Canon R7 First Impressions for Wildlife, What Works, What Doesn't!

well g'day good morning and welcome to the channel today i've got something very exciting i've finally got the canon r7 so it took a little bit longer to get than i expected it actually had a mishap with the courier it got delivered to the wrong house it was a bit of a drama but i've got it now this is my very first session there's a swan right here i don't know if you can see it i'm just sitting on the water so we've got a bird to photograph today's just going to be about my impressions my first impressions this isn't a review i just want to use the camera i'm really excited i got up really early this morning i've driven 45 minutes in the dark i couldn't wipe the smile off my face in anticipation i'm struggling talking to you because i just want to photograph this one but what i'm going to do is just have a use the camera check what the buff is like the iso you know just have a play with it and get a feel for it so for me to review a camera i need to use it for a long period of time and that's what i'm going to do so my review will be a little ways off i'm just going to use it have some fun and just see what sort of shots we can get and i'll share those with you so i asked you what lens you wanted me to use today and overwhelmingly you all said the rf 100 to 500 which i have here yep it looks a bit different it's got this weird camo 3m sticker on it i'll put a link in the description of where i got it from so why don't we set up and we'll photograph this black swan i am here hoping to get sunlight but there's clouds in the sky so it's a bit overcast it might be a good test of the iso conditions if we can just shoot before that sun comes up so without further delay let's get into it [Music] all right so i'm down by the water's edge i've got nice and low you can see that the ground pod put a link in the description i've got the gimbal i've got the 100 to 500 i've got the r7 i've got the monitor so i can record what the viewfinder is happening i'm nice and low and there is a swan coming directly at us now it's overcast or it's not overcast the sun just hasn't come up yet so we've got quite low light so i'm going to shoot at iso 6400 on the r7 and just see what sort of shots we can get if we find it there it is 6400 so beautiful looking swan it's just gliding around i'll just check my settings so i'm at iso 6400 i'm wide open at 7.1 aperture which gives me a shutter speed of 1 200 which is quite slow but you have to go quite slow to keep that iso in check oh look at that that's beautiful [Music] and it'll be interesting to see what these turn out like um whether they're usable or not and i will share with them i'll let you download in the description i'll give you a link to this file just to see what it looks like oh i'm getting some nice color there now look at that color in the background it's beautiful i'm hitting the buffer oh that was stunning so we just had a little bit of sunlight there which sort of made the bird glow so i'm also really interested in the buffer there's been a lot of talk so far about how bad the buffer is on this camera as in you don't get a lot of shots so i'm going to just start off shooting in 30 frames per second electronic and full raw which has the smallest buffer i think it's just over 30 something shots and if i do look on the viewfinder it does tell us i think it says 31 in the top left hand corner there so 31 shots there's not a lot i just took some shots of that swan and i've hit it a couple of times already so just something to be aware of when the action's happening you might hit that buffer okay something else that the r7 has it's inherited the autofocus of the r3 and it's slightly different to the r5 and i've currently got it set to i'll show you so if i just show you the menu i've got it set at servo on an af point so a single af point i've got subject tracking on animals eye detection enable so with those settings when i pointed at a bird we can see the little box turn up which is indicating to us that's what it's going to track so if i simply hit the af on button it'll just start tracking that subject and i can take the shots which is quite cool so you can just put the focus point where you want it and then the camera will start tracking it so we've got some ducks coming over here so if i put the focus point on there and it'll just start tracking those ducts which is pretty cool so you can see how the camera is already picking up those ducks telling me what it is and i just hold down the af on and it starts tracking let's see if it can track past this oh now i got confused so you can see just how amazing the tracking is on these cameras on these mirrorless cameras that the focus point just sticks on the duck which is quite incredible if we move over here bang where are we there where's another bird there's one way over there will it find it yep yeah it's pretty incredible that bird's a long way off and it's picked it up how incredible is that auto focus that's why you want to go from a 7d or 90d to the r7 that autofocus is class leading it's incredible for birds and wildlife i don't think that gets any better than that you can point the camera at a subject at an animal and the camera knows you can see the animal and can track it like it's insane it's just incredible so i'm just shooting a little bit of video of this coot so on the r7 we just go from on to video and then i just hit the record button and it's recording so that should