PRIME or ZOOM for Wildlife? Which Do You Prefer? Canon R5 with RF100-500 and EF500 F4

well g'day and welcome to the channel today i'm out in the warby national park and i'm looking for a specific photo around this time every year we have grass trees in australia and some of the older grass trees have these flower stems that come into flower and birds are attracted to the nectar that's given off but only a few of them will have the flowers and only a few of them will be flowering at this time of the year so i'm hoping to find one that's got flower that will attract the birds and then i'm going to set up and hopefully get some photos that's the goal and i've driven around i've found a grass tree so it's just over here to my left and i'll show you now so this grass tree is currently in flower as you can see it's producing nectar so i've sat in my car for a little while and i've waited and sure enough i've seen a little honey to actually come in and land on this grass tree so i'm pretty sure that if i head over there i should be able to get a shot what i might do first is just do a bit of a scout have a walk around see what sort of backgrounds i'm going to get and i'll just take my r5 and my 100 to 500 and i'll just hand hold all right so i've got my uh 100 to 500 and my r5 and i'm going to walk over to this grass tree [Music] all right so the grass tree's over here i've actually got a monitor on the top of my camera so i can show you what i'm seeing through the viewfinder and let's just have a look at what the background looks like what the grass tree looks like and the sort of shot that i'm trying to get so when i'm here i'm looking at the grass tree and there's a lot of trees obviously behind it so it's a matter of trying to find a background that doesn't have anything that's too dark so if i have a look at the moment there's the grass tree if we zoom in to 500 millimeters apologies about the shaking we can see that we've got those dark trees in the background and we're probably a little touched too far away so i'm just gonna walk my way over there get a little bit closer and then let's have a look and see what it looks like so a background quite a few trees still so that's no good walk around this way a bit so i'm just walking around trying to get away from the dark trees so look what this looks like all right that's a bit better still got some darkness going on but it might be the best best we're gonna get all right so that's our grass tree and you can sort of see the backgrounds as we zoom in so if the bird lands there we're golden so that's the position that i'm going to be in so again like my previous video it's just a waiting game it's just a matter of being patient and waiting um for the bird to come at the top of the back [Music] that's over [Music] that's it [Music] [Music] yeah that was very quick but the birds landed on the top of the grass tree and it sort of moved its way down feeding and we've got a couple of shots and then it's going to come down and it's just hovered as it's feeding and i've just rattled off a heap of shots and fingers crossed we got a shot of it mid-flight that would be amazing that's the sort of shot i'm after um so the bird's gone it didn't stay very long so i was hoping that it would stay longer but i think we still got the shots you know got shots of it feeding on the grass tree and we got a shot of it as it was flying with its wings oh it's nice it's just they all bring it [Music] oh that's really interesting they seem to do this hovering thing every time oh that's very cool exactly as i hoped happened happen all right so what i'm going to do is when the bird comes back because we've got a zoom i'm going to actually try and take some shots actually wide so traditionally with my big lens all i can shoot is sort of 700 millimeters so i don't get a lot of wide shots and part of me has been wanting to get wide shots just for something different i guess instead of just the completely out of focus background and the bird on a stick you know i want to try and challenge myself to get some different types of shots some more wider stuff so what i'm going to do is next time the bird comes back i'm actually going to shoot a lot wider and i just want to see what sort of shots we can get wide and see what they look like so that's the key so fingers crossed we just get the bird to come back all right so typically the birds come while the camera was off so let me just talk you through what happened so the birds landed on the flower and i've put the camera up and because i can just adjust the focal length with the zoom i've just started quite wide so 100 millimeters is the widest this lens goes so we've started quite wide and as the birds landed we've taken some shots it was sort of at the bottom towards the bottom of the uh flower and it was giving us a few side poses which we got and then it did the hovering thing again and i've managed to take some shots as it's hovering sort of quite wide and this is the shot let me know what you think let me know if you like this wider habitat type shot or did you prefer the up close shot i think they both have merit and it's nice to have that you know the power of the zoom is i can shoot at 500 or i can shoot it sort of 100 to 200 and just get different types of photos and i just can't get that with the prime so you know it's a real advantage of having these zooms is just the different compositions that you can create out in the field all right just to give you some context of how big this flower spike is the actual grass tree starts here i don't know if you can see this but this is the trunk and it goes over and then it's up and then the flower goes up so this is a pretty very old grass tree that's growing here and the flower is very high but it's got sweet nectar that's coming out of it and the birds absolutely love it so the honey eaters are landing in the tree up there and then jumping on here and feeding on it and obviously i'm standing over there getting some shots so um yeah fantastic opportunity and i'm glad that i found this grass tree happy that i got a few shots so um absolutely beautiful so this is what it looks like in the bush you often have all these grass trees and you can see them and a lot of them don't even have the spikes on them but some of them get really big this isn't the biggest i've seen but this one's pretty big and i dare say this would be a very old tree they take a long time to grow so to see one this big is a real highlight that's very cool [Music] all right so i'm back for day two and this time i'm trying a different strategy i'm actually going to use my 500 millimeter lens my tripod and this bag hide to see if we can get any other birds on this uh grass stem so fingers crossed we have a bit of luck today but we'll get set up and we'll start shooting all right so the grass stems here i'm actually shooting in a different direction today because the sun's actually over here i'm here in the morning so just in case the sun comes out i need to make sure that the sun's behind me pointing at this grass stem and i don't want to be too close because i don't want to scare any potential bird so we'll probably sit up here i'm just