The astounding new R5

I went for a drive today just to get a few initial images with the Canon R5 Mark II. My initial impression is it seems like a quantum leap from the 6D II and 5D III. (Good thing, because I shipped the 5D off to an eBay buyer today.) Since the viewfinder view is electronic, there is so much more they can do to show focusing points.

But is the 45mp resolution so much better than the 6D's 26.2? I can't say yet. Here are two crops of a turkey image I took today. The tight crop is the actual pixels, 1800x1200. The other one obviously is not as tight. Good, yes. Does it blow me away? Not yet. Stand by.

And I always come back to this. My most commercially-successful image was shot with a 4mp sensor in 2004. What I'm hoping for from the R5 is not millions of pixels to put on a billboard, but world-class autofocus to get more keeper images for my web site.

Little Brothers, 2004

Coons

With the astounding new Canon R5 Mark II sitting on my desk and not much opportunity to use it yet, I'm finally getting around to taking the final step in archiving old images, burning them to 22Gb BD-R discs. These are supposedly the longest-lasting medium, outlasting hard drives, solid states and USB devices by decades. Supposedly. Anyway, I am backing up originals of everything on my web site, and relegating unpublished images to less secure storage. I ran across this one from 2005, a family of raccoons that had just crossed the road in Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge, which now goes by the more politically-correct name of Loess Bluffs.

I usually shoot RAW, and the Canon G6 I used for this image is capable of that. But I remember on this extended trip I was often short of space on my memory cards, so this original is JPG. It's also cropped as much as I dared. I don't have other images like this, so it gets upgraded from the "unused" folder. I was on a multi-week work assignment in Kansas City and did not have my big camera (1D II a the time), so all I had was the G6 on side trips to the KC Zoo, Squaw Creek, the Kansas Cosmosphere, Milwaukee, St. Louis and Colorado. I had just gotten the G6 the month before, and it got quite a workout that summer. For the time, it was an impressive camera with 7Mp sensor and 35-140mm zoom (equivalent), but it didn't have quite the reach I would want for these raccoons. As with the 1D II, I still have the G6 and I know it works, but unlike the DSLR I have no reason to use it.

I've mentioned this before, but it is astounding that you can now buy a 256Gb card for less than $20, and back in 2005 when I needed more space it was $70 for a card with 1/250th the capacity. That is enough to hold about 150 RAW G6 images, so when I ran short I switched to JPG which takes up one-third the space. And, at the time I'm sure I thought that was a great price compared to a few years before. Eggs are now unaffordable, but memory is cheap.

The second image here also has been promoted from the 2005 "unused" folder. On my side trip to Colorado, I snapped these geese at dusk using the G6 flash, and got reflections from all of their eyes.

Finally, one of my favorites that did not need to be promoted is this bee that I snapped in Kansas City. Once again, the original is JPG. With good lighting and color balance, RAW isn't as important, but now that I always have enough storage I never shoot JPG if I have a choice.

Bringing it back to the theme of this site, remote cameras, why is it that the G6 introduced in August 2004 has better specs than any current trailcam of which I am aware? If I could slap a motion sensor on the G6 and leave it outside for three months, I would do it. 7Mp and a good lens, sign me up.

First Light

When I got the 6D Mark II a couple years ago, it was an improvement over the 5D Mark III I got back in 2012. But only an incremental improvement. The rotating display is probably the most significant difference. There is a slight increase in resolution, built-in GPS, and ... that's about all I can think of. I don't think the focusing is any better.

However, the R5 Mark II mirrorless camera is not incremental. It's a vast increase in resolution, and a supposed vast improvement in focusing speed and accuracy. I don't know, I haven't had a chance to mess with it yet. We were hit with a lot of snow the past few days, and there are no animals running around for me to chase. After a few days of thinking about it, I pulled the trigger on the R5 yesterday, and B&H rushed it through the snowstorm for me to get it today. The only RF-mount lens I decided to get at this time is the 100mm macro, replacing the EF version I've had forever. I've had the EF-RF converter for a while to use on my spouse's R10, a consumer-grade camera. Besides the solar eclipse last year, I haven't used it much. Supposedly there is no problem with using EF lenses except for a possible loss of burst speed. Supposedly, focusing speed and accuracy is better for an EF lens on an RF body versus an EF lens on an EF body, but not as good as an RF lens on an RF body. Confusing, not at all. Oh well, as long as I'm keeping the 6D as my backup, I'll be keeping mostly EF lenses.