look pretty cool and then i just turn the dial back and now we're at stills and we can see i can drop that iso down to 3200 now because we've got much better light i also need to mention what type of memory card that i'm using and i've been very very fortunate that i reached out to prograde which is a they create professional memory cards and they were kind enough to send me their fastest sd card and it's very important that you make note of the right speed a lot of the manufacturers put the read speed like they go um 180 or 200 or whatever it is but that's irrelevant for us we want the right speed so always check the right speed the right speed of this card is 250 megabits per second which is one of the faster ones out there and that enables you to write to the memory card at and it'll clear your buffer quickly so just check the write speed of your sd card because ideally you need to have the fastest card you can get and prograde have offered a 15 discount uh through my channel if you look in the description you can pick up one of these amazing professional cards i have purchased these cards with my own money for my r5 so i do like the product and i will promote it because i use it so be sure to check that in the description you've got to have a fast sd card so that the buffer will clear quicker all right so we're starting to get some sunlight and there's way more action further around so let's go for a walk there we go we can see our swan that's the uh nice latwing coming at us i'm not too happy oh the hard hits we got hard heads we've got hard heads here [Music] oh that's nice [Music] so i've changed a few of the settings of how i adjust my iso and my shutter speed i like to have the iso on a dial so at the moment on the r7 by default it's got an iso button we hit the iso button brings up the iso and you just roll through the dial the front dial so you've got to push two buttons iso button and then choose your iso and i don't like that i just want to adjust the dial so i can adjust the iso as i'm looking so i've actually set the iso to the control dial here next to the thumb and you can see that i can just adjust the iso now just by turning it which is works better for me and the front dial is my shutter speed so i can just go darker or brighter just on here now you might be going well how do you change your aperture well i can just assign the aperture to the control dial or control ring sorry on the lens and i'm not changing the aperture because it's at 7.1 this lens is sharp at 7.1 i need all that light so i'm not changing it so for me i'm just changing the heat the dial for my iso and the front dial for my shutter speed and that's all i'm doing quite easy to set my exposure got the swan set the iso to 3200 i can just change the dial here see 6400 make it brighter 3200 if i want and then the shutter speed i can just change it until the histogram is to the right hand side that's all i'm doing i'm just literally looking at the swan okay my iso i can see it's 3200 a shutter speed of 250th which should be fast enough and we just put the focus point on the bird and we take photos that's all i'm doing when the light changes i'm just changing my shutter speed all my iso and that's all i need to do so a fascinating tidbit with the black swan that you might not be aware of but for whatever reason there's more males than females so clearly that creates an issue when it comes to breeding and what ended up happening is males form a pear bond so two males become a pear and then they find a female and they mate with that female she lays those eggs once she's laid the eggs the two males drive the female off the males adopt the nest and those two males will raise those chicks to maturity so it's fascinating really isn't it and very interesting i feel a bit sorry for the female i must admit so i've just shot at iso 800 at 1 60th of a second which is very very slow but you know that's often what we have to do to get that iso down if you're worried about it is we just have to have low shutter speeds and there's no other way to get around that so we've got some noisy miners feeding in these eucalypts and they're just lurking i think they're just getting these little lerps off the leaves and they're flying around so why they call them noisy miners just want to get them a bit lower if we can that's better oh that's nice [Music] okay so we've managed to get some shots it's dropped down low oh so the batteries just died so i've been shooting for a couple of hours and the batteries just died so i have to quickly change the battery morning yeah are they they're still there now tony frogmouth in this tree here there thank you for that i appreciate it beautiful spot that's for sure so i've just been photographing the um noisy miner and a member of the public's come up to me and let me know that there's a pair of tawny frog mouth just resting in a tree they're a little bit high up but they a lot of people refer to them as owls but the frog mouth so i might just go and show you a bit of video and take a photo of these pretty cool little birds that we have in australia so there's two tiny frog mouths up in this tree just resting pretty cool very cool so after the frog mouth so i went and filmed the outro pretty happy with how the morning session had gone when i was driving home i actually spotted a huge flock of sulphur crystal cockatoos feeding in a field i've quickly pulled over grabbed my camera ground my film camera gone over to the fence set up the camera