Wedge tail eagle in flight

Another image shot at Healesville Sanctuary, using the Sony 70-200mm f/2.8 GM II lens on a 1.4x teleconverter on a Sony A7RV. Last one was the smallest Australian raptor, so let’s jump up to the largest. The last image was heavily cropped, this one is barely cropped: this is a crop from 9504 pixels wide to 8000. One thing the two images do share is the excellent focus achieved by the A7RV.

This was shot at ISO 1000 at f/5.6 at 280mm (full zoom on the lens x 1.4x TC), 1/2000. I’m processing these images using the most recent update of DxO PhotoLab version 5, which is the first to support the A7RV, although I am using none of the corrections that PhotoLab provides.

Nankeen kestrel in flight

This bird in flight was captured at Healesville Sanctuary, using the Sony 70-200mm f/2.8 GM II lens on a 1.4x teleconverter on a Sony A7RV. I have shown you other birds captured using this combination, but this shot is exceptional.

The A7RV is using a much slower sensor than the A1. The A1 sensor captures an entire frame in 1/260 of a second, courtesy of its stacked design. The A7RV sensor takes about 1/10 of a second to capture an entire frame, and the A7RV is doing a lot more with the data to be able to do its subject recognition.

So clearly it is completely unreasonable to expect the A7RV to do eye auto-focus on the tiniest raptor in Australia (this is a 140g bird), moving erratically at high speed. especially when the bird is tiny in the frame – correct? Er, no… What?? I won’t tell you that every shot is like this, because they aren’t. But the fact that this camera can pull this off at all is really impressive, and this wasn’t the only one.

I cropped this image from the full 9504×6336 all the way down to 2500×1666 – I am showing you the actual pixels captured around Rusty the kestrel. I’ll show you the full frame and this massive crop below. Click on the gallery to see the images larger. Please

This was shot at ISO 640 at f/5.6 at 280mm (full zoom on the lens x 1.4x TC), 1/2000. I have done minimal editing on the image. I want you to see what I saw when I zoomed in on this.

Osprey in flight

This bird in flight was captured at Healesville Sanctuary, using the Sony 70-200mm f/2.8 GM II lens on a 1.4x teleconverter on a Sony A7RV. The lens was at f/8, and this was shot at 1/2000, ISO 800. I am still learning how to use the A7RV to photograph birds in flight – I wonder if the A1 has made my skills rusty? The A7RV’s new AF isn’t as fast as the A1, but given a little time, can be more accurate.

I cropped this image from the full 9504×6336 down to 6000×4000 (keeping 24 megapixels from the original 60). I’ll show you the full frame below. Click on the gallery to see the images larger.