today on the way to Where the Birds Are, I practiced in-flight technique. For those of you who don't know, I shoot with a Sony DSC-H5, which is an image stabilized super-zoom digicam. Autofocus can be frustrating at best.

anyway, I've figured out the settings and conditions that must be present for BiF on my camera, although I must admit that these are probably subject to change.

I usually shoot center point autofocus - this focuses on center point of the frame, recompose, open shutter. For BiF, I switched to standard AF, which has a very large reticle for focus - much easier to keep on target than the tiny crosshairs of center AF.

I turned IS off to prevent the camera from attempting to stabilize itself during panning.

I put the teleconverter on, and zoomed as far back as it would allow without vignetting - about 245mm or so. With the Tcon, that puts it out at over 300mm. I'll have to do the exact math later. In any case, it's plenty of telephoto for birds in flight. When zoomed this far back and with the AF setting changed, the AF works fast!! who knew that it could be fast? I certainly didn't. I was surprised and delighted to be able to get focus on something moving. I'm still working on the pan+shoot, but I did manage to nail a few today. These would be better if they were exposed properly, but I was just happy to get focus today. Exposure is tommorow's project :idea:











then some lady's dogs scared all of my seagulls into the lake, and I had to move on. Bummer, but at least it gave me more time Where the Birds Are.