Do You Need a HIGH Megapixel Body? Which is BEST, Cropping or Extenders? FF vs APSC?

g'day and welcome to the channel in today's video i'm going to try and answer those common questions we all have high megapixels versus low megapixels full frame versus aps-c cropping versus extenders can we upscale a low megapixel image i think at the end today we want to know how do we get the bird big in the frame while maintaining as much detail as possible do we need expensive gear like this r5 and 100 to 500 or can we just simply use a really old aps-c body and a 405.6 prime that's what we're going to test today and that's what we're going to find out i hope you enjoy i think it's important that we have a look at focal length first it's important we understand how focal length works understand how it impacts the depth of field how it impacts the size of the build in the frame and how it impacts the quality of the images that we're going to get or i decided to do one test i went from 100 millimeters all the way to 1600 millimeters just keep an eye on the background and how big the subject is we'll start at 100 millimeters and we'll work our way to 1600 so we start at 100 and it's very wide we go to 200 this is a big jump remember because we're actually doubling the focal length the next one is 300 another decent jump then 400 and then 500 and now to get to 700 millimeters i actually use my 500 prime with a 1.4 converter and then i added a two times converter which gave me a thousand millimeters focal length now that's the maximum focal length they have however the r5 does have a crop mode which gives us a 1.6 crop that takes us to an effective focal length of 1600 millimeters and you can see just how big this galara is now at 1600 millimeters when we compare it to 100 to 1600 the difference is vast so what focal length do we need well it really depends on the subject that you're photographing how close you can get and your style it'll vary from person to person so i asked my beautiful subscribers what focal length they currently use so as we can see about 60 or more of people use 600 millimeters or more so it shows that that 600 to 800 millimeters is about the average and that's what i use i use 700 millimeters with my prime if i want a light lens and i'm just walking around then i'll go for this 100 to 500 so what do we do if we don't have enough focal length well there's two ways to increase the size of the subject in your frame that's by either cropping or using extenders so let's have a look at those let's first take a look at cropping basically you're just deleting the pixels around the subject and by doing that it effectively makes the subject bigger let's have a look at an example that i shot out in the field so i photographed this duck at 300 millimeters focal length and 500 millimeters focal length we can see that the 300 millimeters is a lot wider and the 500 is a lot narrower so now i can crop the 300 millimeter photo to the same field of view as the 500 so we're now looking at an effective focal length of 500 millimeters can you tell a difference between the two at this crop they're pretty similar but there's one obvious difference and that's the depth of field so the depth of field on the 500mm image is just much narrower which causes that background to go out of focus our depth of field does not change when we crop it on the 300 we've still got a much wider depth of field which makes that background not quite as nice and that's always going to be the issue when you crop images so because we deleted some of the pixels we've actually got a much smaller file now the cropped version is around 17 megapixels and the full frame around 45 megapixels so that may impact how you display or print the final image so can we simply just crop our images and get good results i think the key factor is you have to have a good photo to begin with if you don't have a good photo you're never going to get good results after cropping for example look at this redcap robin bird was just too far away in the middle of a bush it doesn't matter that i was using the r5 and 700 millimeters the photo is never going to be any good however if you have a look at this easton curler that i shot on a 5d4 it's a really nice image we had great light and the bird looks fantastic now this is really hard to photograph bird and i really wanted a headshot showing off that amazing build so i've done a really big crop showing the headshot what do you think of the results how big do you think this final image is in terms of megapixels believe it or not this final image is only about 5 megapixels in size around 2 800 pixels wide do i care no it's gone into my collection i'm never going to print it huge i can display it on social media if i wanted to i'm really happy with this photo so where we do run into trouble with cropping is when the bird is small we might have extra noise or it's just not that sharp when we crop it just exacerbates those issues so if you have a look at this specific black duck that i shot a really poor image with lots of noise when i crop in it just doesn't hold up very well this one's five megapixels as well but i'd never use this image just lacks detail and i just don't like the image speaking of noise the bigger the crop the more visible the noise will be if any of you have a shot with an aps-c camera you'll know what i'm talking about let's