>
> Ken, your shot of the eagle is spectacular. Manual focus on the fly with
> an
> e-1. You are my hero. Bill Barber
>
Thank you. I only showed you two out of 590 pictures, though. Even a blind
nut finds a squirrel once in a while. :)
Actually, the water skiing eagle is a touch back-focused. I was at F5.6 on
that one, but the ones at f8 gave me a lot more fudge-factor on focusing.
Both shots, unfortunately are heavily cropped. I would have liked to have
had another couple hundred mm of lens. Somebody showed up with a $6000 "Big
White". Drool....
Of my focusing errors, I'd say that my hit-rate on focusing was at least
85%. When I blew focus, it was because there was an unexpected flyby and I
had to not only FIND the bird in the viewfinder (600mm effective is hard to
find birds with), but then track focus on it. I'd enjoy a good auto-focus
system, but just as Joel experienced, you live and DIE by the auto-focus and
when it gets defeated, it gets defeated big time. I figure another dozen
outings like this and I might acutally get good at manual-focusing. My
editing of images was brutal--I deleted at least 400 pictures that were
technically OK, but the image didn't work for various reasons, like
disturbing backgrounds, exposure, wing position incorrect, flying away,
etc. Less than fifty were out-of-focus. Of course, there were probably as
many images with NO birds in them where I completely lost the stupid things.
One trick to getting the birds in focus is to start tracking them before you
actually take the photograph. It's usually no secret which way they're going
to go next and just like an airport, there seems to be a typical traffic
pattern they follow.
A bigger issue than focusing was exposure control. I ended up using manual
exposure more often than not.
A side-note regarding focusing with the 300/4.5. I discovered something
when I swapped to the Tokina. The Tokina has a very very short throw
between 50m and infinity. The Zuiko's throw is quite long in comparison
requiring much more turning of the focus ring. The additional turning
distance of the Zuiko made tracking birds much easier because I could better
fine-tune the focus.
Yes, the 300/4.5 does have CA. However, it only showed up on the heads and
tails of the adult eagles. A very slight touch of color noise control wiped
it out, though. As we have tools to fix CA in post, I consider this an
annoyance, but definitely not a problem.
I'm looking forward to seeing Joel's shots of the storefront. I know he was
getting shots that I wasn't seeing. Also, I saved my good shots for
film.... ;)
All cameras performed flawlessly, even when the photographer didn't. I
thought I'd have enticed Joel to bring an OM camera with him, but you know
how it is when somebody buys a new digital toy (E-3)...
AG
--
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