{"id":109227,"date":"2022-03-27T06:05:27","date_gmt":"2022-03-27T12:05:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=109227"},"modified":"2022-03-27T08:35:54","modified_gmt":"2022-03-27T14:35:54","slug":"canon-r5-autofocus-performance-with-a-cormorant-in-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2022\/03\/27\/canon-r5-autofocus-performance-with-a-cormorant-in-flight\/","title":{"rendered":"Canon R5 Autofocus Performance With A Cormorant In Flight"},"content":{"rendered":"

Readers have been asking what my experience has been so far with my new camera, the Canon R5. I’ve had it for about three weeks now but due to adverse shooting conditions and bumps in the road of life I haven’t yet had a lot of experience with it. At some point it’s my intention to post a fairly comprehensive mini-review but I’m not there yet.<\/p>\n

However, I thought an experience I had with a Double-crested Cormorant in flight six days ago provided some telling evidence regarding the autofocus capabilities of the R5. So today I decided to share it, for what it’s worth.<\/p>\n

If you haven’t already guessed, this post is heavy on photogeek so it may have little interest for some of my readers. I hope others will find it useful,<\/p>\n

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The cormorant was pretty far away as it circled the pond before flying off to a new destination. This is the first shot in a series of eight consecutive photos without any skips. Sharp eyes will notice that I was dealing with power lines in the background so some of the photos in the series aren’t good for much of anything except as a demonstration of the AF capabilities of the R5.<\/p>\n

This version of the photo is uncropped to give you an idea of how far away the bird was. I was shooting in cropped frame mode so if I’d been shooting full frame the cormorant would have been even smaller in the frame.<\/p>\n

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1\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This is a cropped version of the previous image. The entire series of eight photos has been cropped the same amount and that amount is substantial. The series needs very little narration from me so I’ll wait until the end to provide my conclusions.<\/p>\n

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1\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

If this photo looks familiar it’s because I posted it to my blog two days ago.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

If I’d been shooting with my previous camera, the Canon 7D Mark II, I’d have been lucky to get two or three sharp shots of the cormorant. The bird was small in the frame and bouncing around in my viewfinder so it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to keep my active focus point locked on to my subject for this many photos.<\/p>\n

But with the R5’s animal\/eye detect with tracking my single active focus point stayed locked on to the bird no matter where it was in the frame. That wouldn’t have happened with the Mark II. I’m not saying the R5’s AF system is infallible, it isn’t. But based on this experience and others like it I’m convinced its a vast improvement over what I’ve been used to. I’m duly impressed.<\/p>\n

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The R5’s AF system is amazing but it’s complicated so the setup of the buttons and dials I’m using is very different from that of the Mark II. For example, I’ve assigned three buttons for different functions of back-button AF instead of the single back-button AF I was using on the Mark II. As a result I keep hitting the wrong button in crucial situations and messing up my photos. I did it again two days ago with what would have been my very best shots of the entire morning.<\/p>\n

Things won’t get any better until I get my muscle memory retrained and that takes time in the field.\u00a0 And a much better weather\/light forecast than we have at the moment.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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PS – One of the decisions I’ve been trying to make is whether my default will be to shoot in full frame or cropped frame. At this point I’ve pretty much decided to shoot in full frame most, if not all, of the time. I might as well take advantage of the full 45MP available on the R5. <\/em><\/p>\n

I was concerned about having to deal with the various issues of such huge file sizes but Canon’s compressed RAW (cRAW) whittles the file size down to 27MP without any loss of quality or detail. I have no idea how they pull off that amazing trick but I’m grateful for it. My Mark II shot at 20MP so that’s not much of an increase in actual file size.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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Readers have been asking what my experience has been so far with my new camera, the Canon R5. (9 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":109228,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,334,1905],"tags":[6270,3232,6269,6271,1901,146,278],"class_list":["post-109227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-double-crested-cormorants","tag-animal-eye-detect-autofocus","tag-back-button-autofocus","tag-canon-r5-autofocus-system","tag-compressed-raw","tag-double-crested-cormorant","tag-flight","tag-sharpness"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/double-crested-cormorant-3755-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-spJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109227"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109277,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109227\/revisions\/109277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}