| Joined: | Thu Apr 19th, 2012 |
| Location: | United Kingdom |
| Posts: | 4424 |
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Today I decided to be a Twitcher.
Mainly because my birding friend Mike had lost a good friend over Christmas and was very down. I thought he needed a kickstart. So we went after the Eastern Yellow Wagtail that's been seen on the 'muck piles' a few miles from where we live.
The bird was quite obliging given 50-60 telescopes and cameras pointed at it. But it was still some distance from our viewpoint....needing heavy cropping even with the 500mm lens.
I had heeded Graham's comments about the size of the focus point and left the D500 at home. The D850 is a lovely camera but has been idle for many occasions when birds were on the menu....and that's the point.
As you will be aware, the D850, like many DSLRs has memory banks to store settings. A B C D. I had configured mine ...A (general photography) Birding (yes I had renamed that one!) C (Landscapes) D (experimental area to avoid messing with the other predefined ones)
Which memory did I use? Of course .....D How many times must I tell myself to double check key settings before starting out? In fairness it was a spur of the moment rushed departure...but no excuses. For some reason I had left D memory bank set on medium file size JPEGs!...and AFS...and some other bizarre long forgotten settings that I must have been playing with when I first bought the camera.
So in the short period allowed (when trying to get birds to pose) I took a complete set of poorly exposed, oversaturated and mainly out of focus low res JPEGs.
Quite a successful morning really.
This is the best I could manage.
Still Mike had his spirits lifted and he (kindly) says this shot is a good enough record for him to use.
On a more pertinent point...
Although I accept that the smaller size focus square on the D850 may well be better at zeroing in on smaller birds heads, as Graham says. There is a limit. Even with the D850 this bird was barely bigger than the square itself! I am sure it does make a difference within a certain subject to camera distance range. But at the end of the day, there is no substitute for getting the bird big enough in the frame to enable the focus square to be able to separate the head from the rest of the bird.....whether that's by closer proximity or greater magnification.
____________________
Eric