Canon R6 Review for Bird Photography - Image Quality, High ISO Performance and Autofocus Tested!

g'day and welcome to the channel in today's video i'm going to be reviewing the canon r6 mirrorless camera now it's going to be from the perspective of a bird photographer because that's what i love i've had the camera for a few weeks i've taken i think over 4 000 photos i've had a number of different sessions so i've really put the camera through its paces and i think i've got a fairly good idea of what it's capable of so if you want to skip ahead to something in particular just check the timestamps in the description at the bottom of the video you'll see little chapters you can click on those if you want to go to a specific area so what i'm going to do is i'm going to break down this review into three videos in today's video i'm going to focus on what is most important for a wildlife photographer and their camera and that is the image quality the high iso performance and of course the autofocus the second video i'll chat about the ibis the mirrorless body the how it compares to a dslr and just give you my overall thoughts and in the third video i'm going to tell you how i set up my camera to get the best photos in the field and probably answer any questions that have popped up from the first two videos the first thing i want to chat about is image quality let's take a look at two shots i took with the r6 the same lens same location but these two photos are drastically different one of them has a lot of noise it's a little bit soft and now overall picture image quality is terrible if you were to look at this photo and i told you it was taken with the r6 you'd think the sensor was rubbish so what's the difference between the two well it's the light and how close i am it's the only two things that have changed being nice and close and having good light has made a world of difference to the image quality between these two images let's have a look at some of the shots that i actually took with the r6 i'll show you the raw photo and the process photo so you can get idea of what the photo is going to look like so let's start with my favorite photo and that was this red cap robin i just love this shot i think it's the pose that i really like the wings are out we've got great eye contact we can see the red chest we can see the red cap it kind of just encapsulates everything that a redcap robin is now this was actually taken with iso 3200 which is pretty high iso but as you can see the quality has held up extremely well so a lot of people have asked me to try the r6 out with more affordable lenses not everybody can afford the latest 500 f-4 so i took my 405.6 out for a spin i went down to a local park and i photographed australia's ugliest bird the white ibis or more affectionately known as the bin chicken luckily a bird landed nearby to me i was able to lift up the camera and i took a number of head shots of this interesting looking bird but when we zoom in we can see the detail the level of detail is just amazing and this was taken with the 1.4 converter i really like this shot i captured of a pacific black duck with its duckling i just liked how we had both of these birds in the same frame you can see that the light hasn't quite come up so it's got a sort of a dark feel to it now the image wasn't quite as sharp as i was like i might have just missed focused but i was able to recover it fairly well and post so i was shooting at a thousand millimeters focal length plus the 1.6 crop and i was able to take this shot of a jackie winter now it came up really well uh the autofocus performed well with the two times and the image quality was very good so overall i was extremely happy with the image quality i was able to achieve and the sessions that i've had let's discuss the biggest question i get asked about the r6 and that is about the sensor the r6 has a full frame 20 megapixel sensor and i believe it's very similar to the flagship 1dx mark iii this is one of canon's best sensors so we should expect really good quality from it but is 20 megapixels enough for wildlife and in my opinion no if i had a choice i would always go with the high megapixel option and i'll be honest this is probably my biggest disappoint with the camera is just the megapixel count you know we crop a lot with birding nearly every single photo i take i crop and ultimately i want to be able to crop and still have a large enough file to print and to send to editors and just to use however if i crop too much with the sensor the files i end up with are quite small let's take a look at the difference between the r5 the 5d4 and the r6 let's pretend i've taken the same shot of the redcap robin with all three cameras you can see that the r5 with its whopping 45 megapixels we then stopped down to the 5d mark iv which is 30 megapixels and then we go down to the canon r6 with its 20 megapixels now remember the actual physical sensor size is exactly the same with all these full-frame cameras so the difference is the number of megapixels of the number of pixels captured in the image so the big question is do more megapixels equal