So....
Kayaker (Brant) (5d3 and M3) came to visit Orlando and he, a friend of mine (80d), and I went for a couple of laps of the Merritt Island Black water wildlife drive. I have posted several shots on my flickr - link at the end of the post. I had to use Capture One for the Sony shots and I am by no means conversant with it.
The water level was just simply odd, we had never seen it so dry on the front, the later half seemed normal - go figure. And the light the first couple of hours in heavy overcast and .... it sucked. It got a bit better later on, as Bryant would say a giant soft box, but wasn't really enough to really dial up the shutter speed w/ decently low ISO and let'er fly. My shutter speeds where hanging around 250 - 500th. Not quite fast enough for BIF or Heron fish catching.
We had some fun. We all laughed when I pulled out the 1dx and fired off about 2 seconds at a bird flying in front us. The sound compared to the other cameras was just a riot. I don't know if it is the way the mirror sounds, but compared to the 5d it sounded much faster than 2x, we had several chuckles. Learning to use the autofocus more specifically on the 1dx. Never really did action stuff before.
I used a metabones adapter on the Sony, and lets just say at 11 FPS vs. 12 on the 1Dx it doesn't make the same noise - indeed at about 5 ft you can't hear it all. Everyone around us knew when I fired off the 1Dx, no one knew when I fired the Sony.
I used the 100-400 and the Tamzooka 150-600 on both. I did rent both a regular and speed booster adapter but the speed boster just confused the auto focus - for video and manual focus it didn't seem to give up much resolution (some but not much).
The other interesting thing was the view finder blackout.... well it stutters on the Sony but it really doesn't black out on high speed shooting.
Some of the more interesting focus features weren't available in adapter mode, so one can see the value of native lenses if you are going to really pull all the features out. Sometimes the focus function would drop back to contract vs. phase and I would have to reset in the menus.
On Saturday, I used the 2xIII on the 100-400 and with the regular adapter it was pretty easy to see the gaps in a 1 inch chain at 1/4 mile (393 yards according to google earth, the speed boosted version was a bit softer, still discernible but clearly softer - I will post those picks later - it doesn't really matter as it was lens resolution vs. camera BS anyway - just an amazing reach for the spies and stalkers among you (not me, just tested it for you)
Last thing on usability - the a6500 is clearly a feature packed camera, it screams for a battery grip - for both battery capacity AND hand space. My hands aren't all that large and ooof the buttons where close together. Image quality etc, not done fiddling w/ the images.
Mirror-less, I have got to think is coming. Operations was nearly silent, auto-focus on sensor so I don't think there is going to be much AFMA needs??, a lot more real estate for af sites - but you will need some really good subject acquisition. Many times the 1dx grabbed anything but the flying spoonbill with the background of sawgrass or grey/green bushes or ripples on the water. I would think w/ the any color algorithm the only pink/red thing in the frame would be higher up on the grab list than light/dark browns.
The green and blue herons are a rip off of Stuarts "high key" insperations of other bird shots I seen from him.
Merrit020516 by mbarrett5076, on Flickr
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