Late February 2021

Well, Mark had another birthday and celebrated in a big way. He is now officially older than the hills and the adage that “It is hard to teach an old dog new tricks” clearly applies. The birthday dinner was meat and potatoes and the Bday cake was a spice cake.

This is kind of a hard blog to write, partly because there is a lot of information and partly because I have to own up to some of my limitations. I got a birthday present. 🙂

Some explanation is appropriate here, this is a one week rental instead of an out right purchase. The objective of this exercise was to determine if new tech would make a significant improvement in Mark’s picture taking. My expectation was that I would be able to pick up the camera and use it right out of the box. I had spent a week watching the how to videos on Youtube. This is a CANON high end mirrorless camera. We currently shoot Nikon Coolpix cameras and have had a SONY DSLR in the recent past. This camera is fairly sophisticated and has a different menu system than I was used to. One problem was that knowing what I wanted to do and figuring out how to do it was often a challenge.

The box contained the Canon EOS R5 body, Canon RF 70 – 200 f/2.8L Lens, Canon RF 28 – 70 f/2L Lens as wells as two CF Express memory cards, card reader, two batteries and a battery charger. This camera has been out for about a year and is quite well reviewed. It is a 45 Megapixel mirrorless digital camera. It will shoot up to twenty frames a second. It is also capable of 8K video. Both the lenses and body have image stabilization and up to eight stops of stabilization have been observed. This made it possible to shoot it handheld. The camera also has excellent autofocus and eye tracking capability. For birds and animals there is a specific eye tracking mode different than for humans. All in all, this camera system had the specs I was looking for.

I was excited to get the camera and had big plans for trying it out. The first thing we noticed as we got it out of the box was how big and heavy it was compared to what we were shooting. The base camera is 1.67 pounds and the 70 – 200 lens was 2.36 pounds. Add the battery, memory cards and accessories, you come in at just over four pounds. The Nikon P900 is two pounds and the Nikon P1000 is three pounds, and we think of those as largish cameras. The extra pound is very noticeable, and my hands got tired holding on long photo shoots. However for a DSLR camera of similar specs, four pounds is a considerable weight reduction. Weight and bulkiness becomes a matter of perspective.

We didn’t test the camera in the same sense as a reviewer would, such as cameralabs.com. What we adopted as a plan was to try to shoot the pictures we normally take and compare to pictures taken with current point and shoot cameras. This strategy was adopted to see if the TECH or the USER was the problem with our current picture taking. This resulted in comparing fresh cherries to raisins. A comparison is possible, but not necessarily useful. Be that as it may, that is what we did.

Over the week, we took a little over 3000 pictures resulting in 5200 files taking up 130 gigabytes of disk space. The reason for the duplication in the files is that we often saved both a raw and jpeg of the same picture. This was a learning experience for us. To post on the blog, the raw files need to be converted to jpeg anyway, so we can’t convey that information directly.

On a clear day, we walked down to the shore to snap a few pictures. We use the No Wake sign on Shackford Point as a test of the focus and sharpness potential of our cameras. This is a nice test because this tends to be where we see eagles perch.

The Canon OS R5 at 200 mm with anti shake enabled, hand held picture taking out performs what we are able to achieve with the Nikon P series cameras. It was unfortunate that our part of the bay was iced over as we didn’t see any eagles during the week we had the camera.

The foxes cooperated and we were able to get pictures with both the Nikon P1000 and the Canon EOS R5.

The Canon pictures were cropped so that the fox image was sized similar to the Nikon pictures. I suspect the Canon pictures are of the male fox and the Nikion are of the mangy female fox. When you look at the fine detail of the pictures, the Canon pictures are sharper. This can be seen by looking at blow ups of the fox tails.

BOIDS

One large component of my blog are taking pictures of the birds in the yard. The light conditions during the time I had the Canon were pretty harsh. The birds were largely backlight and there was a lot of light reflected by the snow. The Canon had a high dynamic range shooting option that combined raw and jpeg files via post processing on the camera. This was a rabbit hole I didn’t want to climb down, so I didn’t try it. Another error was that two hundred millimeters of lens was not enough. We could get good pictures on the porch feeders but it wouldn’t reach the yard bird feeders. We really could have used the greater reach more than the fastness of the lens. The autofocus was great when it worked. When it lost track it was hard to tell and get it to reset on the desired bird. The screen was touch screen and it was possible to touch where wed wanted the focus point. We played around with the camera modes, auto, aperture priority and shutter priority. I found it difficult to outperform the auto mode. One of the problems was maintaining a good depth of field.

It is helpful to have a spotter.

We are a little spoiled with our point and shoot cameras because they have powered zoom, you don’t have to change hand position to adjust zoom. On the whole, the new TECH does improve the quality of pictures I am able to take.

Mammals

FUN with Food

Breakfast is an important meal here:

Sunday is pancake day and Wink found a recipe she wanted to try: cinnamon apple slices, battered and fried. It was a keeper.

We try to maintain the Friday BYOB tradition at Moody Point by having mini BYOBs every Friday. This week was pretzel wrapped hot dogs.

We also got a few girl scout cookies to tide us over…………

Fun with Benji

It can be tough living in our yard, even the gnomes have a hard time.

As for the TECH experiment, I was disappointed with my performance with the Canon EOS R5. It does take better pictures but I was a long way from reaching it’s potential. It is promising enough that we plan to continue the experiment. We plan to wait until May and the OREOs are back to rent a Nikon Z7ii camera. This time we will include a 200-400 zoom and a doubler to get better reach. Hopefully we will also get to take some eagle photos. I still aspire to improve my picture taking. I wouldl like to have one WOW picture every blog.

We are two weeks post second dose of Pfizer and I have actually been to a grocery store. We plan to remain circumspect to help protect the unvaccinated. We have made it this far. Stay safe, stay healthy.

Mark, Wink and Meg

Rogues Gallery

Click on the pictures to get full images.