Tag Archives: equipment

This Stabilization is Amazing

Another episode in the testing of the RF 200-800 for today’s post. This is more focused on the image stabilization in the lens. When shooting stills, I have commented on the slightly odd jerking effects visible in the viewfinder. I think this is most apparent when panning very slowly and I think the camera is trying to work out if you mean to stay still or not. However, one area which is really effective at showing the capabilities of the stabilization is video.

I have some footage below that is taken with the lens at 800mm and hand held. No tripod or monopod here. The rabbit was at the other end of our back yard while the bees were on the lavender plants in our beds. You can see that the image is remarkably stable. It is amazing to see it lock on so well. I have also shot some video of an F-35B in the hover, also at 800mm. It was interesting to see a lot of movement in the viewfinder for a moment and then it seemed to lock in on what it was doing and then things get really solid. This tech is most impressive.

The Hummers Are a Quick Test for the New Lens

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One of the things that I knew would be a limitation of the RF 200-800 was the aperture which is a lot smaller than for really expensive lenses (yes, it is also expensive but not in the tens of thousands type of expensive). In low light, this is going to be an issue and it would be interesting to see how things worked out. When I got home with it, I was sitting on the deck when some hummingbirds started feeding on the flowers in one of our beds. This area is in shade a lot of the time so light was limited. I was rather pleased with the effectiveness of the focus, the sharpness at full zoom and the relatively limited noise related issues from the R3. This is a combination that looks like it could be quite useful for a wide variety of occasions. Not the solution for everything but definitely versatile.

Initial Impressions of the RF 200-800

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When Canon announced the RF 200-800 lens, I was mildly interested but not too bothered by it. However, in an example of how easily a weak mind can be influenced, when I watched some reviews by those that had used the lens, I started to be more curious. The focal length range was always of interest, but the aperture range had initially put me off. The reviewers suggested that the excellent ISO performance of modern mirrorless cameras meant this wasn’t an issue. Also, while not in anyway cheap, the lens was very well priced for the range it offered.

I went to my local shop and placed a deposit for one of the lenses. This was many months ago. After that, things got very quiet. I was beginning to think that I would never see an actual lens. Then I saw something on a Canon rumor site that said August was likely to be a time when a lot of lenses got delivered. Whatever the blockage had been, there seemed to be some relief. The last Tuesday of July (stuff seems to get delivered to stores on Tuesday I guess), I get a phone call telling me that my lens has arrived. Hurrah!

After work, I headed down to pick it up. I then headed down to the water in Kenmore – a short distance from the store – to give it a quick go. I didn’t have a lot of time, but I got a quick feel for some of its quirks. Initially I was a little unsettled. The stabilization seemed very effective, but it did make tracking things that were moving slowly a bit jerky as if the stabilization didn’t believe that I actually wanted to be moving. I worried that this would be an issue. However, the images seemed to be rather sharp so maybe it knew what it was doing.

When I got home, I did spend a little time looking at the hummingbirds on the bushes. The light was very low, which should be a problem for a lens with smaller apertures, but it seemed to work very well and the images were surprisingly sharp and clean. I then took it to its first airshow. Again, results were really very pleasing. The 800mm reach was so helpful since the show line was quite distant and I was veery happy with the framing I could get. The jumpiness in the viewfinder is still something I find rather distracting but it doesn’t seem to be an issue for the images, so I guess the stabilization knows what it is doing. I also shot some video at 800mm handheld and, while there was initial wobbling, there comes a moment when it seems to get what is going on and then it is rock steady. Quite bizarre. I think this lens could be a key part of my shooting going forward. We shall see as my experience grows with it.

Time Lapse Experiments With Ice

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I used to play with time lapses a fair bit. I would shoot a series of images and use LRTimelapse to process them. However, that software had a license agreement that meant, when they upgraded the software, they required you to update your license and the old version was deactivated. This was very annoying. I figured I would be able to keep using the old version but apparently not. I don’t do it that much to justify the cost and was disinclined to use that software after this experience.

