Trogon Photo Tours

September 2016 - In this month's article I discuss my experiences using the Canon 1DX II, Canon's newsest pro body which was released earlier this year.  It includes images from last month's photo tour to Brazil.  At the end of the article I discuss my current opinion of the Canon line up of full frame cameras.  

Ringed Kingfisher photograpahed August 2016, Rio Claro Lodge, Pantanal, Brazil.  Canon !DX II, 300F4 lens, 1/3200 F6.3, iso 800, manual exposure, handheld from boat.  The first thing I would say about this camera is how impressive the new autofocus system is.  This shot is one of 30 in a row of this kingfisher which took this pirahna and proceeded to fly in a circle around our boat.  I used the center zone autofocus mode (manually selected) most of the time, always in AI Servo.  I am sure my 5D III would not have made all of those images sharp (and at 6 frames per second with the 5D3) compared to 14 frames per second I would have had far fewer images period.  The 1DX II's buffer is an astonishing 170 frames. 

Ringed Kingfisher photographed August 2016, Rio Claro Lodge, the Pantanal, Brazil.  Canon 1DX II, 300F4 lens, 1/2000 F5.6, iso 1250, manual exposure, handheld from boat.  My next observation is about the iso performance of the camera.   I found that the performance was excellent up to iso 1250.  "Excellent" is obviously subjective.  But when you consider that my opinion of the 5D3 was that it was excellent up to iso 800, this makes some sense when you look at the www.dxomark.com iso score for each of these cameras. From a subjective standpoint dxomark ranks the 1DX II as the best Canon camera in terms of iso performance and about half a stop better than the 5D3.  For me excellent iso performance is determined by when I start to see a substantial amount of noise in some of the images taken at a certain iso.  With the 1DX II I started to see a fair amount of noise at iso 1600 in some images, particularly images with dark in the background.  This was a little bit disappointing as I thought I would be able to shoot at iso 1600 without worrying about noise.  But if you look at it in the context of other Canon cameras the result makes sense.  That said the noise cleans up easily most of the time using noise reduction software.  I now use Nik Define for noise reduction on the background of most of my images.  It is a free plug in available on the web.   

Southern Tamandua (Anteater) photographed August 2016, Rio Claro Lodge, the Pantanal, Brazil.  Canon 1DX II, 300F4 lens, 1/60 F4, iso 8000, Av mode, evaluative metering at -1.0, handheld.  When I heard this Tamandua was walking through the lodge garden after dark one evening, I decided rather than using flash I would try to use the flashlights that people were using to view the animal with as the light for the image and see how the camera fared at a very high iso.  I figured since the animal was moving (though slowly) I needed at least 1/60 of a second to have it reasonably sharp, this produced an iso of 8000 while wide open.  Viewing this image at 100% percent isn't pretty, the image quality is pretty low.  But after having run the background through Nik Define noise reduction I think the image is acceptable for web purposes.  The highest iso that I ever published with the 5D3 was iso 4000.  So for me at these very high isos there is a substantial increase in quality - but I won't be sending this to my stock agents. 

Green-headed Tanager photographed August 2016, Toucan's Trail, Atlantic Rainforest, Brazil.  Canon 1DX II, 300F4, 1/4000 F7.1, iso 3200 Av mode, evaluative metering at -1.0, handheld.  Part of the motivation for buying the 1DX II was the better iso performance so I could attempt to take flight shots even at lodges in the cloud forest where there is not usually a ton of ambient light.  The birds are so tame at Toucan's Trail you can get very close to a large variety of toucans, tanagers and other birds.  For this image the bird is coming in to land on a set up perch, I was trying to focus on the birds but wanted a lot of depth of field in case I didn't nail the focus, that and the fact that the bird flies very fast meant I needed a high iso.  I didn't nail the focus here but I thought the birds colors were so amazing that I had to share it despite it not being tack sharp. 

