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

koenkooi wrote:

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.

True, this morning I continued going through my photos from yesterday and as the sun started coming out in the afternoon and shutter speeds got higher the shutter shock was no longer visible.  What did start becoming obvious was effects from heat distortion.