I have only had the Canon R5 Mk II and RF 100-500 mm for a week now.
Its primary mission is to capture birds as follows:
1) Motionless (or nearly so).
2) Fishing (some motion and then a quick strike)
3) In flight (especially landing and taking off)
Having just barely migrated over to the Canon world after being a Nikon shooter for quite some time, it would be very valuable, beneficial and appreciated to be put in a position to know how to specifically optimize the focus, all key settings and anything else vitally necessary in order to obtain quality results for each variation listed above.
At this time, unfortunately I do not have a source of advice locally with that particular expertise and knowledge.
Any specific recommendations online or personal sharing is welcomed!
Right now in order to simplify things, I have Pre Capture turned off.
I mostly have the out of the box settings and have yet to install the newly released version 1.3.0 yet.
For now, my preference/style is to shoot manual with auto ISO off, spot metering and single shot until I get more hands-on experience, comfortable and become familiar.
I would really like an education (as to when and in what situation) which shutter mode is most appropriate. Mechanic vs electronic.
a) Is the subject to detect (for my planned usage) better to be left off or is “Animals” preferable?
b) Is eye detection better to be enabled or disabled?
Any other “must have” settings to include for bird photography?
When the camera is turned on, is it normal to hear an audible and constant “whirring” noise like some sort of air circulation is occurring? I won’t entirely call it white noise. Normal?
Why is the LP-E6P battery life so short? Good thing have three!!
Is Eye Control focus a gimmick or really useful for the average user?
Any pointers, feedback, settings or commentary is appreciated. Thank you for participating.
For general advice and learning, there are a few YouTubers whom I can recommend.
For birding and wildlife, check out Jan Wegener's channel.
For general Canon system advice, I find that James Reader has solid takes. He is a wedding / portrait / travel photographer, so a little closer to my area of focus (events and photojournalism).
As to some of your questions:
I prefer to shoot EFCS nearly always when 12 fps sufficient. There are no worries with rolling shutter. If you really need 20, 30 or 40 fps, then electronic is your only option, but you must be mindful of distortion of subjects in motion (For higher end bodies this is less of an issue.) On some bodies, using e-shutter will drop output to 12-bit instead of 14-bit encoding, slightly reducing dynamic range. You also generally cannot use flash with e-shutter.
If you use subject tracking AF, then definitely set it to the desired subject ("Animals" in your case). Some cameras have an "Auto" setting which is also an option. If you want to use your camera like a DSLR, then set Subject to Detect to "None".
Note that if you use back-button focus, you can program each button with distinct AF behaviors. I usually have the AF-button set to work like a DSLR (One-Shot AF, single AF point, subject detection disabled), while the AE Lock button is set to engage Servo Focus using full area AF + subject tracking. It's like having two cameras in one. (In reality, I use the custom modes C1, C2, C3 a lot also, tweaking these behaviors for various shooting situations.)
If you use subject detection + tracking, I have never found a reason *not* to enable eye AF.
As to the "whirring noise", mirrorless cameras keep the lens IS system engaged continuously as long as the EVF or rear LCD is active. This behavior is different than for a DSLR (when not using Live View). Totally normal.
The battery is what it is. Buy a grip (or an R1 or R3) if you want more shooting capacity.
If Eye-Control Focus works for you, it may be quite useful. But it is going to be dependent on your shooting style. I don't think it is that relevant to use with subject tracking, personally, since the cameras are so good at finding the subject in the first place and sticking with it as you recompose. If you use the camera DSLR style, then having the camera pick a focusing point based on where you are looking is a neat trick.
Electronic shutter, yes, enable animal subject detection, turn on eye detection. AI-Servo AF for moving subjects. I actually use AI-Servo for everything because I use back buttons to activate focus and therefore can separate AF use from the shutter release. Releasing the back AF button effectively stops/locks focus on the subject in similar way to using One Shot, but with more flexibility to quickly resume tracking when desired. Note that you can tweak the frame rate in e-shutter if you find the default values inappropriate. I don't like the nature of the EVF blackout with EFCS and therefore never use it unless I need to use flash at 1/250 rather than 1/160 in e-shutter.
Was your preference with Nikon to activate AF via the shutter release or a button on the back of the body?
The whirring sound is normal. I believe it's the IBIS system. If you don't wish to have IBIS/stabilization active, when an optical-IS capable lens is attached to the camera, you need to turn off image stabilization on the lens to totally disable stabilization. For BIF you may wish to set stabilization on the lens to mode 2 rather than 1 because it is panning optimized.
You will need to play with eye control focus to determine if it works for you (reliably recognizes your eye movement). IMO it works best in conjunction with subject/face/eye detection/tracking as you only need to get the AF point in the ballpark of the intended subject and subject detection will very quickly take over and lock on (most of the time).