Blond-crested Woodpecker, male, photographed August 2016 Peruibe, Atlantic Rainforest, Brazil.  Canon 1DX II, 500F4 lens, 1/500 F5.6, iso 800, Av mode, evaluative metering at -0.3, 580ex fill flash at -1.7, Gitzo tripod, Wimberley head.  This stunning bird is common in the Atlantic Rainforest regions close to Sao Paulo and it comes to banana feeders.  There was a very tame female that came to the feeder at Toucan's Trail.  This is the male.  Even if I am shooting on a tripod, iso 800 is typically the lowest I am going to go on the iso with this camera because the images are pristine and going any lower I lose shutter speed that could be useful for action. 

Variegated Antpitta photographed August 2016, Toucan's Trail, Atlantic Rainforest.  Canon 1D X II, 500F4 lens, 1/40 F4, Av mode, iso 3200, evaluative metering at -0.3, Gitzo tripod, Wimberley head.  With images between iso 1600 and 3200, I found the image quality to be very dependant on a correct exposure and not cropping too much.  I guess this is the case with any camera but it seems to me the 1DX II is less forgiving in this area than for example the 5D3.  This image is not cropped very much and the exposure was perfect, but I have images taken in the iso 1600 to 2000 range that were underexposed a half a stop and the image quality ended up being quite poor, where with the 5D3 I feel like I may have been able to salvage them.  Perhaps this is partly because of the camera having just 20 megapixels (although the 5D3 has just 2 more at 22mP).  However I think the image quality of this shot is excellent.  It's not cropped very much and the exposure was good.  I would have liked a little more depth of field but I didn't want to go above iso 3200 and I was working with very little shutter speed.  I did submit this to my stock agency (and it was accepted). Again I used Nik Define software to clean up just the background noise.

Canon has just recently released the successor to the 5D III, the 5D IV.  This looks like an amazing camera.  Dxomark.com ranks it as the best Canon camera so far in terms of image quality with an overall score of 91, the 1DX II comes in second with an 88.  The 5D4 has an impressive combination of 30 megapixels and an iso score according to www.dxomark.com of 2995, which is just below the 1DX II's score of 3207.  In terms of speed and burst it does not compare well to the 1DX II as the 5D4 is 7 frames per second and the burst is only 21, which are improvements over the 5D3 but cannot compare to the 14fps and burst of 170 of the 1DX II.  But if I was to recommend only one camera for bird and wildlife photography the 5D4 would probably be my recommendation for most based on what I have read and seen.  30 megapixels is a lot more than 20 and the 5D4 is much more affordable at around $3,500 rather than the 6K for the 1DX II.  Partly it depends on what type of photography you do, if action is your preference and you can often get reasonably close to your subjects, the 1DX II is the way to go.  If on the other hand you shoot mostly portraits and do a lot of walk around photography in the forest where the birds are small and they may be a long way off, then the 5D4 is probably the go.

Male Jaguar photographed August 2016, Cuiaba River, Brazil.  Canon 5D3 500F4 1/5000 F5.6, iso 800, evalutive metering -0.3, Gitzo tripod, Wimberley head, from boat.  Of course the Jaguar is the highlight of any trip to the Pantanal.  We photographed them on all 5 days that we were on the boat hotel and the last day had a nice mother and yearling cub.  This is my favorite Jaguar shot from the trip, my 1DX II was on my 300F4 when this male Jaguar went after a caiman which was lounging in the water in front of him, the caiman made a big splash and got away.  The 5D3 still takes great images and has become my second camera when I am using 2 bodies and my main backup camera.  In 2017 I will buy another body.  I am curious to see if Canon releases an update to the 5Ds which was released in February 2015.  At 50 megapixels it seems like this would be the perfect compliment to the 1DX II, I would use the 1DX II anytime I need speed but most of the time working in the forest I would use the 5Ds or it's successor.  I have a 7D II but I don't use it much as I am just not very impressed with the image quality of crop sensor cameras and of course the iso performance is not particularly good.  So the 5Ds or it's successor would be what I would use when I need more reach.  

As far as cropped sensor cameras  which are quite a bit more inexpensive, the 80D ($1,200) looks like a nice improvement over the 7D2 in terms of dynamic range and resolution as it is 25.5 megapixels as opposed to the 20 of the 7D2.  However, the iso performance is not improved over the 7D2 (at least according dxomark.com).  I think Canon would have been better served keeping the megapixels the same and increasing the iso performance on their cropped sensor line.