I was SURPRISED by the RESULTS!! How the R5 Performs with old EF Lenses

g'day and welcome to the channel in today's video i want to share with you how this really old lens i think it's 28 years old how this performs on the new canon mirrorless r5 i'm going to go out into the field i'm going to take lots of different photos and i want to answer those questions that you might have is how's the iq how's the autofocus how's the fps does the ibis of the camera you know make up for the lack of is on the lens how does it work with extenders these are all the things i'm going to try and these are all the things i'm going to share with you today all right so some of you may have recognized the lens it's my trusty canon ef 400 5.6 but it is starting to show its age you know when compared to the rf 100 to 500 it lacks is the minimum focus distance is pretty poor however this is a really sharp lens it's really light i think 1250 grams so it's quite easy to hand hold and the thing it's got going for it is it's really affordable i think you can pick it up for 600 us maybe 800 australian so it is an affordable burning lens if you're just getting into wildlife or burning and you want a nice sharp lens this could be the one now if you're not aware these older lenses use what's called the ef mount and the new mirrorless bodies use the rf mount so they are different you can't just fit this lens to this camera you do need an adapter and you can see here this little black ef to rf adapter which i have to mount on this to get it to work so according to canon there's no loss of iq when you use this adapter and i can assure you that i i couldn't see any if we have a look at one of these photos i captured with this lens this male superb fairy wren and his breeding plumage he's ready for spring lovely pose and when we zoom in the detail is just fantastic you know i did have a beautiful morning light to maximize that detail and i wasn't using extenders which gives us the sharpest possible image the first thing i want to talk about are the frames per second you know these latest mirrorless cameras from canon the r5 r6 they get 12 frames per second mechanical 20 frames per second electronic however it's important to know that these older ef lenses just don't get that 12 frames per second of mechanical this one here i think is valued at 6.8 and when we hit the shutter we can hear how slow it is it's quite slow when you compare it to the 12 frames per second of the rf 100 to 500 and it's definitely noticeable in the field after using the 12 frames per second that's for sure however in saying that we do get a full 20 frames per second in electronic mode which is what i ended up using most of the time with this lens let's go into the field and i'll show you how i use the 20 frames per second to capture some really nice images well good morning i'm going to explain exactly how i'm going to get these photos this morning so as you can see we've had quite a lot of rain it's really really green and this moss on this rock just looks absolutely amazing so my plan is to get these birds onto this beautiful moss now the key is to get really low so you can see i've positioned the camera i've obviously got the r5 the adapter i've got a 1.4 extender and i've got the 405.6 and i've tried to get eye level with this rock here that will enable me to get those nice smooth out-of-focus backgrounds if i was too high and i was shooting down we wouldn't get as nice backgrounds so i've set up here and all i need to do is put some mealworms onto this rock here i just breed these mealworms myself for my chickens you can buy them at any um pet store so this high point is kind of where i want the birds to land and there's a few different rocks here so i'm just going to put a few of these mealworms in a couple of these little spots here and hopefully that will attract the birds to land on this spot all right we'll get this going let's see how we go all right okay put the mealworms on there these birds are pretty tame so i'm just looking at my settings we've kind of got dappled light at the moment i'm actually at iso 3200 which gives me 1600th of a second and f8 so my maximum aperture or the fastest i can make this lens is f8 because we've got the 1.4 extender on so obviously on my gimbal head which enables me to turn and move quite easily here it comes the redcop redcap robbing up the back let's hope fingers crossed he comes and lands where we want him so i'm an electronic shutter so i should get the full 20 frames per second he's on my camera there he is there he is oh beautiful beautiful eye contact looking good that's awesome what a beautiful little bird plan worked exactly as i'd hoped you know i've put these worms on this rock just landed on the rock you've got a split second to get a few shots and you just hope that you get the eye contact that you're after um that's the key okay we've got a jackie winter there he is there we go over the shoulder what a nice pose that was very short and sweet that one so the checking window definitely gave us a nice over-the-shoulder pose that's where those 20 frames per second definitely help you know because as soon as you get that head angle that you like you just hold down that shutter and it's going to take lots of photos hopefully one of them will be sharp okay we've got a willy wagtail here this would be a great shot if we didn't look at us [Music] well that was a really successful session you know i've got lots of photos that i'm very happy with i just used some very simple techniques if you want to know more about that i did do a video all about how to get the best image quality um check that out if you're interested and you can see how important the 20 frames per second was when we look at these series of images of this woolly wagtail you know the woolly wagtail moves around a lot it's one of those birds that just doesn't sit still and all i'm really wanting that eye contact so the birds landed where i want it i've hit off the shutter to take a range of shots and we can see the first few we just don't quite have the eye contact and then the next frame we do have the eye contact and i only got two frames with the eye contact i want before it moved off and flew off if i'd been shooting at the 6.8 frames per second or slower i may have missed that shot that's why it's such an advantage to have those higher frame rate cameras it's always a bonus when a bird you weren't expecting turns up i was packing up and i was just about to go to the car and i saw a bird fly above and i thought oh that looks like a hooded robin i haven't seen one of those on the property for over a year i didn't know where