[stoppingdown]

"You were very lucky to come across so many vultures flying close enough to fill the frame at 200mm."

Definitely. Too bad I was lucky in a bad moment.    Maybe I'd have preferred next year, when I'll be more experienced with Sony AF and I'll presumably own an a6300 with better AF tracking.  ^_^ 

The difference between F8 and F11 in terms of depth of field is not great at long focal lengths, so with multiple birds you are only going to get one bird in perfect focus, you just have get the right one.  
 

 

Some birds were really close, but you're probably right. Next time (who knows when?) I'll try to set up the tripod and use the single focus point that I can control (like I did with my Nikon D7000).

 

  The problem with vultures is their very dark undersides,

 

 

 

You don't know how lucky I've been... The sun was low enough, at my back and the birds did some "rolling" turn so to properly expose their undersides... I'm trying to post a couple of example shots (they are not yet the best ones in terms of sharpness, I've still to prune the final 300 70 ones).

 

Exposure was 1/400 with auto ISO that never went over ISO 320. I probably asked too much to OSS.

 

For A6000 I thought f8 with mc-11 makes more sense, f11 will throw the camera to contrast detection Af mode and focus more slowly 

 

 

Hell, there's always some apparently minor but important detail about the AF of the a6000 that I'm missing...