I was a touch bored last night as the sun set on another lovely Autumn day in Melbourne.

I had been carrying my Olympus micro ZD 300mm f/4 lens and my Olympus mZD 40-150mm f/2.8 lens on two Olympus OM-D E-M1 camera bodies for 3 hours as a walked around some old salt pan lakes.

The sun had just set behind some dark clouds and the very skittish tiny robins were hopping along the track in front of me as I walked hungry and thirsty back to my car – always frustratingly keeping their distance well away from me – even for the 600mm super telephoto reach of this lens.

So when I came across a heron I decided to try something different – drag the shutter and see how good the E-M1 Mark II’s IS works for panning.

So here we have the same bird (I presume a heron) taking off and landing but in very different light angles as it flew 180 degrees around me.

These are NOT meant to be sharp, documentary style shots of birds in flight but something a bit more abstract and arty – and I quite like what I achieved, and the AF was fast and the Olympus image stabilisation panned very well indeed!

 

Above was shot at 1/40th second hand held 600mm telephoto reach in full frame terms – rear feathers under the wing are still quite sharp despite the slow shutter speed and flight of the bird!

This one was shot at 1/10th sec – the panning lines are very straight – either I panned extremely smoothly or the IS worked very well to ignore my angular pan – anyway I quite like the effect – although there does seem to be the face of a demon here – an angel in wolf’s clothing perhaps?

I suspect the vivid colours straight from the camera need a bit of subduing before it becomes wall art but it was a fun interesting little exercise – just don’t try this at home with your Canon or Nikon 600mm f/4 lens – you will do yourself an injury!