higher image quality and better better detail or definition in your photos and i don't think it does i believe that the images fundamentally will look almost identical so to test this i actually took the same shot with my 30 megapixel 5d4 and the 20 megapixel r6 same lens same location i was a fair distance away i was about 21 meters from the subject the perch that i'd set up i wanted to be that distant so i could crop heavily and see if there's any difference between the two shots all right this is the raw file that you can see on the screen you can see the bird's tiny it's a little juvenile redcap robin all right here's a comparison of the two shots but side by side now i've resized the 5d4 to be the same size as the r6 can you tell the difference between the two which one's the larger megapixel which one has more detail which one has better feather detail looking at them they look almost identical to me and i can't really tell so there's no clear advantage to all those extra megapixels when you're looking at the images at the same size so which was which well the one on the left is the 5d4 and the one on the right is the r6 the difference is when we look at the actual size of the images so that's the difference the more megapixels the more you can crop and still maintain a big image and that's something to consider if you're not going to be printing large cropping a lot or displaying on a 4k monitor then the 20 megapixels of the r6 is fine okay so why would you go with a 20 megapixel sensor well it's advertised as being extremely good at low light so that would be possibly one reason why you'd take this sensor over another one is just if the image quality was better and the high iso performance was far better than a high megapixel camera how did the r6 perform when it comes to high iso it's been trumpeted as the best canon's got on offer i was expecting a great improvement over the 5d4 so i put it to the test out in the field when i'm talking about high iso i'm talking about say iso 3200 and higher so can we use those high isos while maintaining good image quality i took a number of shots with the 5d4 the r6 to compare how they perform next to each other now i've down sampled the 5d4 to match the r6 i've got three shots to show you so keep count see how many of them you can tell and get right first one is this little redcap robin they look pretty similar to me can you tell the difference between the two maybe the left one's slightly better and that is the r6 the right one is the 5d4 very very similar all right so the second shot is this redcap robin a nice close-up shot again can you tell the difference between the two sensors the r6 is actually the one on the left and the 5d4 is the one on the right and the last one which is the image i showed earlier when we were comparing image quality again very difficult and the r6 is actually the one on the right i think looking at these examples the r6 might have the slight edge but it's marginal and the differences are very similar and to be honest i was a little bit disappointed by that i had thought the r6 would be significantly better than the 5d4 that's a 5 year old sensor the r6 is brand new and it's trumpeted as the low light king so i'm a little bit confused i'm not sure why the r6 isn't a lot better but from what i could see here 5d4 performed very well and it was very similar luckily i had a good model the jackie winter stayed still for me and i actually took a shot with a number of different isos as we would expect the image quality up to iso 6400 is actually really really good with iso 25600 and the 51200 the noise is very apparent and we can clearly see it and you wouldn't really want to be shooting at those high isos i actually forgot to take one at 12 800 so i actually took a few shots and when you look at the process photo at iso 12800 that's perfectly acceptable to me all right one last demonstration with the high iso performance of the r6 i like the framing here it looks quite nice on this perch and this is the final processed image can you tell what the base iso is of this image have a guess i took this at an iso 51200 so how can that be how does the processed image look this good even though that we've got such a high iso and it's actually the power of processing and software but the main one is topaz de noise now if you've seen any of my videos you'll know that i've purchased this software and i use this to reduce the noise in my images and you can see clearly on the screen what a difference it does make now if you're interested in buying the software it does support me i've got a link in the description and if you go down to the description and you want to buy this software there's a discount code for 15 off so just click on the link and put in that discount code and you'll get that off this it really is amazing software so in conclusion i'd be really happy using this camera up to 6400 i wouldn't really have an issue and maybe even 12 800 at a stretch but it wasn't the great improvement i was hoping over the 5d4 so it's definitely good but not as good as i'd hoped the other important part of the sensor is the