05 September 2008

Shooting on the wing

A ring-billed gull, fortuitously passing in front of the good light down one of the Metro Zoo's internal waterways and just in the very first part of the process of turning to lose altitude.
300mm with the Pentax DA 55-300; the above is scaled but shows the full frame.
Cropped to the gull but not scaled; the JPEGness of it all makes me sad, but this is too big to post in a non-lossy format.

This is a getting lucky sort of shot—look! a bird!—but they're not so rare that I have to wonder at the people complaining about Pentax autofocus.

2 comments:

orc said...

If you've got a lot of light, the Pentax autofocus is about the best thing in the world. It doesn't start to partake of dead bunnies until the light starts getting dim.

Graydon said...

Dim light is not so good, but it seems to need either really dim (like the sugar gliders) or a stealth target (like Aoife) to have problems.

And focus confirmation worked with the sugar gliders; little orange square and a chirp. Admittedly, it's hard to move the focus slowly enough that stopping when I notice the blink from the orange square leaves the focus in the right place.

The only other time I have problems is trying to get focus on the bird, rather than the many many leaves around the bird, and that's more a pointing issue (or sometimes a "the branch is moving in the wind" issue.)

And, yeah, it could be better, but from some of the forum comments you'd think it worked by rolling dice or something.