Butterflies in focus
If you wanted to test insect eye auto-focus, represented in the A7RV’s menus by a butterfly, how could you resist visiting the Butterfly House at Melbourne Zoo? (Well, if you live thousands of kilometres from Melbourne, I guess you have an excellent excuse!)
Not all of these images were focussed on the butterfly’s eyes, but the AF picked up the butterflies in every case, putting a box around the butterfly, and in some cases refining that focus to the head of the butterfly.
These images were shot on the A7RV using the Sony 70-200 GM II, at f/4. I had the minimum shutter speed set to 1/2000, but only until the auto-ISO got up to 12800.
The first gallery is of butterflies perched, although some were still moving their wings. Click on the gallery to see the images larger.
f/4 1/2000 ISO 8000
f/4 1/1000 ISO 12800
f/4 1/2000 ISO 2500
f/4 1/2000 ISO 500
f/4 1/2000 ISO 5000
f/4 1/2000 ISO 1250
f/4 1/2000 ISO 1600
f/4 1/2000 ISO 4000
And now something I was not expecting to work! I tried tracking a pair of butterflies in flight. That’s a lot harder than tracking birds in flight, because butterflies do not fly smoothly – they flap wings that are far larger than their bodies.
These images were all shot at f/4 1/2000 and ISO 5000 or 6400. I’ve cropped them to remove distractions (in one image down to 3500×3500). You can see that in some of the images one butterfly is more sharply in focus than the other; I was not running tracking, just AF-C with Subject Recognition set to Insect.
Click on the gallery to see the images larger.