thinking about my background background's probably pretty good here so let's set up this camera so i'm just using a very old benro carbon fiber tripod i've had this for about 10 years there's a link in the description but i've had no issue with it the legs are a little bit um you know a little bit tight from there but that's all right i'm using a pretty old enduro gimbal to take the weight of my big 500 so let's whack the 500 on there got to make sure the uh the gimbal's tightened otherwise the lens will just fall over all right because i'm shooting with my r5 i do actually need an adapter so i've got the adapter that just goes on to the old airf lens like so and then i've got my r5 which will just go on um so yep today i'm using r5 1.4 extender 500 mm lens gives me 700 millimeters which should make the bird quite big in the frame um i'll just quickly check to make sure i'm not too close and just think about my background what i'm hoping to get is actually quite a lot of detail today and if i can get a bird flying with this lens would be top so i'll come back a little bit more all right so that's the sort of framing that we've got um hopefully that should be more than enough okay so today i'm actually using this throw blind and you might have seen in my previous videos i'll leave a link below but it's pretty handy you just throw it over the lens like so and i just um it's got some velcro at the front i'll show you the velcro all right so it's just got um velcro that we just sort of put around the hood of the lens like so and then we just velcro it together coming down the front so pretty effective blind once it's set up we should be able to hide in there pretty well let's get set up and let's hope some birds turn up all right now we just sit and wait and hopefully a bird turns up so this is the framing that we have with the 700 millimeters you can see from the base of the tree we have a lovely background it's nice all the way until we start getting to the top and then the sky causes those bright spots which is just unpleasant so i won't really be able to get any shots if the bird lands high on this flower for some reason the audio didn't work when i recorded the session so let me talk you through what happened the first bird that turned up started feeding at the top of the flower but the background didn't work for me and it was gone very quickly meaning i didn't get any shots at all the second visit the bird started at the top again and it started hovering and we got a few shots however as you can see in the raw file the background is a little bit distracting and the bird is slightly out of focus so the next few visits the bird continued feeding at the top again and when it did come low enough it was on the other side of the flower meaning no shots again but finally a bird arrived on the flower and started hovering in a nice spot and as you can see the eye autofocus has picked up the bird as was hovering capturing a number of shots i was able to freeze the action with a high shutter speed of 1 2 000 of a second and you can see here the benefit of the 20 frames per second of the r5 as we go through the photos captured we had a number of different poses for me to choose from i ended up choosing this shot as i like the wing pose i like the eye contact and the active feeding overall i'm happy with the shot the only improvement could be a slightly more uniform background as that sort of light blue at the top left hand corner is just slightly distracting but that's only very minor but thankfully it didn't take long as the bird then dropped slightly lower still hovering and it gave me a much better background i managed this burst of shots and ended up with this one which i think is my pick of the day i really like the eye contact i like the wings up the background's nice uniform color overall i just really like this shot let me know which one you prefer so the light was starting to get pretty difficult at this point and i was ready to call it when two birds actually landed on the flower at the same time i tried to get both birds in the frame but i was just too close with my 700 millimeters and that's one of the drawbacks of the prime so i decided to take some shots of each bird separately knowing i could probably stitch these in post and here's the shot using two exposures and merged using lightroom's photo merge feature i'm very happy with how this turned out with both birds actively feeding on the flower at the same time well that was amazing the bird turned up and it did exactly what we wanted i have been standing here for hours uh the birds come once an hour it's one species and i'd almost given up hope of capturing the exact shot that i wanted i got some good shots with the 100 to 500 don't get me wrong and i was over the moon with those however i just wanted really good detail and that's sort of where i got the 500 today because i wanted to get close and i just wanted to capture that moment in time when the birds flying and it's feeding on this grass tree that's the shot i envisaged that's the shot i wanted and that's the shot i was thinking about as i was under the blind just watching it waiting for the bird to turn up i think what my time has shown me spending time with this grass tree is that if you have a plan if you have an idea of what you're going to get and you put in the time you can often get those rewards that you're after so i use the 100 to 500 for a couple of days and this 500 for a couple of days and they've both got their advantages and disadvantages the 100 to 500 is just amazing that you've got the zoom you know i got a couple of wide shots that i was really happy with which i never would have got with this lens and i also got was able just to walk around quite easily and adjust based on the backgrounds and things like that so it was just a lot easier to walk around and shoot with that and we got some nice results and i was happy with that however i think the 500 just gets us that extra image quality the birds bigger backgrounds more out of focus overall the photos just look that little bit better and look i'm very grateful that i've got the opportunity to use both lenses but i think long term you know a prime and a zoom is the way to go and definitely help me out in my session here at this grass tree i hope you enjoyed this video i had a lot of fun uh here in the bush capturing this thus hanita if you like the video obviously give it that thumbs up subscribe if you want to see more of these videos and thanks again to all my wonderful members that support the channel until the next video take care and see you later

Channel: Duade Paton

Views: 17,832

Keywords: Bird Photography, Bird Photography Tips & Tricks, Wildlife Photography Tips, Telephoto Zoom Lenses, Canon R5, Canon RF tips and tricks, Canon R6, best kit for bird photography, Canon DSLR Camera For Wildlife, How to photograph birds, Canon RF100-500, Canon EF500 F4 IS II, Telephoto lens for wildlife, EF500 F4, RF100-500, Canon Zoom Lens For Wildlife, Prime or Zoom for wildlife, Supertelephoto lens or zoom lens, bag hide, benro tripod, Grass Tree, Honeyeater

Id: f5UPVmPrGcc

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 26 2021