If you will not use subject tracking much, then I would recommend using a larger AF point, such as single point expanded to give you a bit more leeway for your subject to escape your efforts to keep the AF point on it and still maintain AF tracking.
For distant subjects/birds, apparently subject detection/tracking is improved when the camera is in APS-C crop mode, based on previous feedback by others here. You can assign a button of your choice to immediately switch to APS-C crop mode if you also de-select all the other crop options in that custom function. Note that if you shoot RAW, the resulting file in crop mode will also be cropped and not the full frame image. By assigning crop to a button it's possible to activate it at will to enhance subject acquisition and then press it again to return to full frame if/when the subject is closer and more likely to benefit from full frame capture. In my case, I've assigned crop to the lens's assignable function button.
There is a lot of AF customization possible but it can be a very steep learning curve and maybe better for a later post once you've had some time with the camera. I'd suggest browsing YouTube for instructional videos and/or go back through older posts on this board.
Some of the situations you described would greatly benefit from use of pre-capture. Note that you can tweak the number of pre-capture frames so that it's not always 15 (which is also dependent on the continuous shooting frame rate and for how long the shutter release has been half-pressed before being fully pressed).
Whistling Wings Photography on YouTube has some excellent videos for setting up the R5 mkii for bird photography, and other Canon cameras.
There is also Jan Wegner and he sells setup guides, and they come with the Camset files which you can load straight onto your camera, if you don't want to spend the time making all the changes manually.
I recommend shooting in Electronic Shutter, and if you are going to use pre-capture you should probably shoot in CRAW, as it is a smaller file size, so it writes to the CF card quicker and doesn't fill the buffer as quickly.
Garyvot has already supplied some good tips and as rscheffler states, it can be a steep learning curve and there are plenty of online videos available.
Welcome to Canon and I hope you find settings that work for you, otherwise, it can get very frustrating.
That applies to all systems until you get everything setup the way you want it.
The LPe-6P battery will last a lot longer when you become accustomed to the R5-2. A few things can help retain charge. Close the back screen and use the viewfinder for all reviewing and adjusting. The viewfinder uses much less energy than the back screen. Turn off all nonessential settings and then put the camera in airplane mode. I regularly get 2000-4000 photos per battery. That is shooting at 12 or 20 FPS.
Welcome to FM! Check out the various forums for other information and discussions. And search within the forums for earlier discussions.
jmckayak wrote:
The LPe-6P battery will last a lot longer when you become accustomed to the R5-2. A few things can help retain charge. Close the back screen and use the viewfinder for all reviewing and adjusting. The viewfinder uses much less energy than the back screen. Turn off all nonessential settings and then put the camera in airplane mode. I regularly get 2000-4000 photos per battery. That is shooting at 12 or 20 FPS.
Welcome to FM! Check out the various forums for other information and discussions. And search within the forums for earlier discussions.
With a new, fully charged LP-E6P
The number of shots available may vary greatly depending on the shooting environment.
Fewer shots may be available with a compatible accessory attached to the multifunction shoe…“
Putting the camera in airplane mode while shooting is a good advice!
One thing I don't see mentioned nearly enough, and once I watched the Rudy Winston interview re: Autofocus (2025 update) is Flexible Zone AF and Whole Area AF in terms of its usefulness for birds in flight.
It starts at about the 23 minute and 30 second mark and goes on for about 6-7 minutes. It's the best explanation of Flexible Zone and Whole Area AF (which for sports can also work together with face detection) and why you'd want to use it. At a very basic level using FZ or WA relieves a lot of the pressure of having to have the focus point(s) be on the subject.
If you're photographing a bird in flight (or perched and about to fly, or in flight and about to land) chances are you want one primary bird. And if you're zoomed in with a 500mm or longer lens, and you have one bird in frame that you're interested in tracking, FZ/WA is your friend. As you know, moving the camera when zoomed that far results in big changes with small movements, which can make your subject jump around the frame and out of the range of your focus points. That's where Flex Zone or Whole Area can really help your camera track the subject as it dips and dives through the air.
My setup for birding is usually:
1. E-Shutter - the R5mk2 retains 14-bit color depth with ES and the dynamic range hit is IMO very minor. Readout speed is sufficiently fast on the R5ii that I have no problems with the results using ES.
2. Pre-capture (now easily toggle-able thanks to firmware 1.3.0)
3. Flexible Zone or Whole Area AF (depending on how much difficulty I'm having keeping birds in the flexible zone)
4. Image Stabilization on--type 2 if I'm primarily only panning
5. Burst shooting (I slow mine down to 20FPS)
6. Animal tracking
7. Eye detection (auto)
8. Servo AF
