[Shamim Azam]

Reach is the king when it comes to wildlife photography. I would vote for 400mm prime as it is just the right focal length for mammals. Any piece of glass between the sensor and the lens will lead to slight degradation in IQ and AF performance. I own both 600mm and 300mm primes and I can vouch for bare 300mm. It is incredibly fast and ridiculously sharp when used bare. Images with 1.4X tele are still good but you lose a stop of light. If that doesn’t matter to you much, then 300mm saves a lot of money.

PS: Primes should be silent/near silent while focusing. If the motor noise is squeaky or higher than near silent, then I would suggest to stay away from it. It might be a faulty motor.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 1 day ago by  Shamim Azam.
• This reply was modified 1 week, 1 day ago by  Shamim Azam.

[Shamim Azam]

You can post a link to your raw file. However, what I wanted to arrive at was that when you crop an image specially on 24 MP sensor of A7iii, we are not just zooming in on to the subject but also the noise. The grains can come in the image if the camera brightened the background for a better exposure. And by cropping we only magnify those. You should try the camera in different lighting conditions with more pictures and see how it behaves.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by  Shamim Azam.

[Shamim Azam]

If it is happening with every picture then it may be a sensor issue.

[Shamim Azam]

Thanks! Looked at your images and to me they look fine. Dark backgrounds can bring noise in images. The image in question was shot at ISO 1000 and looks decent without the extreme crop. Cropping magnifies the grain. What you can try is ETTR and see if that is any better. Otherwise the images are great and nothing to stress about. 🙂

[Shamim Azam]

Please make the link public. I don’t have access to view the file.

[Shamim Azam]

Is this image a crop of the actual shot?