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

BirdShooter7 wrote:

ThrillaMozilla wrote:

BirdShooter7 wrote:

ThrillaMozilla 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 difference is small, fortunately, but significant. What was the burst speed, and how did you brace the camera and lens?

I only observed this effect at 15fps, at the slower speed any effect was so small I couldn’t detect it. The lens was braced against the window frame of the car with the motor turned off.

And the camera itself, which is where the impulse comes from, was handheld.

I put your reply in bold. And I might add that it is 1/200 second at 800 mm with an APS-C camera. A very small effect, I would say, and I agree with Bird Shooter. Even that can probably be removed by processing.

Very useful information, thanks.

Yes, the body was in my hand. It’s possible that a solid tripod could solve the problem and maybe that could account for some of the differences observed in shooting from the car vs tripod?

I used to use a bean bag for shooting from the car, but somehow got out of the habit. I wonder how much that would have helped?