[stoppingdown]

At this point of the year I sincerely hoped to have a sounder statistics basis... Unfortunately in the wildlife sanctuaries I have currently at hand it seems they used a vacuum cleaner on the sky, since there's a never-seen-before scarceness of birds. Sure, August is the worst period, but I've been here in this month for almost 40 years and have photo statistics for about 10, and I've always been luckier. There's also a resident population of pink flamingoes, in the hundreds in this period, but this year they have decided to stay well far from watching people. Probably they have been disturbed - people managing the sanctuary say that wildboars got really aggressive in the peripheral areas, which are those open to the public.

 

But at least there are common sandpipers. They are small, shy, fly fast and in an erratic way, so I hadn't them in mind for the first tests... but I had to do with what was available.

 

I was able only to shoot two bursts so far. Continuous AF, of course, then all boils down to the tracking modes. The burst with "Zone" mode (which should be one of the best tracking option, taking advantage of what Sony calls "4D-FOCUS") was a total failure: no sharp pictures, even close. The burst with "Flexible spot, large sensor" mode delivered 20% of reasonably sharp pictures. Composition is poor, because the bird gave me the ass view  , but that's another matter.

 

Considering that I was sitting on a moving boat, the light was low (near the sunset), it's a good start. BTW, AF-C isn't officially supported by Sigma, but the feature seems to be there (I could see the cursors in the EVF tracking the subject). Reading around I see that a few other people tried it and confirmed the feature is there. Probably is just half-baked, so Sigma doesn't declare it, waiting for a firmware upgrade (which Sigma hinted about).

 

Details: Sony α6000 + Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 C @ 562 mm, 1/800 sec @ Æ’/11, ISO 800, AF-C, Flexible Spot L mode, 50% crop, hand-held.

 

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