taking flight

Practice doesn’t make perfect, our kids frequently remind us — it makes progress! After getting a taste of his new camera’s capabilities, D took advantage of the Thanksgiving weekend to put it to a proper field test. He visited multiple birding hotspots on Thursday and Friday, chased down a furtive Costa Rican endemic on Saturday, and brought the camera along on a family hike to the Iral cloud forest — a beautiful private reserve right outside San Jose we just learned about and checked out on Sunday.

Shooting some 5,000 images over the course of the holiday weekend went a long way toward helping D work out the basics of his new camera’s many advanced features. The next challenge is to build up muscle memory. The Z8’s computational capacity is extensive, but so is the range of possible auto-focus shooting modes. The best way to acquire proficiency — and learn how to quickly switch between the various options — is to practice. There were times over the weekend when D realized mid-shot he was using sub-optimal settings. Clicking through the various modes to get to the settings he wanted ate up precious seconds, in some instances costing him the shot he wanted. This is a correctable problem, but will surely take some time.

Even after only a handful of days shooting with the Z8, a couple of positives stood out instantly. First, this new camera captures a ton more detail than D’s recently retired DSLR. This means it is possible to crop the raw images more aggressively without fear of losing resolution — an incredibly helpful improvement since there are times one must shoot skittish birds either from a great distance or from a significant height disadvantage (think warblers flitting around the very top of the forest canopy). This also helps with our blog. For years, D has resized his photos prior to posting them here, which robbed the images of some detail. Because he now starts out with a significantly higher pixel count, the resized photos benefit from appreciably greater resolution.

Even more exciting is the Z8’s ability to track rapidly moving subjects. The new camera is significantly faster at locking onto flying birds, for example, than D’s old DSLR had been. And this is before activating the Z8’s pre-capture mode, which records up to one second’s worth of images before one releases the shutter. The trick is that the camera must be set to an ultra high fps (30 frames per second or more). D had neglected to read the fine print on the fps, and so has yet to benefit from this feature despite thinking — erroneously, it turned out — that he had enabled it.

The camera’s animal detection software isn’t perfect, of course, but it is perhaps the Z8’s most valuable feature for wildlife photographers. Many a time with the DSLR, D had thought he had captured a perfect photo only to realize once he transferred the image to his computer that his camera had latched onto some part of the bird — the wing, the chest, etc. — while leaving the face just a touch out of focus. The Z8, when set to animal detection mode, is primed to search for the eye and to lock focus on it, resulting in much crisper wildlife photos. All of this means that even in the hands of a relative mirrorless neophyte like D, shooting birds in flight is a pure joy, as you can appreciate from these images.

Pictured from top to bottom: crested cararaca, royal tern, brown pelican, great egret, blue-winged teal.