M43 Musings

Fri13 wrote:

Jim Salvas wrote:

woof woof wrote:

Fri13 wrote:

Jim Salvas wrote:

The very idea of shooting small and fast BIFs was unheard of until just a few years ago. Almost nobody could do this with anything other than the grainiest film and early DSLRs were incompetent at the task. But, better sensors came along, with longer, faster AF lenses

Not so. For decades there has been excellent wildlife photographers who have photographed birds in deep dark forests and so. The thing just is that majority of the people didn't hear about those photographers as they made the bird books and education books and even had own special meetings and were more like a war photographers who gathered together once a year to pick best photographers among them.

Now it is like people believe cameras does the tricks and every camera should do it just with push of a button.

While it is a fact that AF is radically improved, but there is huge difference when you give the same camera with same settings to photographer who have been working 30-40 years photographing birds and then for photographer who has been photographing people.

If all this is true what cameras were people using decades ago to get these results?

Personally I find my best MFT camera (GX7) better at higher ISO's than any 35mm film I ever used and quite possibly better than the early APS-C DSLR's I had... 300D, 10D, 20D.

Better photographers may get better pictures but there comes a point when the technology is a limiting factor and high ISO ability must be a limit when shooting in low light and wanting to capture fine details such as feathers?

No matter how good a photographer you are you're going to be tied to an aperture, shutter speed and ISO and the technical results the hardware gets you at these settings and no matter how good you are at stalking the bird and framing it you must be limited by the kit be it film or a digital sensor or even the limits of the processing software.

Very few people were able to shoot small, fast BIFs until recently. Just try to find any of those, even in National Geographic. The exceptions were usually elaborate flash traps. Birds on Branches (BOBs) were the order of the day.

Those were common, but so many had birds in flight, diagonally or horizontally. There are books from people doing those. And flash traps were not allowed among nature photographers.

film just didn't have the capability to shoot fast and clean and, as I said, even digital wasn't that capable until recently. Just think. How long has even FF had clean ISO 6400? Two years?

Clean!? What is this disease of everything needing to be perfectly "clean"?

i get it that birders want more and I applaud them for pushing the envelope. That will give me better gear in the future, as well as keep some lens manufacturers in business.

Well there are wedding photographers (thanks to 85mm) and portraiture (thanks to 135mm) and even streets photographers (thanks to 35-50mm) that has pushed all other gear as well.

But we have again some people pushing "small and light" envelope...

OK, so show me a photo of a small, fast BIF under less than full sun that was taken 10 years ago and isn't grainy or noisy. I maintain this is something relatively new. It is now considered the norm, but how long has that been so?