Thanks for your excellent comments.

“Spray and pray” is a bit of a pejorative

Had to look that one up — “expressing contempt or disapproval.”

But, we are shooting aren’t we? And when we hold the shutter button down with an action shot it is best to pretty much do so without regards to framing carefully. So let’s call it a push.

and perhaps we should come up with a different term? Press and hold? I’m with you on all points and the greatest challenge now with all of these high FPS bodies is that a short press yields so many images that it becomes laborious to cull them.

The cranes flap took less than one second …

Of the remainder images, none of them really wow me as 70 is the money shot.

Agree.

Gail Bisson’s plover is pretty sweet and not only was she on eye level, had beautiful composition, bokeh, and razor thin DOF, it was a pretty unique image.

It is a wonderful image and I love shorebirds but as two folks pointed out, it is missing one thing …

Since picking up my R5 (through one of Artie’s sponsored dealers),

Everybody who deals with Steve Elkins at Bedford walks away very happy!

I’ve had to modify my “press and hold” technique to short taps. The 20 FPS of the ES rapidly fills the card and can easily saturate the buffer.

From were I sit, photographable action rarely lasts long. You will never see my holding the shutter down haphazardly. If anything, I tend to do the opposite … I have never hit the buffer with my a9, a9 ii, a7r iii, or a7r iv. It’s left-over from film days: “I’m Jewish and every time I press the shutter button it costs me 47 cents!” My brain does not forget …
Like the a9(II), I’ve been simply wowed by the number of in focus images as compared to even the top-flight DSLR’s of yesterday.

That is what I have been saying and that is why Arash switched …

Perhaps one significant advantage of the R5 over the a9(II) is the rapid wake up from sleep mode/image review.

If that is/was a problem then you did not read the big SONY e-Guide carefully enough; we use a setting that makes that a non-issue … The huge advantage of the R5 is the 42MP as compared to the 24MP of the a9 ii.

It’s much faster to the draw that way (I’ve been looking for a timed comparison). For example, yesterday I was walking by a pond and noticed an egret suddenly taking to flight. With my a7riv, it would have woken up sometime after the bird was already downrange and a high percentage of the images would have likely been OOF. The a9(II) would have likely captured a lot more photos and all of them would have been in focus though it would have started later than the R5.

Or not ….

27 images in that short burst and all were in focus.

Great. I am hoping to get my hands on an R5/RF 100-500 asap as a loaner …

with love, a