As batteries age they store less. So Im wondering how to measure how many % power my ageing LP-E19 is capable of storing.
If its fully charged it shows full on camera display. I need to know as I spend long times waiting on wildlife which usually goes from nothing happening to its all happened so I need to leave the camera turned on all the time.

Before we get to our #1 pick, we have to first bring up what Craig and I feel is the worst product of 2023. Originally Craig had another pick but I changed him to the dark side so this is now a unanimous decision. Check our best of 2023 #2 and #3 here and here.

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It seems like Laowa will be releasing their first full-frame autofocus lens (but not autofocus for us) and it’s a 10mm F2.8 and still a fairly compact lens. They claim near zero distortion and the MTF’s look good enough that it may even be half decent with coma. If so, this would almost immediately be

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I have been invited to Istanbul at the beginning of March and want to stay on for some days for birding. Any information, advice or a recommended birding guide would be most welcome. I know there is migration towards the end of the month but my experience of that elsewhere is that the birds are rather too high for photographs.

Please check out our other articles as they come out in this series, and of course the article from yesterday about the #3 on our lists. Craig’s #2: Canon EOS R8 Camera Picking the runner-up was probably the hardest part (really not that hard) of making the list. Part of it was getting over personal

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I'm far from anywhere close to a professional wildlife photographer, but I really enjoy getting outdoors and walking around in nature - NOT taking photos for work. My wife and I bought a house this year with 3 lakes in the backyard that have a walking path between them. It's very common to see the daily Osprey, Red Hawk, and there was apparently a Bald Eagle fishing here last year! So I was really excited to get my hands on the 200-800 when it came out. I wanted to have a lens that was 100% for FUN with a TON of reach.

First Impressions: So far they have been almost exclusively positive. Image quality has actually shocked me with how good it has been for this price point. The lens is both light and heavy at the same time, if that makes any sense. It's remarkably light weight for the size of the lens and the focal length, but after you cary it around for a bit, you most certainly do not forget you're carrying it around.

Negatives? I have 3 that have annoyed me so far:
1.) The lens button is basically useless. I have not found a way to use it as a focus recall button. I have no other use for it than to be a focus recall button but there is no way that I can find to set this up.
2.) The manual focus ring/control ring...OK, so I need more time with this lens to learn it's layout, but I don't believe I can have it set to work as manual focus and also provide autofocus if I wish to manually override it. Seems odd and I know I've read complaints about this on some of the silver ring lenses that share the control ring, but on a lens like this, I would expect to have MF override and also AF active. I need to mess around with it more to see if it's possible - I haven't seen anyone mention this or complain about it so if you know, please let me know.
3.) Now this one is pretty bad...the lack of focus limiter is a GLARING omission from this lens. Without a focus recall button or manual focus override, I found this lens wanting to focus on the foreground a lot and then there is no quick way to get it to focus at the correct depth. I honestly struggled with this more than I have on any other lens. Is it a deal breaker? Maybe for professional work. But for my lame effort walking around I think it's fine.

This is now my backyard wildlife lens, and I've gotten a few cool shots like the one bellow when I spotted this Red-Shouldered Hawk fishing in the larger lake behind my house.
However, this week, I had a chance to take it out to a nature preserve and have some fun in this great weather.

Possibly a Red-Shouldered Hawk or Red-Tailed Hawk adult in my backyard?
Canon EOS R3 1/1,000 f/7.1 ISO 125 at 300mm


Remaining images were taken at a nature preserve in Florida all on the same day.
Osprey
Canon EOS R7 1/1000 f/9 ISO 100 at 707mm


Juvenile Bald Eagle
Canon EOS R7 1/100 f/7.1 ISO 100 at 200mm


Snowy Egret
Canon EOS R3 1/500 f/9 ISO 100 at 400mm


Snowy Egret
Canon EOS R3 1/1250 f/9 ISO 250 at 800mm


Great Blue Heron
Canon EOS R5 1/200 f/9 ISO 500 at 637mm

The site is super slow for me over the last hours. Is it just me or are others experiencing the same thing?

