My new R5 is the most amazing camera I have ever owned. However, it has somewhat put me in a depressed mood: my general success in the past at being a moderately accomplished bird and wildlife photographer enough to be recognized in international contests was due to my persistence, now, due to this camera EVERYONE will be a bird and wildlife photographer because all you have to do is point the camera at the animal/bird and it recognizes it, focuses on it and takes the picture! Totally blew me away. Even a swallow that zoomed by me yesterday--bam! it focused on it, and took a very min out of focus but otherwise picture of the bullet-shaped swallow rocketing by! Generally, very little was going on at the marsh, so I tried photographing mainly little twitter birds perched far away to see what it would do and, by George, it would go right to them and lock focus on their body or head (they were so small that the smallest sensor point covered their whole head). On chimping every feather was sharp even those little feathers around the eye. It's almost like shooting fish in a barrel now--there's almost no reason to miss a bird in flight now. I hand hold so this is a God send to me. Also, my 100-400 II is so much snappier in obtaining focus with the R5 than it was with my 7DM2, and the R5's ability to maintain focus is amazing. I would purposely move the camera around after I had locked on one of those little sparrows on a twig and the focus stayed glued on the bird. When I was photographing an egret fishing with some surrounding mallards, the focus point occasionally jumped to a mallard when the egret was moving around but if I pumped the focus button it went right back to the egret. I spent yesterday letting the camera do all the selection on what to choose to focus on and at the end of the day I was not a all frustrated--it picked just what I wanted in each scene--one with some deer running across a field, etc. It's amazing, and almost depressing at the same time, it's so good! This is really the first time I've ever used auto tracking for my focusing. Wow; just wow. Only glitch, I did have it freeze 1 time and just turned it off and back on again and off we went. I was using an old 7DM2 battery that doesn't hold a charge well and still got over 600 pictures. I was using the High mechanical shutter speed for the SD card.
Catherine
Some sample--not earth shattering but the auto focus did all the work and selected these birds. All were handheld at 400mm. Speed was 750, 500, and 1000 for the swallow (probably would have been sharper if I'd been at a faster speed but wasn't expecting to photograph that!)
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