dynamic range what's the dynamic range the dynamic range is just how much detail the camera captures and the dark and bright parts of your image so how good was the r6 well i took a number of shots underexposed on purpose and overexposed let's have a look so as you can see on the screen the image is almost completely black it's really really dark now so i've put that into lightroom i've increased the exposure by five stops and have a look at how well it did that image on the right there i'd be happy to use that incredibly the sensor has captured that much detail when we under exposed it so i overexposed this next one by three stops and you can see on the left just how bright that image is you know the whites are completely blown and when i tried to recover that in post by reducing the exposure by three stops we can see that the chest area on the upper part of the bird was just completely void of any further detail it was blown it was lost so it did a few more tests and it appeared about two stops overexposed was about the limit of the sensor to recover the detail so two stops if we reduce that and post captured some detail and the feathers under the neck and i'd be able to process that quite easily and use that photo so what that means is you don't want to overexpose by any more than two stops but if you accidentally you know get your exposure slightly wrong the camera sensor will still capture lots of detail all right the third thing i want to talk about is the autofocus of the camera what we want to do as wildlife photographers is look through the viewfinder put the focus point on the subject the bird focus on it and hit the shutter and hope that the image is sharp but we're ultimately relying on the camera to detect the subject track it keep it in focus and take the shot if you'd asked me years ago wouldn't it be amazing if the camera could track the subject you're photographing and keep the focus point on the eye imagine that well believe it or not that's become a reality canon's auto iaf is simply amazing the camera is smart enough to detect the bird's eye put the focus point on the eye and then track it as the bird moves this is incredible this is you know amazing for wildlife and bird photographers because all you need to do is frame the subject get the subject in your frame so the camera can see it you hit the auto eye and it tracks it incredible all right so how does the iaf work well it's important for us to go back to how dslrs work first so you can see on the 40d nine focus points not a lot very limiting and you'd have to place one of these focus points on the subject and then focus it's improved over the years and the canon 5d4 had 64 focus points and even the ai server you know it's only got those points to choose from when you're trying to track a bird so that was a big limitation well the r6 has overcome that limitation with this new autofocus system this focus points pretty much across the entire frame and you can see here where i was photographing a butterfly look at all those focus points it has to choose from so the auto iaf can pretty much track the subject throughout the entire frame there's a focus point to pick it up all over the place so that's why it can work so well so how do i actually employ auto if well i use dual back button focus so the af on button i use for traditional autofocus and the star button i use for iaf so i've got the two of them so i can use traditional to sort of locate the bird and then i can push the star to activate iaf and so one thing i really really like about the iaf is the visual feedback you get in the viewfinder so you as you activate the iaf you'll see these blue boxes pop up and they'll go looking for the bird and then once it finds the bird the blue box will get smaller and you'll see one blue box say on the bird's head and then once it detects the eye the blue box will get even smaller and then you can see this blue box on the bird's eye and it just tracks it as the bird moves this little focus point just works like magic and tracks the bird so you know the camera has detected the eye and when you take the shot it's highly likely it's going to be sharp it's likely it's going to be on the bird's eye and it's not going to jump to the shoulder or go somewhere else because you can visually see where the camera is focusing and that is really important and a really great feature because you've got the confidence knowing that the camera is focusing in the right place and i've got to say my keeper rate and these scenarios is off the charts and the only reason the shots aren't sharp is because of user error either the birds move too quickly or i've moved so i've got that much confidence in the iaf when it locks on the other major advantage of iaf is the infield composition of your shots what do i mean by that well if you once once the camera locks onto the bird once it's on its eye you can move the camera around and that focus point will stay on the bird so you can instead of worrying about getting the focus point on the bird all you need to worry about is the composition where is the bird within your frame because it doesn't