.

Shot with the 75-300 mm kit lens. Interestingly, "local" killer whales (that tend to stay in a given area) eat only fish. "Nomadic" killer whales, which roam across great distances eat other sea mammals (seals, etc). Same species, no genetic differences, just different behavior.

Shot with the 75-300 mm kit lens. The tiny boat (actually a good-sized cruiser) in the foreground of this tele shot conveys more of a sense of the scale of the enormous mountains than do wider-angle views showing more of the scenery.

Shot with the 18-70 mm kit lens. This was a glacier we visited by boat. The other boat in the foreground was a twin to the one that we were on. The glacier in the background is about a half-mile away, and ranged from 400-800 feet high at the waterline.

Shot with the 75-300 mm kit lens.

Shot with the 18-70 mm kit lens. It's hard for a photo to convey the amazing broad, sweeping vistas common in Alaska.

Shot with the 75-300 mm kit lens.

This was shot with a 500mm "reflex" or catadioptric lens. These lenses are like miniature astronomical telescopes, with a curved mirror as the primary focusing element. They're very compact and lightweight relative to conventional lenses of the same focal length, but have a fixed aperture, and tend to produce odd donut-shaped artifacts in out of focus highlights. Those limitations aside, the Sony 500mm reflex optic was very sharp. The A100's anti-shake also worked very well on this photo. I was shooting at 1/640, but the equivalent focal length was 750mm, and the boat was moving so much I literally had a hard time holding the camera steady enough to frame the subject!

Another shot with the 500mm reflex.

Yet another from the 500mm reflex lens. This shot very clearly shows the characteristic donut-shaped highlights from the len's odd bokeh. (These are the result of the central portion of the front element of such lenses being blacked-out, obstructed by the secondary mirror that directs light back into the camera body.)

I also played briefly with the Sony 11-18mm ultra wide angle zoom. While this shot doesn't show much detail in the corners, other photos I took with it showed good sharpness and surprisingly little CA (chromatic aberration) in the corners of the frame.

Another shot with the 11-18mm. This was shot inside an aerial tram car, you can judge how small the area was by how tightly packed the people are. A pretty amazingly wide field of view! Supplemental light in this shot was provided by a couple of Sony flash units, held by two of the people in the back of the photo. The A100's wireless flash support worked well in this shot.

Another shot using the wireless flash system, this time with the 18-70mm kit lens. The wireless flash also worked well for this shot, the flash being located slightly behind me, and about 10 feet to the right.

Not a particularly picturesque shot, but a good example of ISO 1600 with approximately daylight white balance. (Cooler than daylight, but at least not a situation where the camera was having to crank up one color channel dramatically, to balance the color.) Noise on the A100 was a bit higher than I'd been expecting, but I haven't had the opportunity yet to compare its photos under controlled conditions with those of competing cameras -- I'll withhold final judgement in this area until I can do some comparisons under lab conditions. (Shot with the 18-70mm kit lens.)

Another ISO 1600 shot with the 18-70mm. As usual, this and the image at the left look worse on-screen than they do when printed at modest enlargement. Still, I'd consider the noise level here to be pretty marginal for making 8x10 inch prints.

(As I noted in the news story announcing the posting of these photos though, I'd have given my eye teeth to have had noise this low in ISO 1600 film, back in my film-based days: It's important to keep in mind your expected use of a camera, and your expected use of its photos, to keep the true impact of image noise in perspective.)

Shot with the 75-300 mm kit lens. Looking for a few non-nature shots, I walked around Anchorage a bit, but didn't find an awful lot that was particularly photogenic. It's a nice enough city, but does have a bit of a scruffy, frontier-like atmosphere about it, with not a lot of interesting architecture.

Shot with the 75-300 mm kit lens.

Shot with the 18-70 mm kit lens.

Shot with the 18-70 mm kit lens.

Shot with the 18-70 mm kit lens.

(From a very nice stained glass shop, that I unfortunately lost the business card from. Look them up in the phone book if you're ever in Anchorage though, they had some really beautiful pieces.)

Shot with the 18-70 mm kit lens.

Shot with the 18-70 mm kit lens.

Shot with the wireless flash system and the 75-300 mm kit lens. The wireless flash system had a fair bit of trouble with this shooting setup, failing to trigger on a number of shots. It was a fairly large room, and we were playing with having the remote flash units positioned on the edges of the stage area. It seemed that the trigger light (infrared? strobe head itself?) didn't have enough oomph to bounce off the background and back to the remotes reliably.

Also shot with the wireless flash system and the 75-300 mm kit lens. When it worked, the A100's wireless flash system worked very well indeed, handling difficult shots like this one very well. (It did well not to overexpose the subject here, given how small a percentage of the frame it occupied, and the extreme contrast between the subject and background.)