Cloudy-bright Skies Plus SONY 200-600 Plus SONY a9 II Equals Great Flight Photography. The Good and the Bad ...

What’s Up?

Private client Harry Lerner and I enjoyed a second great morning session on Saturday past at DeSoto. In the same small bay that we had worked on Friday morning conditions were even better. We had a nice collection of handsome wading birds but this time they were feeding and catching shrimp in lovely, still, dark-green water in the lee of a stand of mangroves. It was a great situation for Harry to practice his newly learn SONY Zebra exposure skills. He was nailing everything.

Best of all Harry taught me something new. At his urging and with his instruction I tried Flexible Spot (L) with tracking and did quite well. Thanks also to. Josh Anon. for pointing me in that direction. I will have a lot more to say about Flexible Spot (L) with tracking in future posts. In addition, I have a lot more to learn about the other AF tracking modes …

I am already thinking about packing for my flight to San Diego on Friday.

Please take a moment to let us know which of today’s featured images is the stronger of the two and why you made your choice. Feel free also to comment on positives and the negatives of each image.

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Too many folks attending BAA IPTs and dozens of photographers whom I see in the field and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail. Those questions might deal with systems, camera bodies, accessories, and/or lens choices and decisions.

This image was created on December 27, 2019 at Fort DeSoto Park, Tierra Verde, FL. I used the hand held Sony FE 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 G OSS lens (at 600mm) with the blazingly fast AF King, the Sony Alpha a9 II Mirrorless Digital camera body. ISO 2,500. Exposure determined by Zebras: 1/2000 sec. at f/6.3 in Manual mode. AWB at 8:43am on a cloudy-bright morning. Center Zone C (tracking) AF worked perfectly by getting sharp focus on the bird’s eye. Click on the image to see a larger version. Image #1: Willet landing

Cloudy-bright Skies Plus SONY 200-600 Plus SONY a9 II Equals Great Flight Photography: The Good

The SONY 2-6/a9II combination makes a great walk-around lens for bird photography. No tripod, no hassles. Keep the 1.4X TC in your pocket for additional reach if needed. If you encounter some good flight photography situations, you are in the driver’s seat. If I had to choose between the Nikon 500 PF with either a gripped D-850 or a D5, I would choose the SONY rig. Why? More consistently accurate AF and the 100mm of additional reach is a huge advantage. Why on the latter? Because the size of the subject in the frame is proportionate to the square of the focal lengths. In this case, 5 squared is 25 and 6 squared is 36. So the size of the bird in the frame in images made at 600mm will be greater than the size of the bird in the frame made at 500mm (assuming the same distance, of course) by a factor of 36 to 25 (1.44 times larger). The bird will be 44% (11/25) larger in the frame than the 20% that many would think when going from 500 to 600. (100/500 = 20%).

An additional advantage that the 200-600 and all zoom lenses have over all fixed focal length lenses, is that you can zoom out for better framing when needed. This holds true for both static bird photography and flight (and action) photography but is actually more important for the latter applications as human zooming is easy when photographing a static bird but pretty much impossible when you need to make the photo now!

Why Cloudy Bright for Flight?

I have long been a huge fan of cloudy-bright skies for photographing birds in flight as all shadows are eliminated and you can create images that reveal superb underwing detail (as in Image #1). Both are extremely difficult to do in sunny conditions except in the rare instances where you can press the shutter button when the bird in flight is precisely on sun angle. And even then shadows are likely except when the wing position if full upstroke.

This image was also created on December 27, 2019 at Fort DeSoto Park, Tierra Verde, FL. Again, I used the hand held Sony FE 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 G OSS lens (at 600mm) with the blazingly fast AF King, the Sony Alpha a9 II Mirrorless Digital camera body. ISO 2,500. Exposure determined by Zebras: 1/2000 sec. at f/6.3 in Manual mode. AWB at 8:44am on a cloudy-bright morning. Center Bottom Zone C (tracking) AF worked perfectly by getting sharp focus on the bird’s eye. Click on the image to see a larger version. Image #2: Osprey — eye-level fly-by

The Bad …

After the five-plus-hour morning session with Harry on Friday past, my left shoulder hurt a bit. Remember that that is the shoulder that I damaged when I fell in my home about 2 1/2 years ago. It has healed quite well but at about 6 1/2 pounds with the hood on and lens foot removed, handholding the rig for extended periods of time might cause some joint-stress for some folks (like me). Others might not be able to hand hold this rig for flight even for short sessions.

Working off a tripod will eliminate 100% of stress on the left shoulder and will help you to create sharper images. It is, however, almost always a lot easier to shoot flight with lenses that can comfortably be hand held than with tripod-mounted lenses. And hand holding is a lot more fun than having to drag a tripod around.

If I had had the rig on the tripod while photographing static subjects it is likely that I would not have been prepared for the two great flight photography opportunities that arose quickly less than two minutes apart …

The last negative is that at f/6.3 the 2-6 is a bit slower than we would like. But too make it a constant f/5.6 would have made the lens a bit heavier …

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