Birds Canon 5DS R
So this is the second in the field practical review on this megapixel monster. Birds are not one of my most successful subjects to photograph due to my tracking skill levels being I would have to admit average at best. The bigger they are in flight, the easier it is for me. But those little buggers that move like flashes of light, those are the ones I get punished by. It has been a great experience to test it while hosting my Creating Photography workshops with various destination form my hometown of Knysna, to the incredible Kalahari and Zimanga Private Game Reserve
The body and lens performance with Birds Canon 5DS R
- I paired this beast with the new 100-400 F4 &-F5.6 MK II and well it was an epic combination
- Battery life is pretty awesome and compares well against my 5D MK III and 7D MK II
- For me personally, the frame rate of roughly 6 FPS is adequate even though many could suggest that you need more for birds as they move and change posture in-between frames.
- I was able to capture pretty great series of images with the bigger birds but did struggle with some of the kingfisher species I encountered
- The buffer for me was an issue simply due to the fact that I did not use an ultra-fast card. In saying that, it is not meant to be a specialist bird photography camera but I did me proudly
- Focus system and point selection worked well and almost the same as my 5D MK III so it was a quick and easy to get it customized for my shooting style.
Shooting style and posture
With birds, I was either handholding the setup or shooting from a tripod mount with a gimbal. This gave me a great advantage to track and keep the subject reasonably in the frame .
All images are 90% full frame except for leveling and some minor crop. We will get to the advantage of the megapixels in a later post. The editing was done in Lightroom CC for ease of use and for the gallery upload. No NR has been added with main sliders, only for the colour smoothness and slight NR removal. Most of these images were taken with first series production model and
As I said in the beginning, it would be a short and practical opinion of the Canon 5DSR. So as they say, you are the judge of the results.
Click on the image to be directed to a select gallery of the bird’s portraits and in-flight shots
