Any lens for bird photography(wild birds)?

[jaapv]

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Real life photography to me. A tripod is useless in dynamic circumstances ( ideal for photographing the perch the bird has just left )

[dgktkr]

Real life photography to me. A tripod is useless in dynamic circumstances ( ideal for photographing the perch the bird has just left )

 

 

Would you say to someone who wants to photograph birds, they're better off learning how to manually focus than learning the advantages and limitations of the SL's autofocus? And what about OIS? Use it or not?

 

Isn't the promise of the SL speed? Fast AF and OIS?

 

dgktkr

[wildlightphoto]

Would you say to someone who wants to photograph birds, they're better off learning how to manually focus than learning the advantages and limitations of the SL's autofocus? And what about OIS? Use it or not?

 

Isn't the promise of the SL speed? Fast AF and OIS?

 

dgktkr

 

 

Learning the advantages and limitations of all of the camera's features is never a waste of time.  Since the current native SL lenses do not extend beyond 280mm and for me bird photography starts at 280mm learning manual focus with adapted lenses would be a good idea.

 

Fast AF is good if it's accurate.  How well does it distinguish between the eye and the bill?  They are rarely in the same plane of focus.

 

How quickly can the user move the focus point to the eye with a bird that moves several times each second?

 

 

I do find stabilization handy with magnified manual focus, one of the reasons I use the 500mm lens on the Sony much more often than on the SL.  A stabilized 500mm lens is not yet available for the SL and once such a lens becomes available from Leica it will be well beyond my wallet's comfort zone.  The lack of stabilization can be overcome to some degree by using the SL's excellent high-ISO capabilities (allowing a faster shutter speed) as with this photo

 

but can be a hinderance when I deliberately choose a slower shutter speed when I want to show the motion of raindrops and the truck I'm inside is being blown by wind

 

My conclusion is that if AF and stabilization are important to you the SL is not yet suitable for much bird photography unless you can consistently get close enough to use a 280mm lens (I can't).

 

I can do without the AF, but the Sony's sensor stabilization has made longer, affordable manual-focus lenses very useful where a longer optically-stabilized lens for the SL is not only not yet available but likely would be so costly that (speaking only for myself) it would be for all practical purposes not available.

[turbonetics]

individual birds behave differently.

AF is good as it can helps to achieve faster focus on the bird but it may not be 100% accurate though the chance is pretty high.

there are some circumstances that manual focus is a better options.

so to cut it short, it is still better to use a AF set-up and u could choose between MF and AF for different situations.

[LocalHero1953]

I can bring no experience of long lens bird photography to this thread, and I have only limited experience of cameras with IS. But, using the SL and its own 28-90, I find that on a tripod IS makes it very difficult to set the lens on a small fixed point: I move the lens to the point, clamp it (hard) on the tripod, and then watch it drift off for a number of seconds before finally staying on one place. I now switch off IS while using a tripod and don't see this effect.

 

Is this normal for IS? A problem with Leica's implementation of IS? Or a problem with my particular lens?

 

Edit: a bit of googling tells me I should in any case turn off IS on a tripod (logical) and that this sort of drift has been seen in other brand OIS camera systems before.

[jaapv]

You are not supposed to use IS on a tripod in general.

[turbonetics]

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some newer generation lenses has tripod sensing so it doesn't matter if u ON or OFF the stabilisation.

if u are unsure then just OFF it when using tripod.