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

Alastair Norcross wrote:

BirdShooter7 wrote:

Dave C 150 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.

They look almost the same to me except a tad more contrast in the first one giving the illusion of sharpness. Are you maybe expecting a bit too much from this non-L glass?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dcweather/

The difference is definitely there and it’s not just a difference in contrast as you suggest though it is subtle so you can be forgiven for making the mistake. The two images are from the same camera and same lens with the same settings and just cropped. The left image is from the first image in a burst and the right image is from the second. The right image matches the subsequent images in the burst. This is representative of all the burst sequences that I took yesterday morning when using EFCS. It’s not a surprise that there are shutter shock effects showing up as Canon themselves acknowledge that they may happen when using EFCS with maximum frame rate. Lesson to be learned here is that if you want maximum sharpness from the R7/RF 800mm f/11 using EFCS with the H+ burst rate is not the best choice, at least not when taking pictures braced against a car window. If your rig is mounted on a sturdy tripod results might be different, I haven’t tested that.

Yes, for a shot like that I would definitely use either a faster shutter speed (1/200 is marginal for me for animals, even perched ones), a lower framerate, or e-shutter. I see that was using ISO 800. I have found the R7 to have excellent high ISO performance, and would probably have used ISO 3200 for that, which would have allowed 1/800. I would also probably not have wanted/needed 15fps for a perched bird, so could have dropped the burst speed to 8fps. Luckily, the R7 gives you various options for coping with this. As to the question of whether the shutter shock is noticeable, I definitely see a little softness there (but not a lot), but it might be possible to overcome that in post too.

Yes we all have our own accepted limits on noise and for me I prefer not to go much more than about 800. I also wanted to keep the iso fairly low because I didn’t want to mask any problems with noise.  Turns out that it was a good idea because now I know that shutter shock can be an issue with this lens and it’s a good idea to keep the shutter speed a little faster if using EFCS.

I think that if you’re not pixel peeping the shutter shock images look perfectly fine so if you’re not a pixel peeper it’s probably not an issue at all.