Mt Spokane Photography said:
Mikehit said:
daniela said:
I´m still not satisfied with the AF, when birds come directly toward to you. A lot of these shots are unsharp. Laterally passing birds and birds that fly away are no problem.
Even the best AF in the world relies on the photographer to keep the AF point on the bird for enough time to lock on, even when you have things like iTR or Nikon's 3D focussing.
But birds coming hard at you, especially with aerial acrobatics, is still a huge challenge with any camera. If you can say with certainty that the main focus point was locked onto the bird for every frame of the sequence then it maybe the AF cannot keep up, if the AF point wavers by any amount I will always wonder if it is the user. In challenging situations like that you need to be hypercritical before you commit to changing cameras.
Software wise, capturing and locking on to one of the birds is likely quite possible. In the current state of the art, ability to run really heavy duty software comes up against hardware limitations, starting with the relatively underpowered processor they must use in cameras to make a battery last longer than 5 seconds. If we did have the power to run a capable processor, then cooling the camera would also be neigh impossible, its a challenge even now.
There would need to be a "bird mode" -- it's tough when the birds start in the trees, or are flying not against blue sky (or other homogenous background), because the camera just doesn't know whether you're trying to catch the bird, the flower, the leaf, the squirrel.... or the other bird.
How could Sony win my money with an EVF? I would buy an A9II if it had Bird Mode, and through the EVF, highlighted boxes around everything it thought was a bird in the viewfinder, let me pick one, and then automatically tracked it. Extra points if it had motion detection, and took a series of photos every time it moved.
I would pay huge, huge bucks it could be attached to a motorized gimbal that would automatically pan and track the bird as it moved
And then 1 year later, I would sell that $25,000 rig and because birding will have become a boring, pointless exercise, LOL.