I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it again and I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it better than last year if the conditions were better than 2 weeks prior, so I went back to Onondaga Lake to photograph the eagles.
The most difficult thing to do is try to figure out how to focus with my kit. I was able to get keepers with each method, but one proved to be easier than the others.
The method that will never work is C-AF with tracking. It sucks and is unusable, so I am left to keep the bird in the middle of the frame and target the subject with the AF-point/target.
S-AF works on occasion, but the lens is slow to focus so there are a lot of misses as the focus hunts for the subject, even if I can track the bird more effectively.
Manual focus eliminates the hunting, but the EVF doesn’t have the resolution or focus-peaking precision to achieve consistent focus and then there is the issue of trying to zoom and focus at the same time.
So, C-AF was the way to go. I kept the digital converter at 2.0x and used a 3×3 focus area with 30-40% success, but confess to not clicking the shutter a lot. I was selective when to press the button: there could be no competing contrast in the background and I had to wait for the right moment, because the blackout of the EVF almost assured me that the bird would probably fall out of frame.
And then there was the light … which proved to be underwhelming until the sun began to set. The forecast had called for clear skies, but there was a bank of clouds that obscured the sun most of the afternoon, resulting in noisier images with less detail than I had otherwise hoped to capture.
All that said, though, I walked away with more quality images this year than I did last year, and I think I’ve quenched my thirst for images of eagles in flight until next winter (which is a good thing, because the snow and ice is melting and the birds will be migrating back to their summer nests very soon).