When I went out in search of photographic subjects today I got a bit more than I bargained for. Sitting in the sun with a vague idea of maybe photographing some seagulls I spotted a Wedgetail eagle! What an excellent time to be trying out my new camera’s AI Servo focus and multi-shot drive modes. AI Servo focus means that the focus intelligently follows the moving subject that the camera thinks you want to focus on. And to be fair, while there were a few misunderstandings between me and the camera (yes, I know there is a cyclist over there, why would I want to focus on him rather than the shiny eagle??), overall it did actually work pretty well. Certainly better than my previous attempts at photographing moving subjects.

The other thing that this camera setting does is take lots of shots in close succession. My old camera could only take four pictures in a row before wanting a break to write the stuff out to its card. This one rattled off several six-shot sequences in succession without batting an eyelid. 384 shots later (I didn’t count but I assume my camera can) I had a pretty decent shot, taken with a 75-300mm telephoto lens.

384 shots later I also had 384 18-megapixel RAW files that made a considerable dent in the computer’s 1TB hard disk and caused Aperture to crash. Maybe 8GB of RAM is not enough after all…? After several hours of editing, the best shots of the day are attached below. I used the eagle for today’s Daily Shoot as well.

Slight administrative change, the thumbnail pictures below now link back to my Flickr photostream. This is an experiment. I am trying to consolidate my public photo store. We’ll see how it goes.