take a look at an example here are two images both taken at iso 12800 which is quite high one's taken at a thousand millimeters on the r6 and the other is taken at 500 millimeters on the r5 now the noise is almost identical when we look at them full frame however when i crop in heavily on the r5 image we can see just how visible that noise is if you don't have a lot of noise to begin with then often it doesn't really matter it's only when you have a lot of noise that it gets a lot worse another really important factor when it comes to cropping is how many megapixels you have this r5 gives me 45 megapixels the r6 that i'm filming on gives me 20 megapixels so it's quite a difference the question is does that impact our image quality it basically comes down to how much you crop and what you intend to do with that image that's really important let's take a look at this example both shots taken at 500 millimeters one on the r5 one on the r6 if i crop both images to a composition that i like we can see that the r6 image is now around 2560 pixels wide or 4.3 megapixels the r5 on the other hand gives us about a 10 megapixel image which is around 3860 pixels wide so it's obviously a bigger image now if we posted either of these images to any social media platform whatsoever you couldn't tell the difference that's because none of these display any images greater than i think 1900 pixels wide so we don't get any advantage to the r5 in this scenario we could also display both images quite easily on a 1080p monitor or a 1440p monitor again you wouldn't be able to tell the difference the only time you can tell the difference is when we go to a 4k monitor because the r5 image can display natively on that because we've got over 3850 pixels whereas the r6 image is just too small and you can't display it on a 4k monitor that's where the bigger megapixels come in but if you're not displaying it on those big monitors then it doesn't really matter so how much you crop your images generally comes down to how close you can get and what your starting focal length is for me i used the r6 for almost a year because i had 700 millimeters focal length i never had to crop it by more than 50 so it was never really an issue for me i never felt limited by the megapixels however if all i had was a 400 millimeter lens then i'd find the r6 a little bit problematic and i would definitely benefit from an r5 all right the second way to crop an image is by using a crop sensor like this 40d so i think the easiest way for me to explain how these crop sensors work is to think about the image that's coming down the lens so if i'm photographing say the scarlet robin the scarlet robin comes in circular down the lens and then it hits the sensor on the camera and the sensor records that image so now let's say i was using a full frame camera with a sensor size of say 24 by 36 millimeters i've overlaid the sensor onto the image and that's what the camera is going to capture the rest of the image is simply discarded and not used so for canon they use an aps-c sensor which is actually 1.6 times smaller than the full frame i think nikon and sony they use a 1.5 and micro four thirds has actually got a sensor that's two times as small as a full frame sensor let's have a look at how the canon apc sensor looks when we overlay it on this image circle you can see just how much smaller it is we're losing a lot of information but the bird is a lot bigger in our frame because these sensors are so small they're actually capturing a smaller part of the image a 500 millimeter lens on an aps-c body gives us an effective focal length of around 800 millimeters or 500 times 1.6 what that means is if i want the bird the same size in the viewfinder on a full frame camera i would need a lens that was around 800 millimeters focal length now the focal length hasn't changed it's just that the effective focal length what it looks like in the camera is different on an aps-c body so i've overlaid the other crop sensors sizes from other manufacturers we've got the 1.6 crop 1.5 crop and micro four thirds so it's important to know that apc sensors actually have a lot of drawbacks probably the biggest one is just the noise i know when i use my aps-c sensor i just couldn't really go over iso 1600 whereas on this full-frame body i can go up to iso 12800 and that's quite a big difference they have a larger depth of field less tonal range less dynamic range you know in poor light they just tend to struggle however in good light they're very competitive let's take a look at how this affordable kit performs out in the field so i've got my 10 megapixel 40d pad with my 405.6 gives us an effective focal length of around 640 millimeters the other kit i used was the r6 with the 100 to 500 all right so these are the two shots on the screen can you tell which one was taken with the 40d and which was taken with the r6 believe it or not the image on the left was actually taken with the 40d it was shot at iso 200 which gave us the best possible image quality so i was pretty surprised with the field of view difference between the two kits obviously the effective focal length of 640 makes the bird just that much bigger but at this 100 they look very similar and it shows you just how competitive a 40 camera is compared to the much more expensive r6 so i was overall pretty surprised with how well it performed but i need