EOS R5 - The BEST Bird Photography Camera EVER?

[Music] 45 megapixels 12 frames per second animal eye detection autofocus on paper the specs of the r5 sound simply amazing but is it an overheating mess or can it deliver in the field [Applause] hi everybody and welcome to the channel in the past as bird photographers we always had to decide between a slow high megapixel camera with like an average iso performance or a fast low megapixel camera with a good iso performance but what we really always wanted it's a camera that has high megapixels so we can crop fast enough frame rate so it can get nice birds in flight and really good iso performance so you can shoot in those dark forest environments and this camera promises to deliver all of that so it's genuinely excited when it arrived so let's look at the camera and some of the features and functions i was most concerned with first of all it has a fully articulating screen so that's pretty cool if you're working like close to the ground or something although personally i'll probably be using it like this most of the time if you're grabbing the camera you can hear like a little rattle or shake that's the ibis so it's not broken don't be afraid when you grab it out of the box talking about the ibis it's been pretty amazing if you're using like a shorter lens i've been using a 16 to 35 and a 70 to 200 it's pretty much like a tripod like i can hand hold really long shutter speed so my viewfinder isn't even moving so it's been amazing for video as well on these shorter lenses i can definitely hand-hold video for b-roll and get some really nice and stable footage does it work with the longer lenses yes it does to degree but it's obviously less effective i'm hand holding a big 600 millimeter lens i'm simply moving around so much that the iris just becomes a little bit less effective but what it's doing it's definitely helping me to get a really nice and stable picture in the viewfinder on my old cameras on my 5d mark 4 for instance even with the is on on my 600 millimeter lens the viewfinder was kind of moving around a fair bit and up and down and that has definitely been much smoother and there's a lot less movement in the viewfinder with the ibis so i think that's definitely an improvement as you can see there's no battery grip i haven't gotten it yet but i definitely ordered one and i would definitely want to use it personally i feel like the camera is pretty small and if i had it with a 70 to 200 for instance it started to hurt my wrist after a while because i couldn't just support it enough i would have really liked to be able to put my hand a bit lower and have that battery but also for shooting vertical it's really annoying to shoot like that i much prefer to have a nice vertical grip to shoot like that so i'm just waiting for that to arrive i would highly recommend it it will also help you with the battery life talking about the batteries it has really not been an issue i was worried about that but so far battery life has been great as long as i'm using the new batteries that come with the camera i've been trialling some older i must say much older i think 5d mic 2 or 5d mark iii batteries and they struggled and the camera didn't even give me the full high speed mode with those batteries it was indicating that it wasn't able to have i guess enough power to have the high frame rate whereas with these batteries i've been consistently getting at least two or three thousand images per battery so that's been amazing and really no downgrade from the 5d mark iv in similar conditions the camera comes with two card slots one sd slot and one cf express slot these cf express cards are really expensive but they're also really awesome they're really fast and it's basically impossible to hit the buffer if you're shooting with the cf express card i tried and i actually started to feel bad for taking so many images before i actually hit the buff and i easily took i think over 200 images before i hit the buffer once but even when i hit the buffer it was writing the files really quickly onto the card and it wasn't much of an issue however when i was using sd cards and i actually bought a fast sd card for this camera i started to hit the buffer pretty quickly after like i think around 50 60 shots and then it just took forever to ride on the car and was really not fun and the worst what i tried to do when the camera kind of not froze but it was just writing for such a long time onto the carton and tried to swap to the other card but it wouldn't even let me swap to anything else or even use some of the buttons so the camera was really kind of stuck on the writing to the card mode which was pretty annoying and i had to wait and then quickly change back to the cf express card so if you're doing bursts and trust me it's very easy to do big bursts with this camera you definitely want the faster card and of course the last thing everyone has been worried about is the adapter is the adapter going to work is it going to be terrible so far i must say i don't even notice it has an adapter in all the adapter does as far as i know is basically move the ef lenses forward to account for the missing mirror box in this camera compared to a dslr and performance has been great like i wouldn't know i've been using an adapter one other thing i noticed and i think that's the same for all mirrorless cameras because you're having an electronic viewfinder the image stabilization on your lens is always on that means if you take your camera off without turning it off you will kind of mess with your rs because it's running and then you're ripping it off and