Birds of prey and action in durham
Earlier this month, I participated in a photography workshop billed as ‘Birds of Prey and Action’, run by Going Digital near Durham. I knew there would also be dogs and maybe some ferrets or polecats.
Since my last workshop, I have sold all my old cameras and lenses and purchased a Sony A7CR. This is the first camera I’ve had with autofocus capabilities that are on a different level from anything I’ve used in the past.
I prefer smaller cameras to carry around with me - as action, days will be secondary to that - that let me to a smaller body rather than one of the more obvious larger bodies.
I hired the Sony 100-400mm lens for the day, and it did look kind of funny seeing the smaller body hanging off the back of it.
The Sony 100-400mm lens with my A7CR hanging off the back.
Here are a selection of photographs taken on the day.
The autofocus was much faster and easier to use than my older cameras. What took a while to get used to was tracking birds in flight. I’m not used to doing that. My arms knew I’d been swinging around that lens.
The animal and bird eye tracking worked incredibly well too. At the start of the day I struggled to keep flying birds in the viewfinder, but that became easier as the day went on.
Since using Fujifilm cameras, I’ve been a fan of letting Auto ISO make life easier. On the FujiFilm cameras you had Auto ISO 1,2 and 3 to pick from quickly - and these could be set with different ranges and different minimum shutter speeds - so I could set them up so that one was for fast action, another was for day-to-day walking around and so on. On the Sony, I couldn’t have multiple saved settings, but I could assign a function button to Auto ISO minimum shutter speed to quickly move that up and down when appropriate.
Noise in photos is so much easier to deal with than a shutter speed that is not fast enough. I tried using DXO PureRAW 4 on some of the photos where the ISO shot up, and that seems to work wonderfully. None of the photos were hugely noisy, but there was some there and it looked better without it.
In July I’m repeating a dog photography workshop which had a lot of action so I’m looking forward to giving that a go.
As a bonus, here are two action shots taken at home of my dog and my sister’s dog - taken with a much smaller and lighter 70-200mm lens.
