Very impressive results. I don't think I could manually focus a bird in flight at 100mm f/2.5 on a GH1. You did a great job of it!
Oh, you could! I'm not very good and I can. And you'd have to anyway. Well maybe not with a 100mm but with anything longer than that and/or smaller/faster birds AF just
will not work -
any camera with the equivalent FL. Maybe if you practice your arse off with a Wimberley gimbal head and your camera's tracking is the best in the industry then... But typically AF is a no go. I've heard many BIF shooters say the same thing too. My only wish in that the GH1 had 7 to 10 FPS in continuous mode! Then I could focus and also get enough frames/poses to have a nice selection! 3FPS with a max buffer of 3 shots sucks MAJOR nuggets!
Here's the GH1 with a FD 300 F/4L @ F/4 ~ F/5, manual focusing, manual tracking, manual exposure, all shown here at 90% ~ 100% cropped:
Jump out and hover for 0.8s
Extreme Diving
Landing after missing a fish. (you can tell he's pissed!)
Landing after missing another fish. (I could almost hear him cursing.)
The Takeoff.
Taking aim.
Target Acquired!
Success!
That was yummy!
Going for seconds!
I was down there again today too. There were 8 other guys shooting this little fellow. At around 4pm we all got together for some coffee and showed each other our results. Of the 9 of us all were manually focusing except one. The manual focusers all had 20 to 100 excellent shots. I had 17 - but I don't think they're excellent... they were in focus and the bird was in frame at least (about like these above). The AF shooter was using the Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0 L USM Lens on a 1.6 crop body. He had one in-foocus shot from 5 hours of shooting - though I dunno how many total shots he took. It could be that he only took one LOL but I'm pretty sure I heard his 6.5fps camera go off at least half a dozen times - just near me. I took a total of 26 shots of the king fisher but 9 of them were kinda like this (Next post):