Some very busy Chipping Wrens...Z8 and 600mm pf at just about MFD

[MotoPixel]

I have some feeders in a small tree outside my kitchen window with some large rocks directly below and a variety of birds do cleanup duty on what the others kick out of the feeder. I was doing some testing of the AF focus speed and sensitivity settings to figure out a good balance for very active subjects like these wrens...they're never still, as you can see. Ended up with AF speed at +2 and sensitivity at 3. Normally, I have the AF speed set at 0 or less so as not to have really abrupt focus changes, but with these, I could probably go faster.

In spite of the 600pf not having a very short MFD, as you can see, it was plenty short for these small birds and other smaller subjects.

This clip was shot in 4.1K NRAW at 60fps and mastered in Resolve to UHD HDR. HDR version will probably not be live for as much as 24 hours, but it's viewable in 4K SDR now.

Cheers!

 

[Dave63401]

Interesting video. They really moved on you a bunch. Do you remember the shutter speed you used?

 

[MotoPixel]

Interesting video. They really moved on you a bunch. Do you remember the shutter speed you used?

Thanks, I'm going to shoot some of the other birds that frequent those rocks when I have the time and similar lighting. I appreciated it being a somewhat hazy sunshine that softened the lighting substantially.

I shot all these clips at 60fps, so used 1/125 for shutter speed and f11 aperture, with auto ISO. Was right on the edge of having to use an ND filter, which I really did not want to do. My only current means to do that with the 600mm is with 100mm square filters and a Formatt-HiTech filter holder kit...kind of a pain to set up for casual use. Wish it had a drop-in filter slot!

The HDR version is live, finally...YT takes anywhere from a few hours to 24 hours to process...on Vimeo it usually takes an hour or two, max. Of course that makes no difference unless you have an HDR display or watch on a phone with HDR display.