Here, another test, this time it was taken with a 35mm f2 lens (yes, you read correctly, a 35mm lens for action
) on a full frame camera. Real world tests with a bird that is flying with a lot more than 1m/s. Given the fact that even in Monte Carlo I wasn't interested in landscapes, I saw this seagull circling the area and I thought, why not take some shots of it for testing af with a wide angle lens, which is challenging for various reasons?!
Below it's a series of 7 images straight out of camera from a burst taken with a camera that has 7fps (5D Mark IV) so it's a burst of one second. Settings were 1/2500s, f5.6, ISO set to Auto. The focus could have jumped right away to the crane seen in the background because it's bigger than the seagull, it's on the route of the seagull also and it's more contrasting so easier to fool the af system...
Image No. 1
Print screen of the Image No. 1 zoomed at 100% (you can see in the left corner of Photoshop window that is zoomed at 100%)
Image No. 2
Print screen of the Image No. 2 zoomed at 100%
Image No. 3
Print screen of the Image No. 3 zoomed at 100%
Image No. 4
Print screen of the Image No. 4 zoomed at 100%
Image No. 5
Print screen of the Image No. 5 zoomed at 100%
Image No. 6
Print screen of the Image No. 6 zoomed at 100%
Image No. 7
Print screen of the Image No. 7 zoomed at 100%
And below it's the same bird photographed with the same camera, lens and settings the second time she flew towards me. I went for one shot following the bird in the viewfinder until she came close enough to me to take the shot and fill the frame with the bird.
I tried so hard yesterday to find on my hard drives bursts of images with so bad keeper rate as the german lab results were and I gave up because as I said, it's hard to beat those poor results shooting in real life conditions. So, if people ignore all the real life images posted by me and Ian Stuart Forsyth and make a case with a lab test, then photography world gone completely mad and now I'm not wondering anymore why DPreview and Youtube influencers gain so much popularity with their lab tests or paid reviews...
Next time someone asks about a good camera for action we should recommend Leica-T because it blows competition in terms of tracking with it's contrast detect af.
And we can't be blamed for our recommendation either because we have a german lab print screen as an irrefutably argument.
Last edited by Dan Rentea; 03-21-2020 at 06:08 AM.