All the gear II

I went out again this morning to try a few new settings. In addition to continuing to muck about with focus I specifically wanted to try RAW vs JPEG, and whether auto ISO was a realistic possibility. So what did I learn? Well I learned that the ISO performance of this little box of tricks is way better than my 13 year old Canon. But it also seems variable, with noise that is inconsistent, for instance a shot taken at 3200 seems to be cleaner that one taken at 1250. I think it must be related to the clarity and/or tone of the background, with a clean green (such as in the image below) behaving much better that a textured brown. I also discovered that there is no point using auto ISO on aperture priority mode. The camera seems to think that 1/500s is a sufficient shutter speed when the lens is at 600mm (900mm equiv), and whilst I don't doubt that the combination of the in-body and lens stabilisers do a terrific job, quite a few of the images came out distinctly soft as a result of the movement of the bird rather than any uncompensated-for movement at my end. It is another murky day here which does not help, but clearly shutter priority is going to be the way to go with a slow lens like this as it will almost always be used wide open hence what's the point in AV? I would rather have control of another part of the equation knowing that f6.3 is what the camera will set. I need to go and test whether this assumption is correct, but I expect that it will be. EDIT - it is.

900mm, 1/500s at f6.3, ISO 3200, handheld. Sharpened and then converted to jpeg and resized to 1000px wide

In terms of focus, it does seem that zone focus works best with birds where you want to be more precise about what bit of the bird you focus on. Once you are locked on to an area the camera does a decent job of staying on that area even when you pan slightly. Eye recognition, whilst wonderfully clever, isn't quite at the level it needs to be and the eye needs to be pretty obvious for it to be able to pick it. It worked on close Egyptian Geese but didn't work on medium range Tufted Ducks. I have no idea if this is because there isn't a specific bird eye algorithm (the choice is between human and animal) or whether I'm not doing something correctly. My Canon shooting style was single central focus point on the eye and then recompose, so perhaps I'll revert to something like that.

Another lightbulb moment was using the zoom functionality for birds in flight. I have discovered that I can set the lens at its widest 200mm setting (300mm in real terms) to easily acquire the bird in the frame and focus on it, and then zoom up to 600mm (900mm!) retaining focus all the while before taking the shot. The camera sticks to a bird against a clear sky like glue, it is very impressive. My Canon used to lose it, hunt in and out, and my keeper rate was very poor. I see this improving things dramatically.

Since yesterday I've also downloaded a basic file viewer and RAW editor, a Sony freebie called Imaging Edge. It has sharpening, cropping, levels, curves and basic noise reduction, but doesn't have a clone stamp tool or easy ways of doing anything more sophisticated. But I'm not very happy at the way that this program produces JPEGs. I think the issue may be the order in which I am doing things, but I don't seem to have a choice. The image always looks better in the software than it does once I see the JPEG on the web - I've got two screens and can look at them side by side and there is a clear difference. The free Canon software I'd been using, Digital Photo Professional, was the same. What a shame that a Windows update killed the copy of Adobe Photoshop CS2 I had for many years. I remember that within CS2 I resized first, then performed three rounds of sharpening, and only then converted, and that seemed to produce better results. And I built it all into a repeatable macro so it was just one click. At the moment I can only resize at the point of conversion and I suspect you lose something doing it this way. But then again neither of these free tools ought to be able to match Photoshop or an equivalent. Anyway I am a bit stuck and will probably have to spend some money. But at least I now have a program that can convert a Sony RAW into something else and has some useable sliders. If suppose if I really wanted the workflow from hell I could covert the files into TIFF and then export them to a portable hard drive that I could then plug into my laptop which still has a working copy of CS2 on it as I disabled the update, and from there I could do everything I wanted. I think I'd rather spend money though for the sake of ease!

As above, but then 20% sharpening on the 1000px jpeg output.