![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/marsh-wren-0798-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"marsh-wren-0798-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\nI’ve been putting this post off because I don’t like to talk about it. But it’s been nagging at me because I told readers I was going to cover this topic, so I couldn’t put it off any longer.<\/p>\n
In the past I’ve praised the many virtues of the Canon R5 but it also has some significant and unfortunate quirks. I know of at least three personal friends and Facebook friends who have purchased the Canon R5 at least in part based on my experience with it, and several others who are seriously considering it. So it’s probably past time that I present a more complete picture of my time with the R5.<\/p>\n
A series of events involving the R5 five days ago at Bear River MBR was the catalyst for today’s post.<\/p>\n
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1\/2000, f\/5.6, ISO 1600, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n This Marsh Wren was the first bird I photographed that morning. ‘He’ was close, in warm morning light and out in the open. I took 110 photos of him and I remember being excited because I knew he’d given me some delightful poses and it was fun being assured so early in the morning that I wasn’t going to get bird-skunked that day.<\/p>\n But every last photo I took of the wren was soft. This one, and two or three others, were sharp enough to almost<\/em> be useable but…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n most of the rest were dreadfully soft, like this one, and they shouldn’t have been. To say that I was disappointed is an understatement. For reasons that would take too long to explain, I’m confident it was a camera issue and not a lens or operator issue.<\/p>\n I had the same problem once again that morning while I was photographing Solitary Sandpipers but all of the rest of the photos I took that morning that should have been sharp, were sharp. And it wasn’t the first time something similar has happened. Roughly once a week I get a cluster of soft photos of the same bird that should have been sharp.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And I wasn’t done with camera problems that morning. About an hour after I photographed the wren, my R5 froze up. Everything, and I do mean everything, just stopped working. It’s happened in the past a few times but those times all I had to do was turn the camera off and back on to fix it. This time that didn’t work, even though I turned it off and on repeatedly. I ended up having to remove the battery, let the camera ‘rest’ for a few moments and then reinstall the battery.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/marsh-wren-0822-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"marsh-wren-0822-ron-dudley\\"")
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