started filming and it's a bit ironic considering my last video was about failing i forgot to turn the microphone on and i didn't get any usable audio so that footage was wasted however the opportunity to photograph some birds in flight was awesome and i took lots of shots of these soft crystal cockatoos flying around and just using the eye tracking of the camera i was able to track the cockatoos as it was flying and you can see in all these frames here just shot after shot it just sticks to that bird and tracks it all the way through the frame and i managed to get the shot of the bird landing with some other birds you can see that beautiful yellow under the wing very very happy with how that shot turned out however something started to become apparent to me that hadn't been that noticeable when i was using it on a on the gimbal and on a tripod it was when i was using handheld i started to notice the viewfinder moving and i started to notice the rolling shutter and electronic mode and when i talk about rolling shutter i'm talking about the wobbling that you get in the images and you'll see this for yourself if you've got this camera as you can see in the sequence we're getting shot after shot but they start moving and they start warping and that's really weird and why is that happening it all has to do with the readout speed of the r7 sensor they're using that old sensor i know it's updated but it's ideal it's technically a 90d sensor the readout speed is very slow so when we shoot an electronic it's going from line to line to line reading all these pixels to create the image and if there's any movement during that time you're going to get this warping effect and i believe the readout speed of the sensor on the r7 i don't know the exact numbers but i think it's over twice as slow as the r5 and it uses old technology front side illuminated the newer sensors from fuji and sony they use this backside illuminated sensor they don't suffer from the same rolling shutter that you'll get in this camera canon have almost forced a really old sensor into a mirrorless body and my initial feelings after seeing this rolling shutter is it was a mistake they should have created a backside illuminated sensor for this camera so as i was driving up my driveway i spotted the most beautiful birds we get visiting on this property and those are turquoise parrots these parrots are beautiful the red face the colours i just had to have a go photographing them so i've actually just stopped the truck i left the truck on jumped out i didn't film it i just grabbed my camera went after the birds and i did actually get some of my best shots i've ever got of these turquoise parrots now these barretts generally feed on the ground and you can see here in this shot the birds busy feeding i got reasonably close but the detail here is excellent i'm very happy with that we also had a bird jump up onto a onto a branch and i managed to get some shots of it this is the male with the blue head very very happy with these shots however it's important that i discuss the failures i had photographed in this bird and how the r7 really struggled so i was using spot af with eye tracking as i was in the morning i had no issue with the water birds whatsoever it stuck to those swans those birds found them no problem whatsoever however as soon as this bird was on the ground and we had grass involved in twigs and sticks the focus struggled for whatever reason it was wanting to jump onto the grass bird grass and it meant that i was getting a lot of out of focus shots and this is a problem when you're using spot autofocus with tracking is because we lose traditional af i lose the spot autofocus that i can just put on the bird and then force it to focus on it so as you can see in this shot i actually missed probably be the best shot of the day had the turquoise parrot up on a rock nice sewed profile would have been awesome but the damn camera just focused on the background super frustrating i didn't have time to change it the bird was gone moment was lost so i missed that shot because of the autofocus now because i'm ham holding again i'm going to have those rolling shutter issues i'm still an electronic i don't want to scare the birds away so i'm shaky at the best of times the birds are moving i'm moving and you'll see in this series of shots just how bad the rolling shutter is so we can see the autofocus issues and the rolling shutter so the bird is on a rock i've pointed the camera i've initiated the subject tracking so i've tried to put the focus point on the bird and i've held down the button and it's just kept grabbing the background the rock behind the bird and you can see as we go through the shots the rolling shutter takes into account and the image is going up and down it's warping it's going all over the place finally the camera picks up the bird and we do get the shot but in a series of shots we shouldn't be having that many that are out of focus and we shouldn't be having to deal with that rolling shutter it makes me wonder whether you can shoot an electronic handheld long term with that amount of rolling shutter with a few those auto focus issues i'm suspecting that i may just go to mechanical mode i may just go back to traditional spot autofocus when i need it and use eye tracking as well when i need it the only issue with mechanical mode is it's good that you get rid of the rolling shutter but you get this sound so you know it might scare the birds you're limited to 15 frames