Prompted by another thread where I said I didn't do bird photography, for two reasons, one I often don't know one brown bird from another and two, it's quite hard to get decent results, distant fuzzy feathered blobs don't cut much ice.
So I thought, well wait, I've got a half decent tele so surely I must be able to do better than that. Having a bird table in the back garden I thought this would be a good place to try. My first few attempts caused me to go back and re-calibrate the lens AF but no, it was in fact spot on already!
After that I examined things like depth of field at 200mm and F4/5.6 and shutter speed and realized that fine margins are at play here, cm in DOF at 5m distance and a continuing trade off of aperture, shutter speed and ISO. I ended up setting the camera to auto iso and using F4 for the available light and 1/750 shutter speed and I shot in clumps, re-composing and focusing on individual birds and shooting a small burst each time.
The picture below is what I was after in terms of focus and clarity, you can see the latticework of feathers which I often see in good bird pictures. Framing perhaps not, so please ignore my collapsing roof on the home made bird table and the washing line in the corner. And it's a juvenile Starling, I do know some brown birds.
This though was one of about 4 or 5 in decent focus out of a quick session of 30 shots. The one after this shot, the bird has moved slightly and it's chest is in focus but not the head, like I said, fine margins. My question then is this experience typical, that I can only expect a small percentage in focus out of a session and that the smallest movement can make a difference and this is already quite heavily cropped even though I was only 5m away with a 200 zoom, if so I think I'll leave bird photography to those who are good at it?
I used AFS by the way, AFC seemed to just continually creep the lens out of focus.
PS The picture looks a little softer in the Pentax Gallery, not sure why, I've attached a crop as well. The lighting was also quite flat as well.
Last edited by 3by2; 07-27-2021 at 01:17 AM.