This brief article shares a small selection of MC-20 birds-in-flight images and discusses the performance of this teleconverter. Recently I put my Olympus OM-D E-M1X, M.Zuiko PRO 40-150 mm f/2.8 and M.Zuiko MC-20 teleconverter through a pretty rigorous field test photographing birds-in-flight. You’ll see an extensive article on that field test very soon.

All of the images in this article were captured hand-held under mainly overcast conditions. This type of lighting is typically somewhat difficult for a camera’s auto-focus system. I purposely chose this situation to challenge the auto-focus speed and accuracy of my Olympus gear.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge.

While doing my field test I did not detect any noticeable auto-focusing hesitation from my Olympus gear when using the M.Zuiko MC-20 teleconverter.

After I determined which camera settings worked best for my style of bird-in-flight photography, I found the overall performance of my Olympus kit to be fast and accurate. My forthcoming birds-in-flight test article will provide more details.

As is the case with any new camera gear, especially when going to a different brand, it takes some time to learn some of the performance nuances.

Buying the M.Zuiko MC-20 teleconverter has turned out to be an excellent decision. It maintains solid auto-focus speed and accuracy, while delivering very good quality images in terms of sharpness and colour rendition.

I won’t go into details in this posting since a full OM-D E-M1X birds-in-flight article is forthcoming. Suffice to say I was very pleased with the results I was able to achieve under quite challenging parameters.

Initially, I wasn’t sure what to expect when creating MC-20 birds-in-flight images. My recent bird-in-flight field test, and the results I was able to achieve at Bird Kingdom have clarified things for me. I’ve decided that the Olympus OM-D E-M1X will be my primary birding camera. I will not be abandoning my Nikon 1 gear. It will still be used to create updated 1″ sensor content for this website.

Technical Note:

All photographs in this article were captured hand-held using camera gear as noted in the EXIF data. All images were produced from RAW files using my standard process. All photographs are displayed as 100% captures without any cropping.

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