Pål Jensen wrote:
Tom wrote:
I finally switched to my 200mm lens (the longest autofocus lens I have)
and that didn't do any better. The camera couldn't focus fast enough to
handle the job. This is the first situation I've run into where my MZ-S
couldn't handle the job.
Strange. My MZ-S has no problem focusing birds in flight with both my 200 and 600mm lenses.
The MZ-S is definietly faster than SAFOX V, used in the 645N. According to Andy Rouse, the wildlife photographer, his Pentax 645NII gets just as many keepers as the AF on his EOS-1v.
I'm sure my technique could be improved but I'm not sure how.
My 600mm lens is the f/5.6 manual focus one.
I started by prefocusing the lens to a distance that I thought would
give me a good shot, putting the camera in focus AFS mode then I held
the shutter button down and tracked the birds from left to right or
right to left hoping one would come into focus and trigger the shutter.
It just didn't happen. The birds were flying too fast and I couldn't
keep that center AF sensor on them long enough to trip the shutter.
I felt like one of those WWII gunners trying to hit the enemy planes
zooming by. My Manfrotto 3421 head really helped that illusion:
http://www.adorama.com/BG3421.html?searchinfo=bogen%203421&item_no=2
but may have been part of the problem.
I then tried holding the shutter button down, tracking the birds and
focusing at the same time thinking that would improve my chances but the
shutter never fired that way either.
That's when I went to the 200/4 AF lens. The birds only took a couple
seconds to fly across my field of view and the lens couldn't focus fast
enough to get the shot before the subject was gone.
I've used my SO's Canon USM lenses and, in my experience, they focus
much faster than the Pentax system.
I've been thinking about a Canon body to lighten our load on our
motorcycle trips anyway. If I had a Canon body then we'd only have to
carry lenses for one system instead of two. This experience just added
another reason to pick one up.
Tom Reese
