robsphotography Loc: New Zealand

During a recent visit to the nocturnal house at a New Zealand nature reserve, I had the opportunity to take, hand-held, in near darkness, some 4K video of two kiwi birds interacting with each other, possibly going through a mating ritual.

To capture this video, I used the full frame 42 megapixel Sony A7R II with the Sony Zeiss FE35mm F/2.8 prime lens.

A blog about this video and a link to the YouTube video can be seen here:

http://www.robsphotography.co.nz/A7R2-Kiwi-Mating.html

Because of the very dark conditions, the camera showed that, even at ISO 25,600, an exposure time of just 1/10 second was required at F/2.8.

I think that, considering the very poor light and that the kiwis were behind a small area of thick reflecting glass, the camera performed quite well.

I did not have a tripod with me, so I had to take the video hand-held. I think the video picked out the kiwis better than if I had attempted to take still images.

I would be interested to hear of your results from video taken with the Sony A7RII, particularly with videos taken in low light.

Regards
Rob

Leicaflex Loc: Cymru

Very interesting video and the information.
Thank you for the link.
:thumbup:

robsphotography Loc: New Zealand

Thanks very much for your reply. At the time, I used my FE 35mm F/2.8 lens, but for filming in a nocturnal house, if time had permitted, I would have changed over to my FE 55mm F/1.8 lens.

Because it is a 4K video, I'm going to look into the possibility of getting a still image from a single frame of the video. The kiwis were moving around so fast that it wasn't practical to get a reasonable hand-held still image when the light was so low.

It's great that the A7RII was able to produce a reasonable video in conditions where the taking of stills without a tripod was extremely difficult.

Regards
Rob