to stress that these were perfect conditions i had great light i was nice and close low iso this is about as best as it's going to get if i shot this in poor conditions there would be a big difference between the two so i often get asked if i use the 1.6 crop mode on the r5 effectively you can just push a button and it makes it an aps-c sensor about 17 megapixels in size and you can see on the screen we've got the full frame image on the right and we've got the apc 1.6 crop version on the left both of these images are exactly the same i could just crop the full frame and post which would give me the same image the question is why would you ever use the crop mode in this camera well i think the main reason would be to get the bird bigger in the viewfinder i know a lot of people prefer the bird bigger and perhaps the autofocus you find it a little bit easier with a bigger bird you'd also get smaller file sizes because you in theory could have a much bigger buffer shooting in that aps-c and perhaps if the bird was so far away you knew you didn't need all those surrounding pixels you could use that for me personally i don't use it because i'm just too worried that i'd clip a wing or miss some sort of action and i'll just kick myself if i knew i was in crop mode and i've missed something so i just leave it full frame and crop it on the computer another way to make the bird bigger in your frame is to use extenders say this two times extender here if i put this on my 500 millimeter lens makes it a thousand millimeters it sounds like a lot of focal length and it sounds like a no-brainer however it's not quite that simple now i get asked this quite a bit should i buy an extender well it all depends on the lens you're attaching to in my experience extenders work best on fast primes so they definitely work on zooms however extenders slow down your autofocus increase your max aperture and they reduce your image quality so you have to be aware of this when you put one on it's just going to be a lot harder to get images using extenders and you're probably better off just cropping to be honest let's take a look at a comparison that i did i've got a really old 1dx full frame body i think it's around 18 megapixels in size i'm going to attach that to my 500 with a 1.4 extender giving me 700 millimeters focal length i'm going to compare that with the r5 on my 400 5.6 so we've got 400 millimeters and 45 megapixels versus 700 millimeters and 18 megapixels let's have a look at how they compare as we can see from the uncropped shots it's pretty clear that 700 millimeters gives us a beautiful out-of-focus background our depth of field is just narrower and the bird is much bigger in the frame the 400 millimeters is quite short meaning the birds are very small and the background is not as out of focus so i've now cropped them to the same field of view the 1dx is still 18 megapixels the r5 is now around 14 megapixels alright so here's the zoomed in versions can you tell which is which i was actually pretty surprised with just how well the r5 and 400 combo competed with that 700 millimeter lens sure the background looks differently but the details in the bird look almost identical and overall there's not that much of a difference between the two it shows just how much of an advantage that 45 megapixel sensor is all right let's try an extreme example r5 500 millimeters r6 1000 millimeters as you can see the field of view difference is extreme a thousand millimeters just makes the bird a lot bigger let's crop both images to a pleasing composition to say i was shocked was a bit of an understatement the r5 image has held up extremely well to the crop it's now only six megapixels in size but you could still display that on a 1440p monitor if you wanted to and the r6 image is around 12 megapixels now that i've cropped it and you'll be able to show this on a 4k monitor and when we zoom into 100 it shows just how well the r5 holds up the noise difference is pretty minimal yep the thousand millimeters is more detailed but so it should because it's got a hundred percent more reach i think this just goes to show how impressive the r5 sensor is okay what if we use the 20 megapixel r6 i've got a shot at 500 and i shot it a thousand millimeters both taken on the r6 again the difference is massive but this time we do not have the cropping headroom of the 45 megapixel let's crop both to a pleasing composition the 500 millimeter shot is now around a 3.8 megapixel file versus the 18 megapixels of the thousand millimeters we're now a little restricted on how we could view this cropped image it'd be fine on social media but we couldn't really display it all that well on certain tvs or monitors and when we view the images at 100 we can see a clear difference between the two we can see if you've got a smaller megapixel body the extenders actually do give you quite an advantage because you just don't have that cropping ability and that brings me to the final question and how well does the upscaling software work if you've got adobe lightroom then you've got adobe's new enhanced super resolution where it quadruples the amount of megapixels you have so our 20 megapixel r6 file is now actually 80 megapixels once we've enhanced it how does it actually look at 80 megapixels let's find out i've enhanced the 500 millimeter image and now i've cropped that down to the thousand