I wanted to do something other than just shooting my bookshelf for first light, so I snapped a rose that was given to my spouse at the dinner we went to last Thursday. However, the camera was set to large JPG rather than RAW, so that took a wrong turn right away. Anyway. I use the Adobe RAW filter on JPG images all the time, and I did it on this one. What impressed me first was the red was not blown out. When I was processing the last batch of butterfly images from the 6D, there were some blown out reds.

So the 5D is headed to eBay, along with the 100mm macro lens and three other lenses. Most significant is my first "L" lens, the 300mm f/4. When I got my first 100-400 a few years later, the 300 fell out of favor. Also going on the block is the 50mm f/1.4 and the Tamron 28-300 zoom. All four lenses being auctioned are 20-25 years old. The focus on the 50mm broke when I was in Antarctica in 2003. I sent it to Canon to get fixed, and it broke again a few years later. At that point I decided not to bother with it any more. The Tamron was probably a pretty good consumer zoom lens at the time, but I just didn't use it much after I got the 300 and some other good Canon lenses. We'll see if anyone bites.

The R5 felt light, so I decided to weigh all the cameras. The R5 is lighter than the 5D by seven ounces, but only a fraction of an ounce lighter than the 6D. Here are the numbers:

R10	- 1 lb, 0.2 ounces
R5	- 1 lb, 11 ounces
6D	- 1 lb, 11.9 ounces
5D	- 2 lbs, 2.3 ounced
1D	- 3 lbs, 0.7 ounces

It should be noted that I weighed the 1D without its real battery, just the AC adapter which is much lighter. It is one heavy chunk of metal. I used to wave that thing around with the 300mm lens attached. That's why I had Popeye arms in the 2000s.

What's the point and how does this relate to this remote shooting blog? This acquisition also had me reflecting on the state of DSLRs in 2025 versus 2002 when I got my first one, the flawed 1D Mark I. Horrible banding in underexposed areas, only 4Mp, but still capable of fine images if the lighting was good and if you got close enough. The R5 has ten times the resolution and 20+ years of technological advancement built into it. And now to bring it back to remote shooting, why in the hell have trailcam manufacturers decided to lie about increased resolution rather than actually doing something about it? I wish trailcams had advanced as much since (just picking a date) 2017 as Canon's high-end cameras have. There has been a revolution in the transition from DSLR to mirrorless, and there has been no real innovation in the trailcam world during that time.

Droner

I took a couple of droning jobs this week even though the distance I had to drive probably didn't make sense. But I haven't flown the drones lately and it gave me a chance to get some practice in. First was a photo-only shoot in Riverton, Wyoming. It was a relatively easy job, although maximum altitude was only 200 feet due to a nearby airport. (The client wanted 350 feet.) The next job, photos and video, was more challenging for a couple reasons. First, it was extremely cold in central Montana near Great Falls, 0 degrees, and my fingers started freezing up. Besides frostbite, I also was concerned that I would have shortened battery life due to the temperature, which was below the rated operating parameters for the drone. As it turned out, the batteries were fine.

My second concern was the property was bare land covered with snow. The images were for a real estate deal and didn't need to be artistic, but how do you take an interesting picture of a white field? Fortunately there were enough surrounding mountains to give the image shown below some interest. Third, the lot was large (40 acres), and it was impossible to maintain visual contact with the drone as required by the FAA when it was 2,000 feet away and at an altitude of 400 feet. But it always was in contact with the controller. Supposedly the controller can maintain contact with the drone up to 9.3 miles away, which if you think about it is rather impressive, but in my opinion is inconsistent with what the FAA says you should be doing.

This blog started out as a trailcam site, and it has evolved into one that covers all sorts of remote-controlled cameras, including drones. I would like to use the drones for more than shooting real estate. As I was driving back from the Wyoming job, I saw a herd of pronghorn in a field. I got a few shots with my DSLR and 400mm zoom, but they were not close. I was tempted to get out my mini drone and send it into the field, but did not. I didn't think it would spook the herd, but it did concern me. But my primary concern was having to climb over a barbed wire fence to retrieve the drone if it went down. It was a bit windy, probably well within even the mini drone's limits, but still a concern. The big drone is more robust and I did have one fully-charged battery remaining after the shoot, but I still lacked the courage to attempt it. I'm including the DSLR image, which shows only about a third of the herd.

Wyoming, limited to 200-foot altitude.

Montana, 400 feet above the center of the property looking at mountains to the East.

Pronghorn herd, DSLR.