Nikon Z8 Birds In Flight
A wildlife photography blog by Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire based landscape photographer Rob Thorley Photography.
I’m happy to report it’s only seven weeks since I was last out with a camera, and that was due to the pre-order backlog of the Z8, and nothing to do with my health.
For the first outing with the Z8 I headed over to Whitfield Valley nature reserve. The plan was to simply have a mess with the settings, and see what I got. For the most part I was trying out the 3D tracking with animal eye AF.
Typically there wasn’t too much in the way of action around the lake.
I’d only got the 100-400mm, and was shooting in DX mode. Not ideal, but it’s all I had. Settings wise I was shooting the birds in flight at 1/2000sec, f / 5.6 with auto ISO set. I’d set the burst rate at 10 fps to see how I got on.
Other than a few Herring Gulls (I think), and a Grey Heron there wasn’t much that went up into the air, or was close enough to me to have a practice on. It’s amazing though the speed at which you can rack images up when shooting bursts.
The images I’d got in focus were looking good on the back of the camera, and compared to my previous efforts with birds in flight I’d got a lot more images that were in focus. I’m pretty sure the failings were down to my technique, or lack of it, and the camera was performing admirably.
I was also trying to work on composition to get more room into the frame for subjects to be flying into. Something that seemed a bit easier to achieve with the 3D tracking.
I was impressed with the AF lock on some of the Grey Heron images. The heron happened to take-off whilst I was behind a bed of reeds, and for a few images I shot straight through reeds, and to my eyes the eye of the Grey Heron looked pretty good.
As well as the birds in flight I also managed to get what I’d call a few environmental images of the Grey Heron.
I was only out an hour, or so but very happy with my initial mess around. I’m looking forward to doing more wildlife, and getting to grips with a few different subjects. Especially when I can add the 180-600mm to my ever expanding lens collection.
You can view more images from my gallery of other wildlife.