My latest cameras have a time lapse function built into them which I had been meaning to try out. I had done this on my little M6 but not with the latest bodies. What to use them on, though. I figured an experiment doesn’t require me to be original in the subject. Just try it out and see how it works. Consequently, I thought melting ice would be good enough. My first effort was not successful. I hadn’t given it enough time to record the melting fully. Second was better but, while the timing was okay, I had focused on the ice cube when it started melting and it slid across the plate as it melted and out of frame. The mode on the camera sets focus and exposure on the first shot so this meant everything was well out of focus.

This is why you experiment with things. The last try worked pretty much as intended. (I should note that I did all of these in the evening, so the lighting didn’t change during the shoot.) I had a long enough time for the ice cube to almost fully melt, it didn’t move, and the lighting was fine. Watching the ice disappear and the cube gradually sink into the water that is progressively growing was rather fun. This isn’t some epic revelation of the nature of melting ice, but it did teach me about some functionality of the camera.

Filming Crews and Their Serious Gear

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We came upon a few filming crews while we were in the Maasai Mara. There were professional photographers but more of the video teams. National Geographic had a crew out working and there were others filming too. You would sometimes find vehicles that were scouting crews for the filming. The thing I found funny was that they often had signs saying that they were filming crews and not to follow them. I might never have paid attention to them until I knew that they were filming crews and might well have good intel about where animals were!

Modified vehicles which allow the camera operator to sit outside the vehicle and shoot looked like just the sort of thing I would like to have. They weren’t always in use, though. I did see one operator sitting inside the vehicle with his feet up while checking stuff on his phone. Looking at the very pricey lenses attached to the camera rigs was almost as fun as looking at the animals. Nat Geo also had a vehicle with a gimbal mount out on the front of the vehicle. It would have been fun to see that in use!

One thing that occurred to me as I watched these teams at work was the volume of material that they would collect that would be culled down to make a TV show. Sure, this would be a vast amount of data to store and sort but how different this must be from the days of wet film. Those crews shooting things like the early Big Cat Diaries must have been carrying a ton of stock and then had to manage all of it through processing and cataloging. That must have been a very time consuming and expensive proposition.

Red Bark

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The arboretum in Seattle is unsurprisingly home to many interesting varieties of trees and plants. One tree that caught my eye was (perhaps) a type of willow that had bark that peeled to reveal an intense red coloration beneath. Sometimes these colors don’t seem to show up as well in an image but I fortunately had a polarizer with me and that took out some of the reflection and glare and allowed the color to show up well. Cropping in tighter seemed to make more sense, too.

Playing With the Insta360

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I did a little filming on a bike ride with an old GoPro Hero 5 of mine. The current generation of action cameras has all sorts of clever tech built in which can deal with rotation of the camera and stabilizing the image. The Hero 5 doesn’t have any of that and I ended up spending a lot of time stabilizing the images in post processing to try and get something usable out of it. I was surprised how badly it came out and started thinking about an upgrade to incorporate all of the newer capabilities. It was at this point that I got a little silly. I had seen videos before about the Insta360 cameras and had found them intriguing but not so much that I wanted to get one. Now I was looking for a new camera, the capabilities that they have seemed like it could be a good step forward.

For those that haven’t seen one, the Insta360 in its current X3 form has two cameras on opposite sides of the body with fisheye lenses with over 180 degrees of coverage. The sensors are 5.7K resolution and the camera can stitch the two outputs together to give spherical coverage. It also has a stick on which you can mount it which the camera will recognize the location of and take both images to effectively remove the stick from the video. With the high resolution of the original files, you can then use their software – either on your phone or using the desktop app – to pan and zoom around the original files and generate video output of whatever you want.

