Some beginner's experiments with an A350 (1 Viewer)

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.

I was a bit disappointed in a lot of the pictures I took of birds on the deck. Many of these weren't quite in focus or look a bit soft or noisy, despite sometimes favourable conditions. I got better results than expected of birds in flight. Not amazing, but manual focus isn't easy with moving birds. The good light no doubt helped.

Here are a few samples - the gulls are okay I think. The Velvet Scoter is rubbish of course, but it's good to know that I can get an IDable shot of one flying by offshore.

I took a few pictures using the Tamron at 300mm. When the sun was out these came out fairly well. When I've tried it in gloomier conditions the autofocus tends to 'hunt' a lot. Here are a couple of reasonable shots of obliging Rock Pipit and Woodpigeon. It's a nice compact, lightweight lens though and I think I'll use it quite a bit.

Andrew, the Tamron needs to be stopped down to F8-11 to get decent results I found. Can't comment on the Sigma, but some good results have been posted with the Sony 500mm F8 AF Reflex...

Getting some good results out of the A350 there!

carlj said:

Andrew, the Tamron needs to be stopped down to F8-11 to get decent results I found. Can't comment on the Sigma, but some good results have been posted with the Sony 500mm F8 AF Reflex...

Getting some good results out of the A350 there!

Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice Carl. I might have another go with the Tamron tomorrow. The Sony 500mm looks interesting, and I suspect is a bit better than the Sigma as it has autofocus.

I have got the Minolta version of the Sony 500mm mirror lens, it is now I believe out of production. To be honest your results with the Sigma mirror lens are not too bad especially some of the the bif ones it is still hit and miss with the Sony/Minolta AF mirror lens, just keep taking plenty of shots and some of them should be reasonable.
Len

Ex-friend.

Helenelizabeth2 said:

Ex-friend.

Click to expand...

Hey, I do say 'beginners' in the thread title. That's okay surely ?