Trogon Photo Tours

In this month's newsletter article Nate discusses photographing warblers and other migrants during our Galveston, Texas workshops this spring.  I discuss my first attempts with the Canon R5 and some subsequent adjustments.  I also discuss bird photography composition and my settings for some of the images. 

Here's a Northern Parula I photographed with the Canon R5 on our Galveston, Texas April 2021 workshop.  I used my 500F4 1/320 at F5.6, iso 1250, Av mode, evaluative metering at 0, Gitzo Tripod, Benro Head, blind.  I had just received my Canon R5 about a week before the workshop and although I had photographed with Melody Lytle's R5 a few months earlier in South Texas which had been setup for bird photography, I purposely did not setup my R5 before the workshop because I wanted to see how it performed with the default settings. This way I could see what other photographers may have been experiencing when they first purchased the camera.  This image worked out pretty well.  In terms of composition, it's somewhat centered but I cropped it that way because I wanted to include the head of the flower in the upper left corner, which I feel is a small balancing subject in the composition. 

During the April workshop I started with the Canon R5 with the default settings.  However, I quickly changed to my trusty Canon 5D Mark IV as I found I was often times having a difficult time acquiring focus with the R5 and missing a lot of good shots.  I think the biggest cause of this was that the default for continuous focus in the AF setup is to enable continuous focus, with that enabled the autofocus point was continually jumping around the screen.  Anyway, during the April workshop I didn't have time to start diving into the R5 setup (and no one else on the trip was using one) so I set the camera aside especially when we were in the blinds at the waterdrip.  This was a beautiful Worm-eating Warbler which put on a good show for us, using our perches and bathing in the pond several times. This was shot with the Canon 5D4 500F4 1/2500 at F6.3, iso 1250, Manual exposure, Gitzo Tripod, Benro Head, Blind.  Again, this image is somewhat centered as I wanted to include leaves on both the left and the right of the bird but there is still more room to the right in the direction the bird is looking than to the left. 

Here's a Cerulean Warbler I photographed with the 5D4 in April.  This beautiful and uncommon species is one of the more sought after warblers so we were very happy to have this beautiful male visit our perches and the water drip.  The settings for this shot were Canon 5D4 500F4 1/2000 F7.1, iso 1250, manual exposure, Gitzo Tripod, Benro Head, blind.  I use full manual mode a fair bit when I am photographing at the water drip, mostly because when the sun is fully out our perches and the whole drip is in sunlight but the backgrounds change from being very light brown or green to shaded and very dark.  By using full manual, the exposure on the bird stays the same and is not influenced by the background.  

Here's one more shot from the April workshop.  We always get some good oriole disputes during these Galveston workshops.  The settings for this shot were Canon 5D4 500F4 1/2000 F5.6, iso 2000, Av mode, evaluative metering at 0, Gitzo tripod, Benro head, blind.  At this point I had changed to av mode, the reason being that now while the perches were still in sunlight (which you can see from the techs was fading) the waterdrip was now in the shade.  So if I had been in manual and changed from a bird on the perches to a bird on the edge of the pond, my image would have been way underexposed without making big changes to the exposure.  This would likely mean that I would miss the shot I wanted as the bird may have hopped into the pond while I was changing the exposure.  So by changing to aperture, the camera makes the adjustment and the change automatically when I swivel from the branch to the pond (I may still have to make small adjustments but I can still immmediately get a usable image). 

In between our April and May workshops I took part of the time to watch some videos on setting up the R5 for bird photography.  One of the videos I found very helpful was the Australian bird photographer Jan Wegener's you tube video EOS R5 - The SETTINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW.  I am not going to get into too much detail here but probably the biggest take away from his video is to set up the regular autofocus system and the eye detection autofocus system on different back buttons.  I used the AF-on button for regular autofocus and the * button for eye detection.  The settings for this shot were Canon R5, 500F4 1/5000 F6.3, iso 1250, Av mode, evaluative metering at -0.3, Gitzo tripod, Benro head, blind.  This shot is even more centered than the three warblers but I think it works quite well with the red eye right looking at the viewer right in the middle of the frame.  This is a Yellow-green Vireo a species which is quite uncommon in the US so we were happy to photograph it. 

Here's the Yellow-green Vireo from above blasting out of the pond after taking a bath.  Again this was at 1/5000 which on the perch may seem like overkill but that kind of speed is necessary to stop small birds in flight and the R5 has great iso performance so it's very good at iso 1250 anyway.  Suffice it to say, I don't think there are many images of this species in flight.  

While I did much better with using the R5 in May than in April at times I still struggled to acquire focus.  One of the things I changed which improved focus acquisition was to change the focus distance range on my 500F4 from full to a maximum of 10 meters while I was photographing at the water drip.  For the most part this worked well but when this Yellow-billed Cuckoo perched in a tree in the distance, I changed it back to full as it was farther away than 10 meters.  This wasn't a great opportunity with this species but it was the clearest shot we had gotten of it on this trip so we all took some images of it.  At 45 megapixels with good iso performance the R5 allows for greater cropping than all of the other Canon cameras.  The techs for this shot were R5, 500F4 1/1000 F5.6, iso 1250, Av mode, evaluative metering at -0.3, Gitzo Tripod, Benro Head, blind. 

When we were finished photographing the cuckoo in the distance I changed the focus range back to a maximum of 10 meters so the camera wouldn't hunt when these small birds landed on our perches.  This is a Yellow Warbler photographed with the R5 and 500F4 at 1/800 F7.1, iso 1250, Av mode, evaluative metering -0.7.  I dialed in some negative exposure compensation on this one to hold both the light colors of the lichen and the yellows on the bird which you can blow out easily.  If you want to photograph some of these beauties up close we have both April and May Galveston workshops next spring.