What this means is that you don’t have to frame a shot when you are shooting. The only thing you have to do is have the camera in the right place. You can worry about where it is pointing later on which is great when you are already doing something else. The removal of the stick is very impressive, only slightly undermined but the fact your hand that is holding it now looks a little odd. Also, if the shadow of the stick is in shot, the software doesn’t know to do anything about that! (As an aside, there is a mode where you only shoot with one side like a normal action camera if you want.)

What is the downside to all of this? Big files! You are shooting a lot of data on two cameras simultaneously so you can fill up cards fast. You do also have to then review each clip and pick your angles for the shots, but you would have had to do that beforehand otherwise so no great loss. Other than that, not a lot to complain about. I have tried it on a few occasions so far. The length of the stick makes it seem like you have a drone flying above you if you put it up there. A cool result. I took it out on a bike ride to see how things came out and I have a short video below that shows you the result. No great cinematography here but an introduction to what can be done. Remember that each shot is only moving the camera around and the panning and zooming is all done back at home. Amazing tech!

Focus Stacking With The Camera’s Help

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One of the functions that my new camera has built in is a focus stacking function. I know this is not unique to this camera but it is a first for me so I was keen to play with it. The mode, when enabled, allows you to set how many shots you want taken and set a scale for how close the focus points will be to each other. You then pick you initial focus point and set it off and it takes the sequence of shots incrementing the focus slightly between each one.

The resulting stack of images can then be processed in Photoshop to get the focus stacked output. This is so much nicer than making minor focus adjustments by hand between shots. The sequence gets created really quickly. I also was able to do reshoots easily. On one of the sequences, I had left it on auto ISO so it shot at a really high ISO level. I could reshoot with the ISO set low (tripod mounting means this was not a problem) in no time at all. (As an aside, the focus stacking algorithm actually seems to do a good job of reducing noise as well.)

I experimented with how fine a scale to use. Initially, I was taking way too many shots with very little movement through the image so I coarsened up the scale a bit. The nice thing was, if it didn’t go all through the range, I could just hit the shutter again and it would keep going. Photoshop chunked through the processing pretty well. I was shooting a few things but also experimented with some coins on my desk. Not the most original subject but one that shows the result well unlike the other things I was shooting. The software seemed to struggle a little on some of the coin edges so maybe a finer shoot next time or maybe I should just hand blend those bits.

How Dark Can This Thing Shoot

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Every once in a while, I really test the high ISO capability of the cameras I have. The R3 got an early test when I was at Red Flag, I went out on two evenings to shoot some night departures and experimented with the ability of the camera to perform in those conditions. The high ISO capability of cameras has not moved on too much to be honest. The max ISO I used on my 1DXII was 51,200 and the R3 is still the same. It does appear to be a bit cleaner but they have possibly hit a bit of a limit. What I had not tried out before was an electronic viewfinder in such conditions.

The first night, I went out into the dunes to be ready for the B-1 departures. As it turned out, they didn’t launch that night. I did get some fighters coming out my way for a while before I concluded that this was a bust and I was heading back to the hotel. I tried shooting a few of the jets but I discovered the limitations of the camera pretty rapidly. When there is no light, the electronic viewfinder really struggles. The frame rate of the viewfinder drops like a stone and tracking a subject becomes pretty problematic. The frames per second drop too so the chances of a result are slim. With an optical viewfinder, this is not an issue but the chances of a good shot are also slim.

I returned to the hotel feeling pretty dispirited by this result. I wondered whether this was a real problem for adopting the R3. The following night, I went out again with the B-1s again being my main target. This time I had some tankers heading out before the B-1s launched. It was a very different evening. Sure, the lack of light still makes the chances of getting a good shot pretty low but the camera seemed to have no problem tracking the subjects and keeping the viewfinder frame rate up to a perfectly acceptable level. If I had only gone from the previous night, I would have concluded that it was unusable.

