Seagulls

Testing out the Bird Eye Focus on the beach

Last night I decided to get out for a walk and headed to West beach here in New Bedford, as the temperature was fairly nice and at home it was hardly any wind at all.
But at the beach the wind was really gusting over 20 MPH gusting to higher or at least that's how it felt to me. plus the clouds quickly were fading away so I decided that it wasn't worth staying at the beach till sunset as I had originally planned.

^{Sony A7iv 240mm F6.3 1/2000 Sec ISO 1250}
^{Click here to view larger}

But as there were plenty of seagulls at the beach I thought I may as well try out the Birds Eye Autofocus on my new Sony A7iv and hence this post with a few shots of Seagulls

^{Sony A7iv 240mm F6.3 1/2000 Sec ISO 1600}
^{Click here to view larger}

I must say I was pretty impressed how good the Bird Eye auto focus worked, it looked onto the eye right away on most of the seagulls I aimed at and I got quite a few shots that were keepers.
I have bene frustrated in the past not getting any reasonable shots of birds, but I think from last nights tests and these shots I got I have a better chance this year

^{Sony A7iv 240mm F6.3 1/2000 Sec ISO 2500}
^{Click here to view larger}

I was using my Sony 24-240 lens for these shots, its a good lens for a Wide zoom range, but in some other ways not a great lens, I will have to try out some more shots of birds on the next nice day using my big Sony 150-600 lens, I kind of wished I had it with me last night but its a big heavy lens and in the wind it would have bene a struggle to hold it steady anyway.

^{Sony A7iv 240mm F6.3 1/2000 Sec ISO 500}
^{Click here to view larger}

So all in All so far with my few tests walks with the new camera I am pretty impressed, and think I have it all setup as I want it now.
It has three memory recall settings which I have setup two of them for now, one for action shots such as sport, not that I do sports photos often but maybe this year I will, and a second one setup for bird photography, so if I see a bird flying by I can quickly switch to memory recall two with a turn of a dial and be ready to catch shots of it, the third option I have setup for landscape photos

^{Sony A7iv 216mm F6.3 1/2000 Sec ISO 1600}
^{Click here to view larger}

Normally when I take shots of birds like I did last night for maybe 5 or 10 minutes I would struggle to find a few good shots but I got plenty last night these are just a few I quickly edited this morning