millimeter field of view and as you can see they're actually very similar now in size so at this crop it's pretty hard to tell them apart let's zoom in to 100 to see if we can see some differences all right when we do zoom in we can see some iq differences the super resolution image is a little bit crunchy it's lacking the fine detail but we've got to put this into context we're comparing a 500 millimeter image to a thousand millimeter image and the fact that they can even compete you know at that normal composition is pretty incredible and it's going to give you a lot of flexibility if you have a smaller megapixel body it's going to enable you to print large or display large if you need to now of course we need to remember that we could upscale the r5 which would give us what 180 megapixel image slightly ridiculous and it'll be a bit hard to process but it's an amazing piece of software all right one final comparison and this time is the r6 and the r5 both at 500 millimeters from 10 meters distance i'm going to upscale the r6 image i'm going to process them both and i'm going to show you them and see if you can tell the difference which is the r5 and which is the r6 alright here's image number one and here's image number two which is which all right here's the two uncropped images the r6 is actually the left image and the r5 is the right image so the r6 was upscaled using adobe super resolutions 80 megapixels compared to the 45 megapixels of the r5 when we zoom into the r5 to 100 and scale the r6 we can see that they are very similar so i do believe that r5 is actually a slightly better file and you know i prefer not to use the upscaling but it's definitely an option should you need it all right it's been a long video we did lots of testing so what did we learn what are our conclusions well if money is no object then a high megapixel high focal length is clearly the best option you're enabled to get the bird big in the frame and have a big file check out this image of a redcap robin that i was able to obtain using 700 millimeters on the r5 it just looks fantastic and i'm very happy with this image if you want portability and the need to crop well this kit here is the way to go a nice 100 to 500 zoom with the r5 enables you to take shots out in the field and crop them and still have nice images currently looking at getting into mirrorless and you've only got ef gear and perhaps 400 millimeters is your maximum focal length then i'd highly suggest getting the r5 body put that on your 400 millimeters and you'll be able to crop it and still have nice file so if you want a mirrorless body but you can't afford the r5 and you've already got ef gear then the r6 is a really good option if you've got an extender you can potentially use that or you could upscale the r6 image if it's not big enough if you're on a budget then clearly a nice old apc body with say a 400 millimeter lens is going to give you an effective focal length 640 which will enable you to get lots of nice shots i used that for over two years and i was really happy with the shots i was able to obtain at the end of the day it all comes down to what your budget is what your style is and what you want from photography yes the high megapixel high focal length will get you the best shots but that shouldn't be a limiting factor on you getting out and having fun you know i started out like everyone else i've still got my original kit my 40d 400 5.6 i still take it out from time to time that's how my passion for bird photography started just getting out there week after week just taking photos and improving my technique it's also important to remember all these tests that i was doing were stationary subjects and really nice light and i was pretty close it'll be a different story out in the field with moving subjects there's a lot of other variables at play however i just thought it'd be a bit of fun to test all the lenses and cameras that i've got and share them with you i'll share some of the raw files in the description below if you want to download them and have a bit of a play with yourself so i'd love to hear from you in the comments what you thought of today's video was any of it interesting what's important to you what have you found in the field let's get a conversation going i do read all the comments i really do appreciate all that support if you like this video obviously give it that thumbs up subscribe if you want to see more of these videos thank you again to all my members that support the channel and until the next video take care and see you later we're comparing a 500 millimeter minute we're comparing a 500 millimeter image to a thousand millimeter dimmage now you can see how now you can see how quickly you can see how much better their image you can see how much better the image kookaburra [Laughter] serenading us

Channel: Duade Paton

Views: 46,029

Keywords: Canon mirrorless cameras for wildlife photography, Bird Photography, Bird Photography Tips & Tricks, Wildlife Photography Tips, Telephoto Zoom Lenses, Canon R5, Canon RF tips and tricks, Extenders, Canon EF400 5.6, EF400mm f5.6L, EF lenses on Canon R5, Canon R6, Extenders vs cropping, High MP vs Low MP, FF vs APSC, Do you need a high MP body, High megapixel vs low megapixel, cropping images, best kit for bird photography

Id: Pg0KbvOHptY

Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 29 2021