June was a weird month for photography. I went out with my wife and some friends for a quick hike and decided to bring along my lens incase I saw any of the new fledgling birds on the way. When I took out my Sony A7IV and Sony FE 200-600mm F5.6-6.3 G OSS (yes, the full camera/lens name in case folks find their way here from Google), I noticed I couldn’t get anything to focus. I thought maybe I changed my settings somehow but after 10+ minutes of just standing there like a fool I gave up.
When I got home I began to feverously Google to see if other folks have had similar issues. Turns out it’s a common enough problem to see it show up on Reddit and various forums but not frequent enough for Sony to issues a recall. From what I could find, it appears that an interior cable can come dislodged, leaving the lens unable to focus or worse, an onboard chip issue. I also get an error on my screen reading F–.
Of course, my lens is out of warranty so that meant I needed to try to find a way to repair it. As much as I love my Sony cameras, support is VERY limited. Apparently there are only 3 authorized repair shops for lens (maybe bodies too?) in the states: NJ, CT and Georgia. All their sites suck and are very manual processes.
So here I am stuck with a busted lens, waiting to send it until after I get back from vacation in July. It’s been so tough missing out on some little baby birds on our bird outtings in the morning and a few hawks that decided to take the opportunity to just hang out in the trees outside my house, taunting me.
In the meantime I’ve gone down a rabbit hole of possibly updating my kit. Really want to snag a 300 F2.8, but the price tag is a bit stiff. I’ll likely just get my 200-600 repaired, but maybe an upgrade isn’t too far out of my future.
On another note – I picked up my first drone, a DJI 4K. Caught it on sale this month for $200 so figured why not! Work has been wild so I haven’t had too much time to tinker with it yet but a few test flights were pretty simple for a newbie like myself. The photo attached to the post is one of the first few I took (and without edits). Excited to see what I can get out of this for future photos / wallpaper material.