Sony a6000 (accidental)Moose Shots

[NorthernFocus]

I was so frustrated with the Nikon1 system during our last travel experience that when we got home I sacked it and got a Sony a6000/17-55/55-210 kit. I hadn't even shot it yet and we have travel coming up soon. So I took it along yesterday when we took Grace out for a walk in the park. I thought I'd grab a few shots of Grace, a few landscapes, and tweak the camera setup along the way.

We barely got started on our walk when we stumbled upon a bull moose thrashing the brush just out of sight a few yards off the trail. We felt safe slipping on by and ran into this guy 50m further on. He was coming down the trail to investigate what all the ruckuss was about. He then stopped right in the trail and made his own display of thrashing the brush and grunting challenges to the unseen bull.

The unseen moose apparently didn't like what he heard because he ceased his antics and apparently slipped away. So we did not end up in the middle of a moose fight. But needless to say we had to re-route our dog walk but not before I grabbed a few shots. The a6000 is definitely not a wildlife camera. At least not compared to a DSLR. But it is a joy to carry around and the interface is far superior to the Nikon1 V1. Though the EVF is just as frustrating shooting rapid fire.

One unexpected difficulty was how different the image RAW file processing is than with Nikon images from my current bodies. In LR the WB responds much differently and a much higher saturation setting was required to bring out reasonable colors. Looking at these now they clearly still need some work. It seems there will be more of a learning curve with this camera than I anticipated. But we'll reserve judgment until having a chance to shoot it in decent light.

Sony a6000/55-210mm kit lens
manual mode, auto ISO, single point focus/AF-C, 10fps

1) 210mm, 1/400s, f6.3, ISO1000


2) 210mm, 1/400s, f6.3, ISO800


3) 210mm, 1/400s, f6.3, ISO800

[DEAN01]

Beautiful shots, Dan.

[MrB]

These are good shots of the moose but the processing seems to have given the images too much of a yellow/orange bias for me. I find that the A6000 has a very effective Auto WB and, usually shooting in Aperture Priority Mode with DRO active, I am pleased with quality of the camera JPEGs after applying a few gentle tweaks in software.

Cheers.
Philip

[Ziggy]

Nice looking Moose Dan.

[Shadowman]

Nice series. Does Sony have software that you can use to compare RAW processing differences?

[NorthernFocus]

Thanks for the comments, guys. They don't all look like they have a yellow cast to me. The first one looks blue overall, the second looks closest though the moose does look a bit red/orange, and the last one is definitely yellow looking. The light falling on the first two should be pretty close and they both have the same processing. So it's interesting that those two look different.

Nice series. Does Sony have software that you can use to compare RAW processing differences?

I believe so. There was a card in the box advertising a free copy of what I assume to be editing software. I just haven't had the time/energy to look into it. But in the long run it may save me some time figuring out how Sony's kelvin numbers compare with LR.

I've got to take it for a spin shooting some landscape shots in "daylight" conditions and see how it behaves. As I said simply from a handling standpoint it already appears to be a step in the right directions.