Birds in flight with Canon EOS R5 and RF 100-500mm lens. 25 February 2022

White faced heron

Macquarie marshes is a large semi-permanent wetland in central New South Wales. In recent years drought has ravaged the area but good rains in 2021 have rejuvenated the region with plenty of water and large flocks of birds.

I used the R5 with RF 100-500mm to photograph birds in flight at a location called Little Terrigal. Keen photographers should consider coming in a high clearance 4WD as there was 400mm of water over the track when we were there.

All the birds shown in this post are quite large and therefore relatively easy to photograph in flight as long as one has the right gear and technique.

The old aphorism applies for best settings…”f8 and be there” in this case, just after sunrise, the birds are most active then.

Another thing I have found imprtant for BIF is to pre-focus on a tree, bush, anything, at approximately the same distance from the camera as the bird is expected to be. If the bird is completely out of focus the AF system will be unaware there is anything in the frame on which to focus. Some lenses such as the RF 100-500mm have a focus limiter switch which should be set to stop the lens from focus hunting into the close-up range.

For a bit more detail I find the following settings and techniques on the R5 work well for BIF.

* Full manual exposure, 1/4000 sec, f8, ISO 1250. On dull days a higher ISO setting is required. Full manual exposure is best. Tv will overexpose white birds against a blue sky, blowing out highlight detail.

* Get on the sunny side of where most birds are flying. Backlit birds in flight are OK for variation on occasion but direct front lighting in full sun is best for feather detail.

* Stabiliser setting on the RF 100-500mm lens: Some experiment is required. I usually recommend Mode 2 or 3 but on this occasion I forgot (again !!) and left the stabiliser at Mode 1 which on the day was OK.

* Back button focus ? There are some fervent advocates of BBF but I am not one of them and really don’t see the point. Shutter button focus works just fine and simplifies operation. I only have to press one button, not two, to make the pictures.

* Drive mode: High speed continuous+. Make sure the battery is well charged. Drive speed drops as battery charge runs down.

* Shutter mode. I use electronic first curtain for everything to simplify operation. This gives 12 fps which works well for me. Use E-shutter for 20 fps but know ye that this generates thousands of files which have to be evaluated later. At 12 fps I usually generate about 1000 files per hour.

* Raw or JPG ? I always shoot CRaw for everything, all the time. Some users say they prefer JPG but photos often require substantial post processing which is severely limited by JPG capture.

* Memory card. I use a SanDisk 128 GB Extreme Pro Compact Flash Express Type B (CFEB) card. This has proven very reliable and super fast.

* AF Operation AF Servo.

* AF Method, Face detect (set Subject to detect: animal in My Menu) with tracking and eye detect. Believe it or not the R5 can quite often locate and track the eye of a flying bird. Not every time or all the time but often enough to make the feature very useful.

* Initial AF pt set for face/eye detect with tracking: I use [Auto] for BIF. I find this works best.

* Servo AF Case: I use Case 1, Versatile multipurpose setting for BIF. This appears to work OK.

* Tracking sensitivity and Accel./decel. Tracking. I leave these at the default which is zero because I don’t know any better. You can read opinions about this online and experiment but setting up proper comparison studies is pretty much impossible.

* Viewfinder/monitor appearance. (Shooting info.disp.) I de-clutter this as much as possible leaving just the essential camera data .

* Disp performance, Smooth.

* I allocate all these settings for BIF to a Custom Mode. This enables a quick change of ten or so settings which would otherwise take several minutes of trawling through menus.