Hi Everyone,

I'm just home from a phenomenal 3 week shoot in NW Argentina.

Here are a few of my favorites that I hope you will enjoy.

To see more please check out my trip report here - http://tinyurl.com/bdekee3s

Cheers!

Glenn


Red-tailed Comet


Brazilian Teal


Scimitar-billed Woodcreeper


Spot-winged Falconet


Buff-fronted Owl


Rufous-throated Dipper


Andean Flamingo


Black-hooded Sierra Finch


Aplomado Falcon


Strange-tailed Tyrant

Since the launch of the EOS R system, the Speedlite situation for the system has been a bit of a mess. Currently, the flagship Speedlite EL-1 isn’t expected to ship again until May of 2024, while it’s compatible the entire EOS R lineup, it’s also prohibitively expensive for a lot of shooters. The Speedlite EL-5

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Just over 1 year after the launch of his first Kickstarter which raised over a half million dollars on crowdfunding platforms, camera reviewer & Youtuber Michael The Maven has announced a second Kickstarter for his MAVEN filter line, which expands his patent-pending Color Coded, Magnetic Filter ecosystem with 17 new filter products set to launch

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One of the disappointments for me with the RF-S system is the normal kit zoom range from 18-45 instead of 15-45mm. In this patent application, Canon sets out to create a 15-45mm that hopefully isn’t plagued with the same quality assurance issues as its older EF-M brother. I swear I went through 5 copies until

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Richard and I decided to do one of those “Best of 2023” lists for Canon’s new gear that was announced in 2023. As most of you know, Canon had a pretty busy year product-wise, while they didn’t make every segment of our community happy, they did release a lot of great products. Craig’s #3: Canon

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This is a curious patent from Canon. These are without a doubt higher-end lenses and are certainly for APS-C and not for Super-35 or Canon Cinema. Canon specifically mentions that these types of lenses would be advantageous for video as the center of gravity doesn’t change. Fixed-length zoom lenses are known in which the overall

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In this patent application, Canon is illustrating some smaller primes. Since these designs are relatively simplistic, they could be good “bang for the buck” lenses as long as you are not expecting pristine resolving power, as they don’t optically fill the entire image circle but rely on software stretching. Canon’s entire purpose with this patent

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Bryan at TDP has test charts up for the 200-800. IQ is very similar to the 800 f/11 but 2/3 of a stop faster. You can pick at the charts and say maybe the center contrast is a bit lower and the peripheral acuity is a bit better, but given that we are looking at single samples, the differences are well within typical sample variation (and Roger is not going to test 800mm lenses ). The good news is that the lens is consistently sharp throughout the zoom range, only falling off a bit at 800mm.

In these two patent applications, Canon is exploring adding haptic feedback into the grip surface of the camera. These are two separate patent applications but discuss similar functions, so I’ll lump them all in here. When I first read this I didn’t think much about it because Canon has done these patents before, until I

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When the Canon EOS R3 was announced, it came as a bit of a surprise. It was Canon’s first foray into a “professional” camera body for sports shooters, photojournalists and the like. Canon was adamant that the EOS R3 was not their flagship, and that would be coming in the EOS R1, which is scheduled

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When we were first discussing the series of patent applications on motorized tilt-shift lenses for the RF mount, one of my musings was the ability to use this to automate stitching and various shooting at different shifts and tilts. It appears in this patent application that Canon had the same idea (if I gave it

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Hello friends (especially AlanF and usern4cr)