you might damage it this has happened to me a few times already because in the past with dslr cameras there was no really the need to turn the camera off when changing extenders for instance so now i have to turn the camera off and wait i actually stopped it so i have to wait seven seconds for the camera to do the mirror cleaning and then the is to stop and then i can take the camera off put the extender on and then turn it back on so that has really slowed it down compared to a dslr where i can just rip the camera off put the extender on and be ready to shoot again probably in less than half the time that i have to right now for me in the field when i just quickly want to rip the camera off put an extender on and start keep shooting this will be a little bit of an issue and i will definitely have to get used to that this brings me to the viewfinder and the one thing i was probably worried about the most i've used an eos r a couple times and i found the lag in the viewfinder or the blackout are kind of freezing between the shots really annoying and i actually struggle to keep the birds when they're flying past me in the viewfinder because it would go like rather than kind of being like just smooth and me being able to follow the birds so that was a major concern but this lag has really not been an issue with this camera and trust me i trialed it out and was really worried about it but if we look at the footage from the u finder here you can see the blackout is basically not noticeable and it's very easy for you to anticipate the bird's movement and go with the bird because you can still kind of see it swimming or flying and it's really not a problem so i've been very relieved with that and positively surprised how good the electronic viewfinder is and in all honesty i probably wouldn't want to go back i can have a histogram in the viewfinder it does the exposure simulation and of all these other cool features in the viewfinder that make my life so much easier compared to a normal viewfinder or old-school viewfinder so all in all i'm very happy with the viewfinder i put it to the smooth settings but i will make a separate video about all the settings i'm using on this camera because it took me about two days to go through all the menus and find all the right settings and tweak them so to get the best results so that will be one of my next two videos where you get an idea of the settings i use and how i set up this camera to get the absolute most out of it animal eye detection autofocus sounds like a silly gimme but it's actually amazing to use the days of focus and recompose are over the camera does all that for us now basically it takes the focusing for us out of the equation we don't have to worry about keeping focus on the bird anymore the camera does that for us what we have to do now is only focus on keeping good composition off the shots while the camera maintains focus on the bird's head at all times it's that good this animal eye detection autofocus has also been amazing when it comes to birds and flight photography traditionally i didn't have the highest success rate with birds and flights on my 5d cameras but this camera has taken my success rate of in focus sharp flight shots from maybe 20 to 30 percent to 90 so i'm more than stuck with that you simply press the button that activates animal eye detection autofocus and it instantly jumps on the bird's head and finds it quicker than you could ever do yourself with a traditional autofocus so that has been really amazing and it's such a good feature i can now hold the focus recompose my shots and the camera stays on the bird the whole time even if i move the camera around a lot that's something we simply couldn't do before this camera does this mean every shot is sharp now and i never take an out of focus image no that's not the case like all autofocus systems there will be times where this camera misses focus sometimes it jumps onto the bird's nostril thinking it looks like an eye or it slightly goes off to the beak or the ear or other parts of the bird that happens at times but overall the chance of getting sharp shots has increased dramatically in my opinion you're never fully losing track of the bird with my 5d cameras it quite often happened that i try to track a bird i slide off with the older focus field onto the background and once i'm on the background i can never get back onto the bird because it takes too long i manually have to try to refocus and the bird is long gone by then whereas with this camera because it doesn't fully jump off the bird the chances of getting much better and much sharper images have increased dramatically i'm really stoked and really happy with this autofocus system right out of the box the way it was set up i found it a little bit confusing to use what happened sometimes it would look for something in like the lower left corner and i just didn't feel like i have enough control so i changed the setting to having one field first and then the animal eye detection autofocus starts looking for the bird from there i found that a lot more helpful because now i can direct the camera in the right direction what the animal eye detection autofocus also struggled with is multiple birds it's actually very hard for you to pick the bird you want to focus on especially if this is kind of lined up in a similar area the own animal eye detection autofocus will simply just pick one of the birds and once it pick the bird it wants to stay on the bird so getting onto another bird is actually quite tricky and the solution for that is that i set up the camera in a specific way i've activated back