A fellow photographer, Adam Jones, posted a pretty amazing image of a swallow in flight using the Canon’s new R5 camera. These little birds fly so fast and so erratically that I honestly never thought much about trying to capture them in flight, but after seeing Adam’s photo, I thought I’d give it a try. Adam convinced me to get the R5 back in January and it’s a great camera though some of them have some serious flaws. I’ll get into that later. One of the amazing thing about the camera is it’s ability to track birds in flight fairly well. While my rate of keepers was expectedly low, I was surprised to have any keepers at all. While not as spectacular as Adam’s image, I was excited to capture this interaction. In honesty, the first image is pretty sharp and well focused. The subsequent two images lose focus enough that I can still use them here but probably not for much else.

The second image, above, is still focused enough that I could probably print it nicely but I wish the third image was a little sharper. With the fourth frame, since I was tracking their flight and this interaction brought them to a near stop, I have the birds half out of the frame. All the same, I was pretty impressed that I was able to capture any flight shots of these fast erratic flyers and the large files of the R5 give me room to crop and still have a large enough file for printing. As good as the R5 has been, there has been some production issues. The most notable is that the camera locks up for no apparent reason and the only way to get it working again is to pull the battery. In 6 months of shooting, mine has done it three times but a friend had to send hers back to Canon. They replaced the motherboard in her camera but it didn’t solve the problem. Hopefully Canon will figure this one out quickly.