1\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\nSix days ago this male Belted Kingfisher ran me ragged as I tried to follow him from fishing perch to fishing perch in my pickup. His three favorite fishing perches aren’t close to each other, which meant I often had to move my vehicle when he gave up on one perch and flew to another. Thankfully, by now he’s acclimated to my pickup so he pretty much ignores me but other vehicles, or folks on foot, will often spook him into the next county.<\/p>\n
Here he has just left his perch (out of frame and above him) in a dive on a fish. With any of my previous cameras (Canon XTi, 40D, 7D and 7D Mark II) I’d have had virtually no chance to get the kingfisher sharp in this shot,<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/belted-kingfisher-9861-full-frameb-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"belted-kingfisher-9861-full-frame")
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I’ll use a full frame (uncropped) version of the same photo to help me explain why.<\/p>\n
The kingfisher had been perched on the short branch marked with the red X and he was surrounded by a tangle of branches and twigs. Immediately after he took off the active focus point of any of my old cameras would almost certainly have locked onto one of the branches (or somewhere in limbo) instead of staying locked on the bird. So the kingfisher would have been soft.<\/p>\n
But using the R5, Canon’s animal\/eye autofocus technology ignored all the branches and kept my active focus point locked on the kingfisher, even though he was flying toward me which is no easy task. It didn’t do it perfectly so the kingfisher isn’t tack sharp but he’s pretty darn close.<\/p>\n
In addition, the huge file size of the R5 (46 MP compared to 10 – 20 MP for my old cameras) allowed me to crop drastically in on the kingfisher and still have enough pixels for acceptable image quality.<\/p>\n
I’ll admit it, there are times when the R5 makes me look like a better bird photographer than I really am.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I can thank the Canon R5 for this shot. I’ll explain why. (2 images)<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":130206,"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":[2853,6,334],"tags":[6297,454,2329,6214,1239,6304,146,211,2330,2738,311],"class_list":["post-130189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-belted-kingfishers","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","tag-animal-eye-detection","tag-autofocus","tag-belted-kingfisher","tag-canon-r5","tag-diving","tag-file-size","tag-flight","tag-male","tag-megaceryle-alcyon","tag-takeoff","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/belted-kingfisher-9861c-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-xRP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130189","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=130189"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":130244,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130189\/revisions\/130244"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/belted-kingfisher-9861c-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"belted-kingfisher-9861c-ron-dudley\\"")
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