button auto focusing but instead of just using one button i now set up two different auto focus modes on two different buttons so what have i done as the base mode i do not have chosen the animal eye detection autofocus in the camera no i set it to the traditional auto focusing mode and then to the spot autofocus so it's one little field that when i press it will focus exactly on the spot that i've focused on and i set the focusing for that onto the af on button my front shutter button only takes the picture it does not do any focusing for me and secondly i assign the animal eye detection autofocus to the star button so whenever i start pressing the star button it overrides the normal auto focusing and activates the animal eye detection autofocus why have i set it up in that why because now i can kind of direct the camera on what i want to focus on before where i didn't have that the camera kind of just randomly picked whatever i'd wanted to focus on now i pre-focus with the traditional spot autofocus on the bird's head that i want to focus on and then press the animal eye detection autofocus and it will keep focusing on the bird that i've pre-focused on with birds and flight this is not as important and if you have even an out-of-focus viewfinder press the animal eye detection autofocus and it just randomly sees a bird somewhere it will jump onto the bird and stick with the bird so that's not as much of a problem but having a row of birds sitting somewhere pre-focusing on one bird and then activating the animal eye detection autofocus has been much more successful for me than trying to get the animal auto focus to actually focus on one specific bird in that automatic mode it just picks one bird and it can be frustrating at times so setting it up the way that i've set it up has dramatically increased the usability for me and makes it much easier to actually get the bit in focus that i want to have in focus what i noticed with using this camera and the animal eye detection autofocus is that if you have nice and high shutter speeds and do nice and smooth movement your heat rate will almost be a hundred percent whereas if you have not fast enough shutter speeds and move your camera around quite sort of drastically in like a jerky kind of way the animal eye detection organofocus will have trouble kind of staying on the eye and you will get a lot more kind of just out of focus or motion blurred images but i guess it makes sense if you do a rapid movement the camera has to quickly jump through a lot of auto focus fields trying to stay on the bird's head and it doesn't always succeed so do smooth and nice movements and try to anticipate what the bird is doing and you will get an amazing success rate of sharp shots with this camera let me show you some examples now of images that i've taken and the things that have really impressed me with the camera in the field so looking at this series of silver gold raws in fast on image view you can see the camera nicely tracked this silver girl against this really busy background giving me and a great chance of getting some fantastic fly shots typically most of my other cameras would have always just jumped onto the background straight away not giving me any chance of getting shots like this where this camera just stuck on the bird the whole time did not jump onto the background once here's another particularly impressive example with the bird flying against a busy background it's nice and sharp the camera attracts it nicely and now there's this bit of grass coming into the picture but the camera actually keeps tracking the bird behind the grass keeps staying on it stayed on it the whole time didn't even get distracted at all by something being right in front of the bird pretty amazing here we've got a nice example of how the camera just stays on one bird and does not get distracted at all by another bird i focus on the rebirth and then this bird in the front here came into the picture but that didn't distract the camera at all it stayed on the bird that i initially focused on even though that other bird was flying right through my viewfinder about the camera once it's locked on the one bird it will stay with that bird one more set of images to look at for birth and flights where the background changes from water to a busy background and let's see how the camera did with that so here's the bird camera acquired focus stayed on the bird now it's flying towards me as you can see it's still nice and sharp and now it starts to enter with that dark background behind me and i'm actually kind of struggling to track the bird but the camera doesn't struggle whatsoever staying nicely on the bird throughout the whole landing process and giving me a great opportunity to get some really nice images and that's simply amazing isn't it no matter what the background is the camera doesn't care at all it just gives you nice and sharp images and that is something that has really impressed me i was never able to take flight shots like this and now i can simply with the press of one button crazy here's another just nice portrait just showing you how nice and sharp this image is with the adapted 70 to 200 millimeter lens at iso 1600 and here another cool example showing you how well the camera focused right on the bird's eye and here's another shot that i got while i was shooting the silver gulls i noticed through the corner of my eye there was suddenly this gull landing started to call just to the side of me with a beautiful dark blue background so i ripped the camera around and while i was still whipping it around i pressed the animal eye detection focusing