they've gone i've been missing him and thankfully he came down and he got a few worms and i took some shots it's not a very colorful robin when compared to all the other ones but he's a real character and it's always been a favorite of mine so i was really happy to grab this shot with a nice pose and that nice eye contact let's talk about the autofocus performance of this old lens on this new body this new body is obviously packing the latest technology with bird eye af and being mirrorless it works slightly different to dslrs so it's interesting to see how it performs the good news is that everything works you know we get pretty much 100 coverage across the af field the lens focuses and you can see how well the bird if works on this camera i'm switching between two focus points and the bird if is able to pick up the eye fairly quickly and we can just go from one to another and once you lock onto a subject you can just move the camera around which is a real advantage as to the old days we used to just move the af point to get the composition you want and that's a big advantage and as you can see the shot of this red cap robin i was able to get the iaf on the bird the birds nice and sharp and the background and foreground are slightly out of focus and i quite like this shot usually i want to see the feet of a bird but for some reason this image speaks to me and i quite like it do you like it let me know in the comments if this one appeals to you so the massive advantage of these mirrorless cameras now is your ability to focus past f8 what do i mean by that or when you put a two times converter on this it becomes an 800 f11 on a dslr autofocus simply wouldn't work but with the mirrorless body the af does work i'll talk more about the performance of the extenders later but here's a little preview of a shot i was able to obtain with the two times converter of a ferry rent and it looks pretty good but i want to stress something really really important is when you put extenders on this lens the autofocus takes a massive hit and i mean it's quite substantial it's just a lot slower and i was hand holding trying to shoot some fairy ends and it kind of drove me nuts to be honest i actually found using traditional autofocus was a lot quicker than using the bird iaf so in the end i would just use traditional i use dual back button focus on this camera so i have one button for traditional autofocus and one button for the bird iaf so i can simply just use traditional once i see the bird once the bird's in focus in the camera i then switch to bird if which then finds the bird and i take those photos so that works a lot better than trying to find the bird with bird eye af it's a bit of a mouthful but it's just something to be aware of is that the bird iaf just won't work as well on these older lenses that i've found anyway so i was even quite surprised when i was photographing these robins i actually looked up and there are a couple of wedge-tailed eagles way off in the distance so i thought well why not just try and see if the camera can pick it up so i've picked it up and i've focused and i've used bird iaf and the bird iaf has actually picked up this eagle which was way in the sky and it's tracked it and i took some shots i mean they're terrible because the bird's so far away but you can see that the bird if does actually track birds in flight it would be a bit of a challenge and i wouldn't recommend using that kit for that but it does work all right so i get asked about extenders quite a bit so i thought i'd try the 1.4 and the two times on this lens and just see what sort of photos i can get with this setup the reason for that is 400 millimeters on a full frame camera is pretty short and i took this shot of a fairy wren you can see just how small the bird is at 400 millimeters and i've got to crop in quite a lot to get the composition and the framing i want and that can often lead to some noise issues and a lack of iq however the r5 does overcome that a bit with the big megapixel body all right so when we put a 1.4 converter on this lens it becomes a 540 f8 meaning we lose that one stop of light and the max aperture we can go is f8 so we're going to have to use lower shutter speeds or higher iso and it could be an issue in low light so the first session i had was actually with those fair ends again and i had nice light so i had no issue with shutter speed and i was able to take lots of shots and i was absolutely stoked when this male landed on a rock and it just started singing and i've captured this shot and you know i really really like how the shots turned out it's up on the rock we've got a nice side profile tails up mouth's open singing and that's taken with 1.4 and there's absolutely nothing wrong with the image quality in this shot so in good light the lens performed really well you might be wondering how does it perform in low light well i got the opportunity to try it it was heavily overcast i've gone back into my front yard i had uh f8 so the max aperture i think that gave me a shutter speed of 1 320th which is really slow and i had an iso of 12 800 which is kind of the max iso i like to use on this camera i tried to take some shots handheld and i'll be honest i just couldn't get sharp shots the lack of is the high iso everything was working against me i took maybe 60 shots looked on the camera and nearly every single one of them was out of focus or lacking detail lacking sharpness was basically unusable i probably got one or two shots which were marginal i have heavily processed one of them just to show you what you can get and that's the fairy run you can see on the screen it hasn't polished up too bad however it was an extremely difficult combo to use probably and that's probably the biggest drawback of these extenders on this lens is you just can't use it in low light it's just almost impossible you really i think for me anyway i've got fairly shaky hands you have to use it on a tripod or if you use handheld i'd say 1 640th 1 500th of a second would be the slowest shutter speed that you'd want to use so it's really a good light sort of setup once you start adding extenders onto this lens so i ended up using the 1.4 extender the majority of the time i took maybe 4 000 photos in my testing and i got so many nice shots that you know it gives me confidence knowing that if i had to use this lens in the field i'd have no issue putting a 1.4 on it and still getting nice shots yep the af takes a bit of a hit but majority of the time it worked fine here's a few shots i took with the 1.4 converter which i ended up really liking first one was this male flame robin who was posing nicely on a