In my most successful photographs of a
Kestral Buzzard in flight, I was not prepared as I came across it by accident and I reacted instinctively, trying to make the best of a fleeting opportunity so I do have quite a few mistakes that have degraded the quality of what could/should have been. And yet it's the best images I have made thus far because the
Kestral Buzzard is sharper than I have managed to get in the past, it's more detailed than I have managed to achieve and, best of all, it has the highest number of keepers I have ever recorded.
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It did not start great, the
Kestral Buzzard was hiding on the opposite side of a tree I was approaching while I was walking my little (dog) Princess. I was hoping to see one but my expectations were very low, that's why my shutter speed was not fast enough for a bird of this size, 1/1000 sec is the bare minimum I would have preferred and I should have had 1/2000 or even 1/4000.
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Luckily the
Kestral Buzzard doubled back and it was coming towards me and I only ever had a few of these opportunities where it would fly that close to me, it got about 10 meters away in front of me. Trying to keep the framing good was a bit of a struggle because I didn't realise at that time, I had the APS-C crop on so I was tracking it with the equivalent of a 750mm Field of View (3.2
° Diagonally).
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It is rare for me to keep so many pictures in a burst (once I got a few different angles and movements and a few crop factors I would delete the rest) but I am so awestruck to see a keep rate (in this case) of 90% when it got so close that I can see the colour of its eyes I just wanted to edit and keep all of them ( even though some are redundant because the position of the wings is very close to each other it's basically the same picture but with a slightly different background, more or less cloud in it).
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There is motion blur in the wings and even a bit in the bird's body, yet, it still holds a tremendous amount of details and even a bit of Depth of Field between the bird's head (which is where the AF tracker was on) and the wings, adding a bit of dimensionality to the image despite the f 6.7 aperture. (As long as I don't have my own home or own a car I will never drop over 10.000 £ for an f 2.8 or f 4 lens, that's just ridiculous pricing no matter what it takes to make that lens).
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Even with the 14 MP crop from APS-C mode engaged and cropping the image still, there are plenty of details. I sharpened the image, ran it through Topaz DeNoise AI with Clear profile, de-fringed the cyan artefacts from de-noising the image and oversaturated the eyes and the beak to bring back the brown and yellow colour, I am more than happy with the final output.
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As always, I do have to rant to Sony about not making the ASP-C mode being engaged more obvious because I did not realise it was until after looking at the playback and noticed it was 14 MP instead of 33 MP, like the red framing of the entire viewfinder when recording video there should be a more obvious marker (in colour?) of crop mode being active.
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But, the reason why the ASP-C mode is still useful and worth using is that once engaged the AF Tracking and even Real Time Eye Recognition is significantly more effective and responsive and I do believe it's because you are reducing the area needed to process and in effect doubling the processing that can go into tracking the subject. I do believe that for anyone who owns a telephoto lens wider than 600mm this is mandatory if you are tracking very small birds or birds from very far distances. I will test this further though I will be limited to confirming the effectiveness of lenses with 600mm or more focal length (teleconverters included or not) since Tamron 150-500mm f 5-6.7 is the longest lens I currently own.
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For me, this has been the most successful result I have gotten thus far from Sony a7 Mark IV's Real Time AF, Subject Recognition and Tracking. I am sure it would work even more efficiently with the likes of Sony FE 200-600mm f 5.6-6.3 or Sony FE 100-400mm f 4.5-5.6, but getting these results with a combination of less than 3.000 £ used is still impressive.
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This is the closest it got and I kept this image just as a visual representation of that because the
Kestral Buzzard was on the very edge of the frame (this is not cropped at all from 14 MP) and it tracked it incredibly well.
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It landed on the same tree it flew off from but on the side towards me. This is the 14 MP ASP-C crop.
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And this is similarly cropped from 33 MP (ASP-C mode disengaged), there's no loss of detail or any disadvantage in having the ASP-C mode enabled when the subject is less than 50% of the entire sensor area. You gain the benefit of a more confident and effective AF.
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This is as far as I would be willing to crop ... the
Kestral Buzzard was in shade (the sun was low on the horizon on the far right side of the frame) and the Eye AF was spot on in staying on his eyes.
