Sony A1 Bird Eye AF: Turkey and Chicken (sorry, no turducken)
Related: Animal Eye AF, Bird Eye AF, Eye AF, Roy P, Sony, Sony A1, Sony mirrorless
This page looks at bird Eye AF of the Sony A1 using AF-C focusing handheld in the outdoors, with a turkey and a chicken at relatively close distance. Sorry, no turduckens, and sorry if these aren’t sexy enough, but these birds don’t give a flying.
Sony A1 Bird Eye AF: Turkey and Chicken
Includes 9 frames of Mr Turkey and a chicken.
Sony A1 + Sony FE 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 GM OSS @ 400mm
RAW: LACA corrected, +60 Shadows, -67 Highlights, +20 Whites, +10 Dehaze, +10 Clarity, Chroma NR {8}
[low-res image for bot]
Roy P writes:
For lack of a more interesting bird, I took a few crow shots hand-held with my Sony FE 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 GM OSS. Whoever coined the term “as the crow flies” evidently never attempted any photos of a crow in flight. These are not easy to shoot – they are surprisingly fast and don’t give much of a warning they’re about to fly.
Compared to my Sony A9 II and the Sony A7S III, the A1 felt a great deal easier to acquire and retain focus as the crows flew around. I got a lot of shots like the one below, which were like 33-35 MP crops. That is a huge improvement over what I would have obtained with an A9 / A9 II: about 10-12 MP crops. So the real resolution upside from the A1 is like 3x, when measured in terms of the net pixels yield.
A dark crow against a bright sky at dusk on an already cloudy day at shutter speeds of 1/4000 sec is about as bad as it gets for capturing details, so this was primarily an exercise to test the AF. So far, I’d say it’s pretty darned impressive.
DIGLLOYD: sounds about right.