per second but you will eliminate rolling shutter so you know that was interesting i'm glad i got that opportunity to photograph those parrots because i wouldn't have known that otherwise and that's why you have to really use a camera through multiple sessions to be able to do a proper review and i'll do that later on so what i might do now is just fully just recap quickly my first impressions of the camera and i'll go through the things that you're mostly interested in first one is the iso how did it perform in high iso as you would expect for a 30 megapixel aps sensor at iso 3200 and above it was pretty noisy and you're going to have to use noise reduction software now you would have seen from the photos at the beginning of the session that i did actually get some usable shots at high iso so the swan at iso 6400 pretty happy with how this turned out but i did use topaz denoise now you can use that already with the r7 just in lightroom you can open up de-noise you activate it and you can see by this slider that it does a pretty good job of removing that noise and once it's processed i'm pretty happy with the outcome now if you want to use topaz denoise yourself i have got a 15 off link in the description it works ex really well and you will need noise reduction at 3200 and above on this camera so if you don't already have it perhaps look at that or wait for dxo pure raw which doesn't work with the r7 yet but i'm sure it will in the future right in terms of the buffer lots of questions about this and i will do a full video on iso and buffer in the future i was hitting the buffer consistently at 30 frames per second full raw almost unusable referee you can definitely do those little short bursts but you're going to hit the buffer when it counts and you're going to be very frustrated so i put it into c raw and it was better but again i was still occasionally hitting the buffer i think to avoid hitting the buffer all together you're just gonna have to shoot at 15 frames per second and c-raw and then you'll be fine i don't think you'll have any issues hitting the buffer but we will test that in the future the image quality of the camera i didn't have very good light so i had overcast conditions almost all day and as a consequence the image quality is not going to be as good as if you have nice sunlight so for the conditions i was happy at those lower iso it worked better and overall very happy with how it performed as expected i need to do some more testing and some better light it's nowhere near the r5 quality but we have to consider the price and what it is all right the usability of the camera um yeah i'm not a fan to be honest the first issue that i've got is that for whatever reason i actually use my left eye to look through the viewfinder and not my right eye so my left eye which means my face is over here and the thumb and the control wheel i've got my thumb and when i'm doing it i'm actually hitting myself in the nose with my thumb every time i'm moving the joystick which is a bit annoying it just feels a bit cramped in here that's a bit of a pain and my thumb feels super awkward going over to the right hand side to initiate dual back button focus it's just quite awkward to be honest i'm not a fan i much prefer the r5 or the r6 so that'll take a little bit of getting used to it feels fine and my hand you know my little finger i've got pretty small hands so they're not coming off the bottom overall not too bad but i prefer the layout of the r5 and the r6 the viewfinder i don't have an issue with the viewfinder it's a non-issue of course it's nowhere near as good as the r5 but you can see everything clearly you can see the autofocus you see the bird you can pick it up sure it's a little bit crunchy a little bit digital but it's not a deal breaker it's not a reason i wouldn't buy this camera so overall pretty happy with how it went you know i did get some nice images but i need to do a lot more testing i need to test it with other lenses i need to get out in the field and better light and i will be doing that and coming up so stay tuned let me know in the comments if you're getting this weird wobble if you're getting the rolling shutter how bad is it for you and electronic what are your feelings so far what lenses are you using with it what do you want to know i do read the comments and i will answer those questions thanks to the subscribers who obviously subscribe to the channel the new members welcome if you're not aware for the small price of less than a coffee per month you can support the channel helps me to continue making these videos by these cameras to test et cetera so thanks again happy birding and we'll see you in the next one see ya and i'm at 30 is it 30 frames per second whatever the highest frame rate is 30 yep all right so i'm also very so i'm also really interested so i'm also really interested in the sh i'm also really i'm really

Channel: Duade Paton

Views: 79,158

Keywords: Canon, Lenses For Wildlife Photography, Cameras for wildlife photography, budget telephoto lens for wildlife, wildlife photography, bird photography, Australian Wildlife, Canon camera and lens for wildlife photography, Canon R7, R7 Mirrorless Camera, R7, R10, EOS R7 Canon Mirrorless Camera, Mirrorless camera, Autofocus bird eye AF, FPS, FPS & Buffer, Canon Ergonomics, Kangaroos, R7 Key Features For Wildlife Photography, Mirrorless vs DSLR

Id: Dk8T2OlfS90

Length: 23min 30sec (1410 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 05 2022