matter where you put the bird the focus point is going to stay on the eye so say you've got a duck moving i don't have to worry about the focus point i can just look through the viewfinder and frame it as i like so dslr's maximum aperture that they could focus at was f8 so say my 500 f-4 if i put it two times on it it became a thousand f8 so my 5d4 will focus at f8 older cameras like my 40d wouldn't even focus at f8 but if i wanted to use my 405.6 that would become an 800 f11 and a dslr simply will not focus but the r6 works differently and it does focus past f8 i think it goes all the way up to like f22 not sure why you'd want to shoot at that so i wanted to test this out so i got my 405.6 i put it two times on it giving us 800 f11 which is pretty amazing lo and behold the iaf worked amazing i was really surprised at just how well the iaf worked of course the auto focus had slowed down a little bit but the iaf still locked onto the subject and followed around and i was able to take some shots i wasn't expecting the quality to be all that high but you know i was shooting in really good light i pushed the aperture out to f14 to increase our sharpness and have a look at the results for yourself look at the shot on the screen the detail looks really good to me if with great image quality the background's well out of focus because how close i was to the subject this is best case scenario so i wouldn't go rushing out buying a two times for your 400 and expect to use that all the time and f14 is very restrictive you're going to need a lot of light to shoot at those narrow apertures but it is an option and if you've got a 100 to 400 mark ii or even the 405.6 perhaps it's an option for you i'm so happy with the auto iaf that i don't think i could ever go back to a dslr to be honest there's probably a lot of you asking well how does the iaf work with birds in flight well unfortunately i haven't tested it thoroughly and i did have one session with some little corellas and it's probably user error but i didn't actually have that much success these birds were sort of in the high in the eucalypts and they were sort of flying above me i was standing there trying to find the birds push iaf track the birds take some shots i did get some that was sharp but i got a lot that was soft the camera didn't have too many troubles picking up the bird but it was just having trouble locking on and getting sharp shots so i think it's more user error than the camera and i'll have to try it out with my 400 5.6 because using 700 millimeters handheld can be pretty difficult to keep the camera steady pick up the bird early enough you know get lock onto it so you know i probably didn't do the camera justice by shooting in this scenario so i'm happy to show you the shots which were soft you can see that the focus points have picked up the wing but for whatever reason it's completely soft it just didn't focus against the blue sky of course it worked a lot easier because it could detect the birds and we got this sharp shot so the auto iaf is going to struggle in scenarios where there's a lot of distracting elements so i've tried it out i've taken my 405.6 handheld i've spotted a bird in this wattle and as you can see it's hidden in the wattle very difficult for the iaf to pick it out i tried and it sort of jumped around the bird what i ended up doing was using traditional vanilla af to focus on the bird and once it was focused on the bird i then engaged auto iaf and it did actually pick up the bird and stuck to it and we took a few shots so you know it's just going to be a combination when you're walking around use traditional af and then iaf you're just going to have to use a combination of both if you saw my previous r6 video you'll see that i have encountered some issues with the autofocus on the r6 feel free to watch that because i go into a lot more detail so the situation where it really struggles is say i've got a bird on a perch and i'm focused on that bird and there's a large separation between the bird and the background if i accidentally focus on the background and it locks onto the background the camera can simply can't see the bird and it will not focus on the bird even if you put the focus point on the bird and you hit either you know traditional af or auto iaf it's not going to pick up the bird it won't leave the background so what you have to do is either turn the manual focus ring to bring the focus closer and then the iaf will pick it up or focus on the ground in front of the bird or use focus preset if you've got it this is annoying but you can get around it pretty easily so the comments in that video are well worth a read and it appears this is an issue with all mirrorless cameras it's not just canon it just seems to be an issue with the mirrorless systems that if it can't see the subject it's not going to pick it up the dslr's definitely performed a lot better in this scenario of course dslr's had issues too but for whatever reason the mirrorless doesn't work as well and that was a bit disappointing to me i had expected it to be better than the 5d4 but in this scenario it is an issue i want