First thing this morning I found myself taking photos of birds in flight (BIF). The first sequence I shot was 58 images. Since I was a long ways away and we didn’t have enough light for much shutter speed, the results aren’t perfect, but focus seems to started and stayed consistently on the bird’s head.
Of course, this is bird against sky, the easiest of the focus system chores. We’ll get to bird against busy background soon enough.
With birds going away from you—why are you still holding down the shutter release?—the camera can no longer see the eye, but the Z9 is still staying focused on the bird, typically a wing or the body. If you have even a little bit of depth of field you’d probably find that to be good results, too.
With an absurdly small Pied Kingfisher, the real test started. Facing me, good. Facing away from me, the tail feathers is where the Z9 focused.
When the Pied was in the sky, the camera had no trouble figuring out he was the subject and focusing on the head (or tail feathers in the case of facing away). On his dive, two problems arose. First, me anticipating the dive (hey, I’m two years out of practice at that!), and more importantly: he dove through a busy background. Fairly consistently the Z9 lost him. Not always, but consistently. I suppose if we could have been closer and I had a gimbal head instead of handholding 500mm, the results might have been better.
On the other hand, if there were more than one Pied in my frame, the Z9 picked the nearer one pretty consistently.
I should point out that getting a Pied in full dive, let alone hitting the water and getting a fish, is a real test of the photographer as well as the camera. We adjusted our angle so that the Pieds were diving through a slightly less busy background. The Z9 did better, often holding the bird. But now I was having a problem with the water hit: other birds on the water were getting in my way!
With flocks of bird in flight, I saw the focus system jumping around a bit as they approached. Mostly I’d say that the Z9 would hang on the nearest bird, but there are some odd lapses where it went to another bird momentarily. Granted, these birds were fairly distant as I began the sequence, and as they approached I was starting to crop out some of the flock and adjust my composition. Still, it should be noted that the Z9 under detault Tracking Lock-On settings will sometimes jump to another bird in the group. I’m not yet sure if I can characterize when or why it does that, but, of course, you can adjust the tracking if this becomes a problem.
Overall, I spent quite a bit of time at one pond where the bird activity was high. I had plenty of opportunities to photograph birds taking off and coming in for landings, chasing after fish, squabbling with one another, and just generally doing bird things. Overall, the Z9 made my job easier than it tended to be with the DSLRs, just doing the right thing quickly more often than not, but also allowing me to get in and override.
Funny thing was, while sitting photographing the birds, another animal came along to give me some testing practice: lions.
Let’s just say this: the Z9 has no trouble at all detecting lions, and going to their eyes (if they’re open). I suspect all of you with cats as pets will find the same thing, but the distinct brown color of the lions against all the green currently in the Botswana environment probably made it very easy for the Z9 to detect. Note that I wrote earlier that sometimes the Z9 would bounce between ear and eye on the leopard. That’s some of that animal’s natural camouflage confounding the system. No such thing happens with the lions.
Since I had three lions to play with, obviously there were groupings that happened. The natural tendency of the Z9 is to focus on the nearest lion when it’s seeing more than one. Sometimes you’ll get the “go to other eye” prompt at the side of the focus detect box, sometimes not. That part I haven’t figured out yet.
Many of you have asked whether or not you can see focus confirmation in AF-C when you press the AF-ON button (or shutter release for those of you aren’t setting your camera right ;~). The answer is yes, but you have to turn that option on.
Meanwhile, back at the BIFs, I’m noticing other things. No, maybe busy backgrounds aren’t as big a problem as they were with the Pied. With the big birds dipping down towards the ground and filling the frame—or at least filling more than a small number of pixels of the frame—if the camera was focused on the bird before the dip, it stayed on the bird while a busy background was scrolling by. I’d also say that the steadier you can keep the bird framed in that situation, the more you’ll get the right result.
New Animals: egrets, kingfishers, eagles, kites, and a host of other birds, lion, jackal, hippo
Birds: No issues. Camera usually detects head or eyes if it sees a beak. No visible beak and it might go elsewhere on the bird.
Lions: No issues. Eyes easily detected if open, otherwise it goes to the face.
Jackal: No issues. Same as lion.
Hippo: Well, the Z9 knows about where the subject is, but no, it doesn’t seem to particularly recognize the hippo. You’ll get “side of body” type focus most of the time. I’ll have to spend some more time in close and head on to hippos to be sure.