button and started shooting so i got one shot the next shot the girl already stopped calling with a normal camera i simply wouldn't have gotten this shot because i would have never been able to acquire focus this fast so this is the in the field cases where i see this camera being simply superior to anything else because i have the ability to just press a button and the camera jumps onto the bird straight away allowing me to just get more and faster images i also had the opportunity to take the camera to the local duck pond and attached it with the adapter to my 600 millimeter version 2 lens that you can see in the background there and just try to see how it performs just tracking ducts against the water against busy backgrounds or even like through bushes so i just wanted to show you some nice examples where you just see the beautiful detail the really nice sharpness all around all the feather details this was shot at iso 800 at 600 millimeters all raw files in this particular example i liked how again the camera stayed on the bird's eye most other cameras would just simply jump around between the two birds whereas this camera just stayed glued to the bird's head that i initially focused on next i want to show you a series of images where i actually underexposed a fair bit and then just try to be mean to the camera move it around and just try to see if it can keep focus on the code even when it was going through the bushes past the bushes so let's look at these images trying to go like up and down and moving around and i was just firing away the whole time as well so i easily took like 150 200 images while tracking this bird so as you can see now it's entering this busy background i purposely moved the camera way up see if it would jump on the background but it stayed glued to the bird the whole time without really giving it any trouble of following it as you can see here now it starts to swim into the bushes now there's branches getting right in front of it does not bother the camera at all it stayed on the bird the whole time that's pretty crazy isn't it and just one more example of a duck that is pretty dark pretty late as you can see by the settings 1 800 of a second f 8 iso 8 000 me just trying to push the limits again and look at this this is not much noise in this shirt at all it is absolutely usable at iso 800 crazy at iso 8 000 see i'm not even used to those highers or numbers here are some more sample images now of some rainbow lorikeets in my backyard and i really tried to push the boundaries again attaching the 600 millimeter version two lanes with the 1.4 anti-tank extender and some shots without extenders in bad light with high ice old conditions just seeing how the camera would react it did very well the only thing i noticed it struggled a little bit with the two times extender as you would expect in these star conditions but the viewfinder kind of became a little bit sluggish with the bare 600 millimeter lens it's nice and fast and responsive with with the two times extended it kind of felt like a little bit heavy like you're dragging it a little bit but i assume that's because there's much less light so i took those shots took some shots i saw 3200 6400 just a few and then i looked at the shots on the computer and my mind was blown i opened those 12 800 iso images and i couldn't believe it they were actually totally fine and i could hardly see any noise in the raw files it was simply amazing so when i compared to my other cameras there's simply no other canon camera that i've used that has higher mega pixels that can even compare to that on my 5d mark iv i may have been happy to use like 3200 6400 very reluctantly with with this camera i'm probably actually confident to use 12 800 maybe even 25 600 it still feels strange to me to even think about these high iso levels but the camera certainly seems capable of delivering the performance when it comes to these highers on numbers with still decent dynamic range not too much noise and great details and if you ran some noise reduction on these files you would have completely clean looking files with great details at iso 12800 that's mind-blowing so i think the camera has dramatically increased in that regard and will definitely help me in the field on those dark days to get much better images having a camera with 45 megapixels people always talk about the ability to crop so i wanted to do something crazy i used one of the seagulls examples where the goal was way too far away already i made a really tight crop edited the picture and looked at the size and it was still six megapixels so this huge crop is still six megapixels now i wouldn't use this file to blow it up big on a wall but if i was selling something like this to a magazine for like a quarter size print or for the web this would be totally fine having the ability to crop in this far and still get a decent sized file will be very helpful for those moments where you just can't get close enough to that bird of a lifetime and now you might actually still be able to get a decent shot out of it i also really like the ability to have so many different video mods to shoot on and especially that 4k high quality mod has given me really crisp and beautiful looking footage so i'm looking forward to using that more the camera's also really quiet which i found really nice 5d or 1dx camera just hammer why they're so noisy and the birds instantly look up towards you whereas with this camera i've not had one bird yet that even noticed the camera sound when i was clicking away with the mechanical shutter so that's been really great so what's not to like