I've been following threads comparing the RF 100-500 with and without the RF 1.4x, with the RF 800/11, as well as threads elsewhere. Shooting from the same distance with an R5 I expected that the resolution of the RF 100-500 would be better with the RF 1.4x. I just received a new RF 1.4x and after shooting a few tests, I was surprised to find the RF 100-500 performed better when cropped than with the RF 1.4x. I wonder if there is a problem with my testing or if my RF 1.4x is somehow substandard. Your thoughts would be appreciated.
I shot a test chart and a toy penguin at about 10m in bright sunshine, the test chart on a sturdy carbon fibre tripod with 2 second delay with manual focusing; the penguin by hand kneeling ont the ground using EFCS and eye tracking (a real world situation) . My first trial using electronic first curtain shutter suggested possible vibration, so I repeated the test chart photos with electronic shutter. The photos were both processed in DXO Pure Raw2.
Comparing the test chart in Lightroom with the 500mm photo at 150% and the 700mm photo at 107% showed the 700mm photo to be softer. This improved when I added quite a bit of clarity.
The penguin photos when viewed at 196% and 143% (for the 500mm and 700mm) showed similar levels of detail.
The first photo shows the test target and penguin at 500mm uncropped.
The second shows the test target viewed at 150 and 107%.
The third photo as with #2 but added clarity in the 700mm photo.
The final photo shows the penguins viewed at 196% and 143% with no additional editing.
Your thoughts please!

We have finally confirmed that the Canon RF 35mm f/1.2L USM is indeed coming in the first half of 2024. There have been some false positives over the years, but we’re as sure about this as we are about anything. There were conflicting reports as to whether or not it would be an f/1.2 or

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In this patent application, Canon describes setting lens barrel button functions based on the orientation of the camera body. The idea that they are batting around is that as you change the orientation and you are hand holding a heavy lens, the buttons can be then in an awkward position when you are trying to

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While waiting impatiently for the 200-800, I have been fiddling with extension tubes on the 800 f/11. The first set I got was from Vello and they were pretty sloppy. Today I got a set from Meike and they are better. Not wonderful, but definitely usable. the weather has been fairly dark and the shots below were taken in between rain showers at ISO 6400 on the R7. There was enough light for correct exposure at 1/320 s. I used both tubes in tandem for 31mm of extension and now my close focus is in the neighborhood of 14-15 ft, which definitely helps with magnification. So far the results are noticeably better than standing back with the 1.4 TC added to get similar magnification. Here are a few samples slightly cropped and downscaled to 4k to fit the site and they make nice backgrounds for a 4k monitor . Processing was LR enhance followed by a light pass with Topaz Denoise for final cleanup and a bit of sharpening. Other adjustments pretty routine.

Hey everyone, I did some comparison shots between the two lenses to compare sharpness and bokeh, and field of view.
There is no extra enhancing on these jpegs, just DLO in DPP for all shots (that seemed fair to have each lens optimized to its potential). All shots were at each lens' widest aperture. On the Santa toy, focus point was the mouth, the book in the very center, and the portraits were all on one of the eyes.

Some interesting obsevations: the 24-105 is sharper than the 28-70 at widest focal lengths, but might be a draw at the longest focal lengths.

The 28-70 is known to be wider than its adverstised range, something like 25 or 26 to 65mm (?). This is evident as the 24-105 is noticeably tighter in all shots. I added a pic of the 24-105 at 24mm, and you'll see it's only slighter wider than the 28-70 at 28mm. I also added a pic frome the 70-200mm f/2.8 at 70mm to have a third variable, and it's closest to the 24-105. The 24-105 might be tighter than advertised, or the 70-200 could be wider...

With the bokeh, both lenses have the onion ring look, so basically a draw there. With the 24-105's tighter FOV, the bokeh balls look the same size at 70mm as the 28-70's, but larger at 105mm.

So, download or have a look at the comparisons and let me know what ya think:

TTArtisan released an intriguing 10mm F2.0 for APS-C systems. It’s manual focus and manual aperture but it’s 10mm F2.0 so there’s that. Because there are no electronics, Canon ignores it as if it does not exist and so it’s available for the RF mount. Unfortunately, it has a fair amount of tangential astigmatism which makes

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Hey, I know first off it has to be software compatibility, but it's now 2023. The file names in the canon camera are 8 character IMG_#### and they flip at 9999.
would it be that huge of an issue if they upgraded the camera firmware to increase the Seq # from 4 digits to 7 or 8 digits? With Digitial files names this would be great help for sport shooters? etc.. I use the seq # to know how many flips of the shutter I've taken per camera. I use format R62A####. But then use a third-party app to rename files adding 3 leading numbers to my files before I import them into my edit software. Just a thought?