Once I returned home I tried it again, this time with the right settings, and what a difference! Thousands of perfectly sharp pictures with what I calculated to be a 97% hit rate. These were shot at 1/250th of a second fine for travel photography but should have been 1/2000th of a second for BIF. The other inappropriate setting? I was so focused on shooting the birds (and making sure I had underexposed enough) that I forgot to set the camera to a fast enough shutter speed. Later I discovered that I had two inappropriate settings that prevented usable BIF shots: The AF Track Sens(itivity) feature tells the camera how long to wait before trying to refocus in AF-C mode it was set to the factory default of 3 (standard) when it should have been set to 5 (responsive). I blame this on myself for using unfamiliar equipment – the camera had arrived just days before I left on a one-month trip, and I hadn't had time to go through all the menus and configure everything just the way I wanted. This first attempt was disastrous, since just about all of the in-flight shots I got were either out of focus, blurry, or both.
(See last month's blog post for some of the more successful shots from that outing.) My first attempt was on an uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland, where we were shooting puffins. Since I'm working on a book on the A9, it's customary for me to put the camera through its paces.
( A technically difficult feat to perform!) That changed with the new Sony A9, the first mirrorless camera that claims to be able to match the performance of the flagship bodies from the big boys. Up until now Sony has never had a reputation for doing it as well as Nikon or Canon. I've always considered Birds In Flight (BIF) to be the acid test of a camera's autofocus system – more so than just tracking an Olympic athlete, whose motion can be extrapolated and predicted to a certain degree.
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