about this camera what i found complicated is how you get to the video mode now there's no way to go from camera shooting stills to stand by video mod with just the press of one button that's something that i would really like to see but it might be in there if you know about it how you can set it up let me know in the comments i would really appreciate that but like i said so far i've not found a way to just press one button and switch from video to stilts and back as we all know with new cameras there's also no software available yet so you can either use dpp which is kind of stuck in 1998 and really not fun to use or i used adobe dng converter that converted my raw file to dng and then i could open it up in camera raw but i felt like the quality of the dng wasn't quite up to the quality of the raw file it was a little bit darker not giving me the best image quality so i'm hopeful within a couple months hopefully that there will be better software with matching camera profiles so we can get the absolute most out of our raw files and lastly we all know overheating is an issue with this camera and the more you use it the more the recording time availability for you in the high quality video mods seem to go down yesterday i had my first experience with it after i filmed most of this video i went ahead and took some b-roll of this camera where i just turned it on had the screens running i was just sitting on the tripod after a cold start and after one hour of shooting some b-roll off the camera i was down to only three minutes of available video recording to me so in the standby mode the camera had built up a lot of heat killing almost all the video features and it also drained the battery considerably because it was indicating the battery is really low i changed the battery but then after i changed the battery i had an overheating warning and only one minute of video left so then i thought is it really to stand by that's messing with the camera so i grabbed the camera went out took about 2 000 images with it on a fresh battery and the battery is only down to 77 and after that 20 30 minutes of taking those 2000 images i still had the full 20 minutes of full quality 4k video available to me so taking a lot of images in a short period of time didn't really affect the overheating but just having a camera sit somewhere with the screens on totally made it overheat so my recommendation for you would be if you're using this camera and you intend to shoot videos and stills always turn it off whenever you can if you're standing somewhere waiting for bird to come it's probably better to turn it off or to turn the auto power off on so the camera quickly turns off after 30 seconds or something not allowing it to build up that heat in the standby mode that then eventually will kill all other features so that's definitely a problem it hasn't affected me too much yet but i definitely see it affecting me down the road in the field and it's something that i'm a little bit concerned with and hopefully canon can find some sort of fix to that to at least mitigate those times a little bit more and give you at least some minutes of video available when you need them a lot of people have asked me would you choose the r5 or the r6 for bird photography and for me after trying the r5 i haven't tried the r6 but the r5 would be the clear choice for me 45 megapixels that really good high iso performance and that amazing autofocus just put it over the top for me and when it comes down to it 45 megapixels with great image quality and great iso performance will be 20 megapixels for bird photography any day of the week so other than budget where the r6 clearly wins the r5 would be my choice for bird photography all in all the r5 is an amazing stilts camera for bird photography it also has amazing video capabilities but they come with severe overheating limitations so if you can live with those i would definitely recommend the r5 for your bird photography because it has been simply amazing to use it the highest all performance the great image quality the high megapixels and that amazing animal eye detection autofocus simply put it over the top for me when it comes to bird photography and i know it will help me to take amazing bird images going forward i've also really enjoyed using the evf because now i can have the histogram displayed in the viewfinder negating the need for me to do test shots and just speeding up the whole process overall if you want to take your bird photography to the next level make sure to check out my master class on editing my video purged and my ebooks down there in the description i've linked them for you and i know they will help you to become a stand-up bird photographer other than that let me know in the comments do you have any questions about the r5 do you want me to try out certain things let me know in the comments so please give me a thumbs up for this video make sure to subscribe to my channel and i will see you in one of my next videos very soon enjoy your day bye

Channel: Jan Wegener

Views: 139,023

Keywords: bird photography, australia, vogelfotografie, jan wegener, birding, photography, birds, tutorial, equipment, wildlife photography, nature photography, canon 5D Mark IV, Canon 600mm, which camera to buy, camera, sony, canon, nikon, megapixel, autofocus, bird photography equipment, bird photography gear, birding gear, birds in flight, eos R5, Canon EOS R5, overheating, animal eye AF, animal eye autofocus, R5, R5 or R6, flight photography, Af-on, star button

Id: 5vyq304j4wE

Length: 29min 14sec (1754 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2020