Off the leash

I had the 1D set up trying to get birds landing on the birdhouse when flickers came into the yard. I decided to see how skittish they were and ventured out into the yard with the R5/100-400. To my surprise, they were fairly approachable. After two days, I determined that there is a family of four, and the adults are still feeding the fledglings to some extent.

I did get this motion-triggered shot of a magpie with the 1D, but I fear it may be giving up the ghost after 21 years. Many of the images from the past few days have a diagonal thick black blob covering up much of the image. Another anomoly is a horizontal light shape across most of the image. That is what can be seen here behind the magpie. I'll do some more testing, but I fear the worst. It is not worth fixing. It might finally get put up on eBay as a "parts" camera.

Fledgling (left) getting fed by Dad.

The adult male has the red chin.

Overnight

I turned off the sprinklers and left the 1D/70-200 out overnight. I didn't get much, but this sparrow was at 5:49 AM, and the robin four hours later. The background blur shows the difference in lighting conditions. The sparrow is wide open at f/4, and the robin is at f/13. As the day went along the wind came up and the waving grass started setting off the motion detector, even though I have it aimed high. Just before I stopped the camera, another sparrow came by at 11:49 with a grasshopper in its beak.

I need to construct a small tube that fits over the motion detector so it doesn't get distracted by waving grass. There are wings on the sides that can be adjusted, but nothing at the top or bottom. I have taped cardboard to the top, but it is not an easy fit on the bottom, which is where I need it for this. If I can get this done, I won't have so many wasted shots and will feel better about using one of my better cameras. The 1D fired off 760 wasted shots in the two hours between the robin and the second sparrow.

To be clear, magpies, robins and sparrows are fine for test subjects. What I really want perched on the fence are bluebirds, meadowlarks and flickers.

Post

To get out of the bird bath rut, I focused the 1D and 70-200 at 200 on a fencepost in my back yard. It is located between the two bird houses, which are unoccupied but which still get traffic from bluebirds and others. When I set it out this morning, there was a meadowlark on the fence further to the north, and a robin and magpie closer, so I had hope. The images during the day just had a few blurry birds, but I had better luck right at sunset. This magpie caught the light in the first two images, but clouds on the horizon ruined the ambiance for the next two. I decided to turn off my lawn sprinklers and let the camera sit out there all night in hopes of getting some early morning shots. The alternative is to get up really early to set out the camera, and I am not going to do that.

The camera was set at 70mm, 250 ISO, TV priority with 1/500th of a second. On the lit images, the f/stop was a respectable 7.1. As it got darker, that dropped to f/5-5.6.

20-year-old tech

To get maximum dollars, I should have sold the Canon 1D Mark II #9 (vintage 2004) in 2012 when I got the Canon 5D Mark III #8 , but I never did. So there it sat in a box until I revived it in 2021 to take some motion trigger shutter actuations off of the 5D. If I sold it now I might get a few hundred, but what I have is an 8 Mp camera which equals the top TRUE resolution in any trail camera I know of. As I have said many times before, every trail camera manufacturer except Reconyx lies about image resolution.

I put the 1D out today with the 70-200 zoom, which also is more than 20 years old. This camera-lens combo traveled with me to Antarctica and the Galapagos way back when, and they still produce a decent image. I don't have a battery that can power it for more than a few minutes, so I use an AC adapter and a long extension cord. It soaked up more than 400 shutter actuations today, getting mostly magpies but also some blurry shots of a flicker. It is profocused to the middle of bird bath, and the flicker was sitting on the front. But these magpies were in focus.

To process in Photoshop, my new standard practice is to use Smart Sharpen on the foreground and Reduce Noise (rather than blur) on the background. I don't know if anyone downloads these images and zooms in to see the pixels, but I think using Reduce Noise rather than blur serves much of the same purpose and is more subtle.

I need to find a setting other than the little bird bath, but it is just so convenient since it gets a lot of traffic. The nest boxes are unoccupied, but birds still frequently perch on top of them. Maybe tomorrow.

Fireworks

I haven't shot fireworks before with the Canon R5 Mark II #18, so I set up two tripods for the 4th of July, the R5 with the 24-105 zoom set at 105, and the Canon 6D Mark II #12 with the 100-400 zoom set at 100. Both cameras were set for 4-second exposures, f/11, ISO 200. I used the intervalometer on both, set to five seconds, so all I had to do when the fireworks startered was to trigger both of the cameras.

At least that was the theory. It seems like they never started the show before 10:15 in the years I've been here, but this year they got going at 10:06. I didn't even have the R5 turned on because it is a bit of a battery hog, and when I did turn it on it seemed like it had lost the prefocus. So it took a few seconds to fiddle with the focus. Both cameras showed some shake on early images after I hit the buttons. I turn off the image stabilizers when I shoot on a tripod because back in the day (20 years ago) that was the advice Canon gave for most lenses. Both lenses I used are recent versions so I tried to look up current information. The Canon KnowledgeBase says, "depending on the kind of tripod and shooting conditions, sometimes it may be better to turn off the lmage Stabilizer function." In other words, maybe, maybe not.

Here are two images shot at about the same time by the two cameras. The first is the R5, the second is the 6D. I was able to crop a bit more with the R5 due to its higher resolution. The third image is from the 6D. Because I used the intervalometers, these meet my arbitrary criteria for inclusion on this blog site. In previous years, I just used a corded shutter release, which does not meet the criteria. Not that it really matters.