rock nice side profile nice eye contact overall a really nice image and another image i got on the mossy grass was this um woolly wagtail there's just something about the pose and the setting in this which i actually really like the bird is nice and sharp the out of focus background i think adds to it with the warmth and the color overall a really nice image and just lastly uh female fairy wrench is not as colorful as the male but she's still pretty in her own right nice perky pose on this rock again taken with that 1.4 converter good eye contact good pose another image i was happy with all right so i was happy with the 1.4 let's talk about the two times converter obviously with the two times we've got 800 f11 f11 being your max aperture means that you have to have adequate light or you're just going to have fairly low shutter speeds or really high iso and i'll be i'll be upfront and honest i found it to be pretty terrible to be honest the autofocus was slow the image quality was poor it's just not a combination that i would end up using confidently unless i had perfect light and a tripod that's the only time that i would try this combination or use this combination i did have a little red cap robin on a rock which was pretty close and i did get the shot which is on the screen and when we look at it it looks pretty good to me you know the image quality is good but i don't want to deceive you into thinking oh gee i'm going to be able to get the images like this all the time this was a bit of a rarity this was the best i got with this setup and it was only because i was close had great light on a tripod when i used it any every other time as you can see in a couple of these shots it was just slightly out of focus the detail was lacking it just wasn't quite right i wouldn't feel right saying that you can use this and get nice shots because i think you'll just end up being disappointed to be honest so from my experience the rf 800 f11 it's just fast superior to the two times on this lens the rf lens is obviously native you get the full auto focus benefits you get the is it just works better than this system does and you'll get far more consistent shots than you would trying to use this just food for thought so i want to share with you an example of a situation where i used this lens i ended up being slightly disappointed i was in my house i heard my chickens start going off their alarm call was going i've looked outside and actually saw a brown falcon flying around i thought there might be some birds of prey around and i happen to notice a bird sitting in a dead tree not that far from the house so i've grabbed this camera i've gone out i've tracked the bird i've gone around the bird and then i noticed it wasn't actually a brown falcon it was a sparrow hawk which i have not seen on the property and i don't have many photos so i was pretty excited you know i tried to get as close as i could i was taking lots of shots as i got closer and eventually the bird flew off and i had my fingers crossed that i was going to get some shots because you know i really wanted some of this bird and as i've gone through the photos i started to get pretty disappointed because they were just lacking critical focus they were lacking critical sharpness and i was just going through them going oh that's no good that's no good luckily one of them wasn't too bad and that's the image i'll share with you on the screen this one is okay and i'm definitely going to use it and there is a few other dead sticks around you can see here but if you wanted to you could clean this up and remove those other dead perches and just make the bird a little bit more isolated and you can sort of see a process photo here and it's come up pretty well and i'm happy with this however i got pretty lucky i think in the end it's i could have gone away from that experience just with a whole lot of soft shots so i would have been far better off just probably with the 1.4 converter so as i mentioned this lens does not have is so another question is well this body has ibis will that counteract the is missing from the lens and look it definitely helps with the viewfinder if you can see on the screen here one with the ibis on and one with the ibis off there's a big difference in how steady the viewfinder is it's very unpleasant to try and shoot with this lens without ibis on so i'm not the best person to be testing low shutter speeds because i shake for some reason i'm not sure why yarn gives me a hard time over how much i shake in the field but for me i need higher shutter speeds to be honest i need one 500th of a second or higher doesn't matter if the lens has highest or not um i need as much help as i can get you know i'd feel a lot more comfortable with the newer lenses the rf100 to 500 i'll be happy using lower shutter speeds just because that works so well the is the lens and the ibis of the body so in conclusion really happy with how this lens performed got lots of nice shots plenty i'm going to add to my catalog the 1.4 converter worked well you know the bird if does work even though it's a little bit slower using 20 frames per second electronic enables you to get lots of different shots i just think it's good for us who have older ef lenses you don't have to go out and buy the newest rf lenses they're definitely better but you can get away with using your older ef lenses for a little bit longer maybe invest in the r5 or the r6 and get the advantages that these bodies offer before you invest in the more way more expensive rf glass so i'd love to hear in the comments how your ef lenses are working on your mirrorless bodies are you having any issues are you finding it works well it'll help others if you do that um if you enjoyed this content obviously give it that thumbs up subscribe if you want to see more of these videos thanks again to my lovely members and until the next video take care and see you later oh it's starting to rain good timing all right so yeah so you know but but and being honest but but interestingly but interesting interestingly but interestingly bit of interest

Channel: Duade Paton

Views: 59,054

Keywords: Canon mirrorless cameras for wildlife photography, Bird Photography, Bird Photography Tips & Tricks, How to improve image quality, how to improve your wildlife photos, How to take better photos, Wildlife Photography Tips, how to take photos of birds, Sigma 150-600, Telephoto Zoom Lenses, Canon R5, Canon RF tips and tricks, Old EF Lenses on Mirrorless, EF to RF adapter, FPS, Extenders, Canon EF400 5.6, EF400mm f5.6L, EF lenses on Canon R5

Id: mGx6h5tSies

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 09 2021