Now that my new kit has arrived, I’ve been out the past couple of days getting familiar with it, and I’m genuinely loving it. On Saturday I photographed the spring tide, and then on Sunday morning I headed out early with my mate Ben Kapur to photograph wildlife down at a local reservoir.
Once we got to the hide, Ben checked over my camera (Canon R5 II) and helped set it up for bird photography, dialling in a bunch of settings and assigning the Fn buttons and dials to specific tasks so I could change things quickly without looking away from the action. He saved all of this to a custom mode, and then it was a case of me getting to know where everything had been assigned.
In no time at all the Kingfisher arrived. WOW! Only the second time in my life I’ve ever seen one, and this one was up close. At one point it flew right past the window we were sat at and landed on the roof of the hide above us.
It then flew down onto a branch at the water’s edge, where I started taking photographs while Ben read its body language and told me when it was about to dive ... and sure enough, it did. I managed to get shots off, including some with the pre-capture function, but my ISO was too high for those and an egret decided to photobomb 😃 so I won’t be working on any of them. The light first thing was quite dull and uninteresting too.
As the morning went on, though, I became more and more familiar with what to do and when, practising on herons and egrets as they calmly paced around, and on gulls as they flew around.
Having NEVER done this before, I was like an excited kid at Christmas, seeing how incredible the technology is at recognising the subject, locking on and tracking it. Pre-capture too ... amazing.
I can’t wait to get out again and again and put in the practice, at the reservoir, in the back garden and down at Seaton Wetlands. This is so much fun, and I LOVE that there’s always something new to learn.
KIT
Canon R5 II
Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 IS III USM
EF to RF Converter
1.4x Extender
