R7 from my car ?! What the heck ?!?!

BirdShooter7 wrote:

I’m glad you brought this up as it caused me to do some testing and I learned some things. I’ve mainly used the R7 and 800mm f/11 in ES mode as my main in-flight lens is the EF 500mm f/4 and I haven’t noticed shutter shock with it in EFCS on the R7. However, because of this thread I decided to take out the R7/RF 800mm f/11 and use it in EFCS from the car.

What I noticed after taking a bunch of pictures this morning is that I am seeing shutter shock in EFCS on the R7. Over and over I saw the first shot in a sequence come out a tad sharper than the subsequent shots. The first shot was pretty consistently sharp to my satisfaction when taking photos from the car. I did have pretty good shooting conditions though. It was overcast and about 75F outside and distance to subjects was generally pretty close.

Here’s a representative sample of what I’m seeing.

And here’s the actual pixels crop from the first shot of a burst and second on the right. All of the subsequent shots in the sequence were similar to the second shot and I never got another shot in a sequence that was as crisp as the first.

The shutter shock effects I have seen in my photos  go away when using 1/250th of a second or shorter as a shutter speed (and with longer than 1/40th, but that's likely a no-go for birds).

Your 1/200s shutter speed above fits nicely into my theory If the theory is correct, your burst might've been fine or have only extremely subtle shock at 1/250s.

Your setup is an excellent demonstrator for all this: lightweight camera, strong shutter, 800mm and APS-C.