So I recently acquired a Sony A350 together with a variety of lenses. I was buying someone else's full kit, so didn't have any choice over the lenses, but a couple of them are potentially useful for bird photographs. These are a Tamron f4-5.6 70-300mm and a Sigma f8 600mm mirror lens. These wouldn't necessarily be the lenses I would buy if I was building up from scratch but I like the fact that they're inexpensive (the camera, four lenses and lots of other bits of kit was less than £600, most of it nearly new) and that each can fit into a coat pocket (okay I know that's not really how you should carry them).
Anyway, I went out around Girdle Ness today to see what I could do with it all. The light was sometimes very good, but it was also quite cloudy some of the time. I took a lot of shots, all as JPEGs. The results were inevitably a bit mixed but I got some reasonable pictures in amongst a lot of out-of-focus stuff.
I mostly used the mirror lens, mainly because I wanted to see how easy it would be to get reasonable shots with it. This lens is manual focus, and that's certainly a limitation. The IS in the Sony camera is a bit of a help with handholding. I mostly shot at either 400ISO if the sun was in or 200ISO if it was brighter.
My expectations in some ways are not really high, given the low cost of the lenses, the lack of good light in Scotland, and the limitations of mirror lenses. I'm mostly quite happy if I'm able to get some record shots that are helpful for ID. I got a few pictures that I think are at least 'quite good', such as the ones attached. All have been processed a bit (mostly just a bit of brightening and sharpening). The peculiar bokeh is a bit of a feature with mirror lenses and it's quite noticeable on many of the pictures I took. I don't mind the doughnuts too much, but some of the other effects are a bit strange. The camera and lens also produces quite noisy images at 400 ISO.
Anyway, I went out around Girdle Ness today to see what I could do with it all. The light was sometimes very good, but it was also quite cloudy some of the time. I took a lot of shots, all as JPEGs. The results were inevitably a bit mixed but I got some reasonable pictures in amongst a lot of out-of-focus stuff.
I mostly used the mirror lens, mainly because I wanted to see how easy it would be to get reasonable shots with it. This lens is manual focus, and that's certainly a limitation. The IS in the Sony camera is a bit of a help with handholding. I mostly shot at either 400ISO if the sun was in or 200ISO if it was brighter.
My expectations in some ways are not really high, given the low cost of the lenses, the lack of good light in Scotland, and the limitations of mirror lenses. I'm mostly quite happy if I'm able to get some record shots that are helpful for ID. I got a few pictures that I think are at least 'quite good', such as the ones attached. All have been processed a bit (mostly just a bit of brightening and sharpening). The peculiar bokeh is a bit of a feature with mirror lenses and it's quite noticeable on many of the pictures I took. I don't mind the doughnuts too much, but some of the other effects are a bit strange. The camera and lens also produces quite noisy images at 400 ISO.