arbitrage wrote: speedmaster20d wrote:
The bird eye detection is a gimmick by definition IMO . How is it going to help with a shot like the one below ? Is it going to be able to detect the eye of a peregrine zipping through? What If the bird is small ? What if the membrane is closed ?
With all due respect all those guys pointing their camera like that will end up with a steep angel, under-belly shot with bad light angle, cluttered and ugly BG. They will get the same junk no matter what grear they are using. A waste of time and lots of deletes. I am sorry but they are clueless from the way they are pointing their cameras. I am sure you agree
This happens pretty often in my area too and usually when I see a crowd like that I know that I should not bother ...just annoying ....
Don't get me wrong. I can imagine the feature working in some situations and nice to have but as a bird photographer it will not sway me one way or the other. In some cases I don’t even want the focus to be right on the eye because the rest of the body might become OOF and soft. I'd prefer whole subject tracking like the Sony's but I would like it to be more reliable for various situations
My 2 cents
The eye part on the R5 is more useful for the perched birds. It usually doesn't narrow down to the eye on the flight ones unless a larger heron or such.
I should probably have phrased my statement better....it is more the head detect on the R5 that I found to be very useful for BIF. Keeping the focus away from the near wing and less likely to drift backwards on the neck/body/tail. I'm pretty sure that the head detect would have kept on the spinning head of the tern but never got an opportunity like that to try it out on. It did keep on the heads of waders if they turned away from me and even when they submerged the head foraging past the eyeball. With a half eye above the water line the R5 would snap back to eye-detect.
That said, it is just another tool in the toolbox and the A9 has a pretty uncanny ability to stick on the head vs other body parts even without specific head/eye detect. And with RTT you can basically turn the A9 into head-detect tracking by starting your tracking on the head...just not easy to do for BIF.
The A9 seems to do a good job of tracking the head area. for that shot I did use focus tracking (zone with tracking) and the green frame was on the head area when I snapped. I just wish the tracking mode was reliable under all conditions, it will never be 100% just because there are infinite variables in the field. I am sure it will improve with time. If Sony made this tech almost 5 years ago who knows what they have in the works now. I no longer have any Canon lenses, but if I run into someone with R5 I would like to try it and see how it works.
arbitrage wrote: speedmaster20d wrote:
The bird eye detection is a gimmick by definition IMO . How is it going to help with a shot like the one below ? Is it going to be able to detect the eye of a peregrine zipping through? What If the bird is small ? What if the membrane is closed ?
With all due respect all those guys pointing their camera like that will end up with a steep angel, under-belly shot with bad light angle, cluttered and ugly BG. They will get the same junk no matter what grear they are using. A waste of time and lots of deletes. I am sorry but they are clueless from the way they are pointing their cameras. I am sure you agree
This happens pretty often in my area too and usually when I see a crowd like that I know that I should not bother ...just annoying ....
Don't get me wrong. I can imagine the feature working in some situations and nice to have but as a bird photographer it will not sway me one way or the other. In some cases I don’t even want the focus to be right on the eye because the rest of the body might become OOF and soft. I'd prefer whole subject tracking like the Sony's but I would like it to be more reliable for various situations
My 2 cents
The eye part on the R5 is more useful for the perched birds. It usually doesn't narrow down to the eye on the flight ones unless a larger heron or such.
I should probably have phrased my statement better....it is more the head detect on the R5 that I found to be very useful for BIF. Keeping the focus away from the near wing and less likely to drift backwards on the neck/body/tail. I'm pretty sure that the head detect would have kept on the spinning head of the tern but never got an opportunity like that to try it out on. It did keep on the heads of waders if they turned away from me and even when they submerged the head foraging past the eyeball. With a half eye above the water line the R5 would snap back to eye-detect.
That said, it is just another tool in the toolbox and the A9 has a pretty uncanny ability to stick on the head vs other body parts even without specific head/eye detect. And with RTT you can basically turn the A9 into head-detect tracking by starting your tracking on the head...just not easy to do for BIF.
The A9 seems to do a good job of tracking the head area. for that shot I did use focus tracking (zone with tracking) and the green frame was on the head area when I snapped. I just wish the tracking mode was reliable under all conditions, it will never be 100% just because there are infinite variables in the field. I am sure it will improve with time. If Sony made this tech almost 5 years ago who knows what they have in the works now.
Sep 02, 2020 at 04:48 PM
Previous versions of speedmaster20d's message #15335917 « Where is the birds eye AF and a new menu? »
I am sure you agree 