BIF. Sports Mode, Sony RX10iii

Least Tern in a dive. Sony RX10iii. Sports Mode.

When considering the Sony RX10iii, and trying to justify the price to myself, I wondered how it would work for Birds in Flight. The Sony HX400V I used to own had an excellent Sports Mode, that made Birds in Flight relatively painless…or as painless as BIFs can be (with is not very…BIFs are among the most frustrating of targets). I had been disappointed in the Sports Mode on the Nikon P series cameras…since the engineers at Nikon forgot to bias it toward the higher shutter speeds necessary for action. 🙁 I ended up creating my own fairly effective BIF mode, detailed here, and got some excellent results with both the P900 and the P610.

Still, I was looking forward to testing Sports Mode on the RX10iii. 600mm is a good “starting point” for bird photography, and, with big birds, will produce satisfying images.

The key to BIFs is finding the right location to practice. My best shots come from Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico (Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese) and the wild bird rookery at St. Augustine Alligator Farm in Florida (Wood Storks and Egrets)…both places where there are constantly birds in the air, and where you can learn to predict flight paths well enough to be ready for action. And that is the key to successful BIFs. Lots of birds flying, and lots of practice.

I will not be in New Mexico until November, and not in St. Augustine until next April, so two days this week I decided to hike 2 miles in and 2 miles out to the only place around home that offers lots of birds in the air…a Least Tern nesting site up the far end of one of our local beaches, on both sides of the Little River where it reaches the sea.

Not ideal for a first practice. Least Terns are tiny, fast, and unpredictable compared to Wood Storks, egrets, cranes, and geese…but needs must.

Sports Mode / Continuous Focus / Wide Area Focus / Continuous Shooting.

The first day was mostly practice and I had not completely figured out Sports Mode yet. By default, the RX10iii’s Sports Mode uses Wide Area Focus and Continuous Shooting, and locks the focus on the first half press of the shutter. If you shift to Speed Priority Continuous, the locking on the first frame behavior continues (though the frames per second goes way up!). Therefore I got a lot of shots that were focused where the bird was when I half pressed…but not where the bird was in subsequent shots.

A bit of study of the Function Menu options and the manual turned up other options. If you switch to Continuous Focus using the focus mode switch on the front of the camera, and keep it in regular speed Continuous Shooting, then the camera will focus between frames. You also have the option, when in Continuous Focus, to switch the Focus Mode to Wide Area Lock on Auto-focus, which, in theory, might, track your target between frames??? (I have yet to determine if that is really the way it works.)

The second day, the birds were much less active, but I got a chance to try Continuous Focus and Wide Area Lock on Auto Focus.

You must remember I was shooting Least Turns…among the most difficult BIF subjects you could possibly find. I will be happy to revise this when I have been to Bosque or St. Augustine and had bigger and slower birds to work with 🙂

With terns I had the most success with the Wide-Area Focus and Continuous Focus combination. If I could see the bird in the viewfinder, even if fuzzy, the camera would lock on focus and I could shoot a burst of at least 3 or 4 shots while the camera kept focus between frames. After 3 or 4 shots, generally the camera needed to hunt for focus and shooting paused, but then picked up again when focus was reestablished. The whole burst of shots would be sharply focused. Very good!

Very satisfying. Cropped to about 5mp.

With Wide Area Lock on Focus, the camera had more trouble picking up the tiny terns against the background of sky and clouds.

In both modes, the major frustration was that the camera wanted to pop out to infinity focus between bursts, largely I think, because the terns took up such a small portion of the frame that the system just could not find the target. When this happened the camera was so far out of focus that I could not even see the birds in the finder. If I swung down and focused momentarily on the middle distance, then swung back up, I could again see the birds, though not in focus…but then half pressing the shutter would lock focus on the bird and all was good for a burst. I think with larger birds this would have been much less of an issue. (When a Cormorant flew over, the camera easily “found” it against the sky and clouds without any intervention on my part.)

Going away!

600mm is not a lot of reach for small birds like terns. All my shots needed cropping for a decent image scale. While you can not use Clear Image Zoom in Sports Mode to extend the reach of the RX10iii, you can use the Smart Digital Tel-converter. For larger, easier to find and keep in the finder, birds than terns, I think the 10mp, 840mm option will be excellent. I got a few shots with that setting that showed real promise.

My conclusion: Even with difficult subjects, I got enough keepers to be really happy with the performance of the RX10iii for BIFs. I am very eager to give it a try where the birds are big and slow, relatively speaking.

Head on. One of the more difficult shots.

 

 

4 thoughts on “BIF. Sports Mode, Sony RX10iii”

  1. Thank you for this post. I am not really a bird photographer but am going to Bosque for the first time in January. Was considering renting a heavy rig, but based on your comments, I think I will give it a shot with my RX10 III. Cheers.

  2. Thanks for the information, I was looking for a info like that to make my mind, since I also love BIF.

    Regards

  3. Informative and helpful.
    I found the camera to be a “Hunter” birds that were large and filled 3/4 of the frame, were not “Locked” on. I use the words, “Huh, what’s that you want me to capture?” lol
    Anyway, I’ll have a look at the settings as prescribed here and will give it a go at Rondeau Provincial Park, Ontario Canada.
    My Nikon D500 will be my primary camera.

    Cheers

    Mike A Hodgson

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