to share with you quickly a session i had with a dainty swallowtail butterfly so my wife spotted this butterfly just around our house i never photographed it before so i grabbed the r6 my 405.6 i ran outside and the photo i wanted was the butterfly on top of a daisy with a clean background so i have to try and position myself to ensure that there's nothing directly behind the butterfly now i did actually just out of curiosity activate the auto iaf and no surprises it's not going to work because it can't detect an eye so it's just looking around and it really couldn't find the eye it'll lock on to daisy or the wing you're never going to get a properly sharp photo using auto iaf and you can see on the screen how we had all those focus points activated because it simply couldn't find the butterfly so i had to use traditional autofocus what i did is obviously look through the viewfinder put the focus point on the bird and then i hit the af on button and when it worked it worked really well it you know it locked on to the butterfly and i was able to get some shots however the issue with the background raised its ugly head as you can imagine got a bit of wind the butterfly is moving and i'm moving too because i'm handheld and when the butterfly flew to a new flower and i've moved the camera and i'm trying to acquire focus occasionally i just get it wrong and if i accidentally put the focus point onto the background or slightly off the butterfly the camera just immediately is attracted to that background it just goes straight for it and sticks to it and again it doesn't matter what i did i couldn't get the focus point off the background and i would actually because i'm hand holding it was a little bit awkward to turn the manual focus ring i had to using my left hand i had to push my index finger to change the focus ring whilst holding it all steady and then try and focus on the butterfly again and hope that i didn't miss it a second time and have to repeat that or i'd have to focus below the butterfly on the flowers sort of get it and then up and onto the butterfly so the focus just seemed very jumpy to me and i must admit i was actually pretty frustrated i was thinking with my dslr i put the focus point on the butterfly i hit the focus point and it's going to find it if it misses it it's going to come back to it it's just going to hunt until it finds the butterfly and then it'll focus on it and away we go but with the mirrorless body i was relying heavily relying on me not stuffing it up if i accidentally get that background then i have to do these things and overall it wasn't that enjoyable and in this scenario i would much prefer to use my 5d4 so the issue isn't the camera not finding focus the issue is the camera focusing on the wrong thing so i've got the focus point on the butterfly but i've obviously moved or for whatever reason it jumps onto the background i can't get it to let go of the background to jump onto the butterfly i have to you know use one of these other methods and it's just a pain it's just annoying and you know i could see me getting frustrated in the future with this so i'm not sure what i'm going to do to overcome this or whether you're finding these same issues but it's definitely something to be aware of all right well thanks for sticking with this video i know it's been a long one but we had a lot of content to cover and i hope you find it beneficial and helpful for you when deciding to go onto the mirrorless system the image quality was as good as i had expected the high iso was a little bit disappointing i'd expect it better and auto iaf is just simply amazing there are some autofocus issues but overall i'd much prefer to use the r6 than my dslr so a big help to me is to hit that thumbs up video let youtube know that people like the video if you want to see more of my review videos hit the subscribe button thanks to all the members who support the channel if you want to support the channel directly there is a join button next to the subscribe button for about the cost of a coffee every month it helps me to continue making these videos so if you've got any questions about the r6 put them in the comments below because i'll hopefully answer them in future videos so until the next one take care and bye for now so this is canon this is arguably one so this is probably cannon one of well i don't think there's 20 pig and the right and then the star button on the and it sticks to the background and the cameras oh that was a mission it was a long one

Channel: Duade Paton

Views: 66,145

Keywords: bird photography tips, bird photography lenses canon, bird photography canon, canon 5d mark iv, cameras for bird photography, bird photographer, best canon lens for bird photography, best lens for wildlife photography, Telephoto Lens for bird photography, wildlife photography in the field, field testing telephoto lenses, Lens Review, Canon R6 Review, Canon Autofocus Issues, Canon 800 5.6L, Canon 500 f4 lens, canon r6 autofocus, Canon R5 Review, Canon R6 Image Quality

Id: RhBqtxxc6Iw

Length: 23min 23sec (1403 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021