Kestrel In The Environment - Using Z9 Auto Capture

[agrumpybirdphotographer]

I had an opportunity in the last week to take some images of both Kestrels and Kingfishers at a couple of private sites in Yorkshire. The Kestrel site gave me a chance to try out the Z9 auto capture facility properly for the first time.

I had given it a go in the garden but without much success so I wasn’t holding out a lot of hope but using Steve’s excellent guidelines in his Z9/8 book. I gave it a whizz at the start and end of the session.

I used a 24-70mm @ 24mm and tried to capture a “Bird In The Landscape” type image.

TBH I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked, loads of “misses“ but quite a few hits as well.

Anyhoo just thought I’d share the experience of using auto capture.

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[NorthernFocus]

Nice job. I really like the first one.

 

[agrumpybirdphotographer]

Cheers Dan, appreciate it.

 

[Charles Loy]

AWESOME! Over the top nice - second is my fav

 

[agrumpybirdphotographer]

AWESOME! Over the top nice - second is my fav

Thanks very much Charles, very kind.

 

[BarkingBeans Coffee]

Great to see someone else giving it a go. I have had similar experiences with woodpeckers in my yard. How many frames did it rip off for you?

 

[agrumpybirdphotographer]

Great to see someone else giving it a go. I have had similar experiences with woodpeckers in my yard. How many frames did it rip off for you?

Lots, I went with the info in Steves book and went for one criteria only (motion). To be safe the speed was set to 1 (to capture mostly everything) and the size to 2 (again in line with the book). All the motion directions were enabled and the AF points masked as appropriate to stop false triggers. Finally I set Rec Time to 2 s, with a Wait gap of 1s that seemed to give around 31 frames a burst at the set shutter speed. So as the bird was moving about ALOT of frames.

All in all I was actually quite impressed once I kinda got my head around things. Would I use it a lot, probably not but if I have similar opportunities in future I may well give it another go just to try something different.