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.
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.