Talys said:I've been fortunate enough to have a friend's Sony A7R3 and 100-400 4.5-5.6 GM OSS for a little while. I've been playing around with the lens, and thought I would share my first impressions of it in comparison to the 100-400 L II, which I own.
JBSF said:Talys said:I've been fortunate enough to have a friend's Sony A7R3 and 100-400 4.5-5.6 GM OSS for a little while. I've been playing around with the lens, and thought I would share my first impressions of it in comparison to the 100-400 L II, which I own.
I use 7D2 with 100-400 Mark II for birds much as you do (passerines, not so much BIF). However I also use it a lot for insects, especially dragonflies/damselflies. At MFD, photos from this combo can be incredibly detailed.
Can your or anybody else here post insect photos taken with the Sony combo? Or the Sony with the Canon 100-400?
JBSF said:Can your or anybody else here post insect photos taken with the Sony combo? Or the Sony with the Canon 100-400?
Talys said:Also, subject tracking while panning is excellent, but when the subject is moving towards me, the number of in-focus shots is quite low, especially if I qualify that to wanting the head of the bird in focus. When photographing eagles, out of 8 shots, there'd be 1 with the head in focus, and a half dozen where the head/eyes are soft.
And Canon 100-400 II with 2x III extender has better optical quality than 100-400 GM with Sony 2x extenderAlanF said:Phil
Thanks so much for relaying your insights and experience. It has been most useful for me and I am sure many others. I threw my 5DSR + 100-400mm II into the car on Saturday as I thought I might have had some shooting opportunities yesterday on the way back from an event. The combination behaved flawlessly for BIFs I cam across, and the 5DSR is not the best Canon for BIF. The 100-400 II is such a reliable lens.
Alan
AlanF said:Phil
Thanks so much for relaying your insights and experience. It has been most useful for me and I am sure many others. I threw my 5DSR + 100-400mm II into the car on Saturday as I thought I might have had some shooting opportunities yesterday on the way back from an event. The combination behaved flawlessly for BIFs I cam across, and the 5DSR is not the best Canon for BIF. The 100-400 II is such a reliable lens.
Alan
Neutral said:For better a7r3 AF tracking for BIF you might try to increase AF Track sensitivity from standard 3 to 5 and change AF-C priority from default settings to AF.
Here is AF guide for a9 which is applicable to a7r3.
http://support.d-imaging.sony.co.jp/www/support/ilc/focus/en/a9/settings/index.html
But I would not expect the same AF performance for a7r3 as for a9, which I think is the only one Sony FF camera which tracking AF capabilities are on par with DSLRs with dedicated AF sensor.
A9 is doing AF sampling and recalculations at 60Hz but for a7r3, I did not find any information.
Probably for 10FPS tracking a7r3 should be doing at least twice more so AF sampling rate could be up to 20HZ though I have some doubts that is so high.
If you have bird not far from you approaching you at 60km/h this is about 17 m/sec advance per second.
So for a9 with 60Hz AF every object will be moving about 0.27m between samples so it is easy for a9 to track and predict object position and keep it within lens DOF.
If we assume that a7r3 has 20Hz AF sampling then tracked bird distance change between AF samples would be around 0.83m so approaching bird could get out of DOF range easily, especially if bird is close to camera.
So I would not expect a7r3 to be on par with a9 as well as with any modern DSLRs which have dedicated high speed AF sensor. Only a9 is real competitor at the moment, and this performs for BIFs perfectly, much better than a7r3 , on par with 1DXm2.
AlanF said:Phil, thanks for more testing. To my eyes, both eagles are very soft, and they are over-sharpened. I can do better than that with a Canon 100-400mm II + TC.
Thanks for sharing test results.Talys said:Well, I used the 1.4TC yesterday, so some comments there:
1. The size is excellent, extending the camera by just 16mm (compared to 26mm on the Canon 1.4 IIII).
2. It is a very important piece of the puzzle for Sony for now, because native lens options essentially end with it at 560mm/f8. The 2x is not a real option on the camera, because autofocus past f/8 is not PDAF.
3. Good news for Sony: The TC on the 100-400 GM has a smaller hit to autofocus speed than the Canon 100-400LII + 1.4 III.
4. Bad news for Sony: like the 100 - 400LII + 1.4 III, it's a pretty terrible Bird in Flight combination in terms of autofocus speed. But then again, the Canon combination isn't very good for birds in flight either -- not so much tracking the bird, but getting the initial AF lock, if you only have a couple of seconds and you aren't already focused on or near the vicinity of the bird.
5. The only way I could get it to autofocus was to AF on some trees at about the same distance at a lower zoom, then point it at the bird, and then letting it do its thing. Then, following the bird (using a small zone AF, like center + expanding).
6. I photographed 105 shots of two eagles circling in the air. I was very lucky: they circled for a long time. If you've ever shot eagles, when they do this, it's very easy to focus on them, because their flight pattern is relatively slow and predictable. Exposure setting was something like 1/2000, f/8, ISO 320. I was using a monopod with a sirui tilt head.
Literally ONE was in "best" focus, which wasn't really perfect, but was probably as good as I'd get with AF. TWO were very close after artificial sharpening. FOUR more were close enough to be considered good focus after artificial sharpening. 98/105 shots were garbage.
For reference, on a 6DII, my shot percentage would have been something like 60%+ in perfect focus, with or without an extender.
7. For bird portraits in a situation where the extra 40% reach lets you take a well-composed shot where the subject fills up the frame, it's excellent. In my opinion, better than the Canon, because you can focus magnify, manually adjust, and guarantee a perfect focus on the eye much easier than you can on the Canon.
8. Whites against contrast solids had CA that don't correct in post (without manually photoshoping it). Slightly OOF whites had bad CA, worse than without the extender. It is also small enough that if your subject fills up the frame and you can resample that image down to typical distribution sizes from the original 42mp, it will disappear.
9. IQ was generally pretty good, but it definitely suffers a little. If I could split the difference and get 20% closer to the subject, I would rather do that than to use take the extender, with the 40% magnification. This, based on some heron shots (though the extender shots were in a different location as the non-extender shots). Note that this is no different than the Canon.
Attached is the best shot I could get out of 105. It was photographed using uncompressed RAW (so, 85MB file), 1/2000, f/8, ISO 320. It is cropped, but not resized, and sharpened as best I could in LR.
This image has a long edge of about 1800 pixels, so it's not exactly a deep crop, though it's still a significant one. That said, I am able to get very good 1500-2000 pixel bird crops out of a 6DII with the 100-400LII with or without the extender, definitely superior to this one. But I will try some more, and report back.