The embedded images in the RAW files looked pretty good but the Lightroom edits required a lot more work. DPP might be the answer or DxO PrimeRAW could do a good job. However, that is not the issue. Will the camera allow me to shoot at night with very dark subjects. Apparently, the answer is yes. It can handle it. However, it can’t track an almost black subject with a couple of navigation lights like an optical viewfinder can. That is a limitation that I may have to live with.

Giving the R3 A Workout At Nellis

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I had given the R3 a couple of trips out before I headed to Nellis. I had shot it at BFI and at Juanita Bay. However, my trip to Nellis was the first time it was going to really be given a serious blast with constant shooting and varying conditions. How would it perform and could it be the camera for me for the next few years?

First, I should point out that I have not yet had a proper investigation of the various functions of the camera and how to configure it. Consequently, I was not using it in the best way I could but was instead experimenting with it as I went. So, given that limitation (of me, not necessarily the camera), how did it go? Overall, things were very impressive. Let’s start with the simple things.

Battery life was really good. I shot a little late on the first night, all of the second day and the beginning of the third on one battery. I had spares with me but the battery life, while maybe not as long as for the 1DXII, was still very good. It is also a nice thing that I can recharge with a USB-C charger if I need to which means not taking the large battery charger with me.

Autofocus was very impressive. When things are a long way off, it is still guessing at what to look at and that is something I need to investigate. However, it seemed to recognize planes very early on and then track them very effectively. The ability to let it track a target allowed me to worry about composition far more than I used to with center point focus. I could move planes to the edge of the frame to get a wingman in and still have focus working well.

Exposure was okay. I have the viewfinder set up to give me the exposure simulation which is handy for understanding what the camera is seeing. This helped me out once when I have managed to change the ISO to 800 by accident. Not sure how I did that but I was able to notice it quickly. However, I am not so sure about how quickly it adjusts as conditions change. Moving from a cloudy background to blue sky provides a rapid change that the camera needs to accommodate and it sometimes seemed a little slow to work it out. When shooting raw, your have some latitude to adjust afterwards, of course.

Handling was good. It felt good in the hands and I am wondering whether I will miss the hand grip I have used in the past. The controls are good. The smart controller is neat but it does get adjusted a lot without realizing. I also am so used to using center focus that I sometimes assume that I have to keep the subject in the same space to keep it in focus, not realizing that I can re-center things with the camera following things. I did struggle to work out how to chance the card that I was using. I found a way but it was not as simple as for the 1DXII.

Image stabilization is something that is causing me a lot of trouble. It isn’t the performance of the stabilization. That is really impressive. What I am struggling with is that the stabilization switches on and then stays on. I can put the camera down for a while and I can still hear the IS motors in the lens whirring away. Eventually they switch off but this seems like it is really chewing battery life. I have tweaked a few things to reduce it but, on the 1DXII, the IS would switch off after about 20 seconds. Why it this happening? Again, this may be my failing but I would like to understand why it happens and try to switch it off.

Frame rate is very impressive. I rarely switched it up to the 30fps setting. 15fps was blasting through the cards at a prodigious rate as it was so no need to make things any worse. I have the audio shutter turned on so I have something to remind me when I am taking too many shots and to hopefully keep things under control. However, while the frame rate may notionally be similar to the 1DXII, it consistently hits it which does result in a lot more photos than I was used to. More culling to come I guess.

Having the ability to connect to my iPad and phone is a real benefit. I used to just have this with the M6 and I really liked that. Being able to connect to the R3 gives me a lot of flexibility. I was able to send a few shots to a friend while out in the field. I will use this sporadically but it is definitely a good capability to have.

Overall, it was a great experience. I had two bodies with me but I focused on shooting with the one R3 and the other body, a 1DXII, stayed in the bag almost all of the time. I had it ready in case but didn’t end up using it. At no point during the time there did I think about reverting. I do still have a few tweaks to work out with how to set the camera up but it was a very positive experience. I think that this camera might be the one for me.