Bird Photography

a ducks rear-end sticking up out of the water
200-600mm G / Sony A7R IV

First time out birding and all I got was this duck’s ass.

I didn’t write about this in my offline journal, but to be fair, there was a lot going on. Yesterday, my company announced a 15% layoff via email. I was not impacted. I will not go into details. Needless to say work has been weird. One thing that happened on this day is a package was delivered containing a Sony 200-600mm lens.

I recently sold my Nikon that I use for scanning and replaced it with a new-to-me Sony A7R IV. I chose this camera for a handful of reasons. One is to use it for scanning up to (eventually) 4x5 large format negatives, utilizing its pixel shift feature. Another was to finally take a crack at bird photography. Something I’ve wanted to try for a very long time, but never had the means to acquire the equipment. And I wasn’t about to let a camera like that be used strictly for scanning negatives.

There was a lot of back and forth between the 200-600mm G and the 100-400mm G master lens. The latter may produce slightly sharper results, but I wanted the reach more than the (barely?) difference in quality or sharpness. So after a lot of YouTube videos and a good copy finally popping up used for a decent deal, I pulled the trigger.

And honestly? I absolutely love it. After getting certain settings down, of course. Which took a while and more YouTube videos. Modern cameras are…a lot. One thing I’d like is a black pro mist filter for it, but the filter size is so huge that this particular filter in that size is a bit costly. Maybe one will pop up on KEH or eBay.

The optical image stabilization is good enough that I don’t need a tripod 💪, however, a monopod in the future may be a decent investment. I’m sure there are some insane tripod/monopod + head combinations that make bird photography an absolute breeze compared to handheld shooting. Maybe someday.

So, since work was basically on pause due to the chaos mentioned above, I took a break and headed to a nearby park.

a great blue heron bird walking on top of sticks and a turtle in a marsh
200-600mm G / Sony A7R IV

That poor turtle.

Not terrible for a quick outing. There will be a lot more bird photos on the site, I’m sure. It’s a lot of fun. It’s the most fun I’ve had doing photography in a long time.