The Wetlands of Salmon Creek

[AlanLichty]

There is a wetland area along Salmon Creek which lies just over a mile from where I live in the northwest part of Vancouver. It dries up in late summer but fills back up during our rainy season and occasionally completely floods when we get heavy rains. The ponds typically attract a lot of winter waterfowl visitors dropping down from Canada including ducks, geese, and swans who join the local herons and egrets. So far I have been able to identify Tundra Swans, Canada Geese, American Wigeons, Green Winged Teal, Mallards, and Northern Pintails. The biggest issue trying to get images of the birds lies in the fact that you can't really get close to the ponds and have to shoot from a distance.

I bought a 100-400mm lens quite a few years ago but it didn't have enough reach to get worthwhile shots of the waterfowl that gathered here every year. I did buy a 2x converter but that pushed my 100-400mm lens to f/11 and none of my DSLRs could do autofocus with it installed. This last summer I finally made the jump to a mirrorless camera body and it turns out this camera can handle the f/11 lens combination just fine. The resulting 200-800mm focal length is a great fit for this venue and the autofocus capabilities of this new camera (Canon R5 Mark II) are giving me some delightful results. Expect to see a lot of images from this place. This is a 2 panel telephoto panorama from yesterday afternoon showing part of the scene looking upstream towards Mt. Hood in the distance.

Something I had never tried before - a 3 panel panorama at 800mm using a monopod. This is the far right of the pond in the scene above.

C&C always welcome.

 

[JimFox]

That's quite the reach! That worked out well with the mono pod. And it stitched really well.

 

[AlanLichty]

That's quite the reach! That worked out well with the mono pod. And it stitched really well.

Thanks Jim - having AF with this lens/converter combination is like a whole new way to do photography for me. I did play around with this in my yard a bit and decided the hit ratio worked much better with a monopod instead of handheld when you reach out to 800mm. Lens stabilization coupled with IBIS does help up to a point but when you go past 400mm it doesn't take much to end up with duds.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

Nice work with the combo. The 100-400 is a heavy lens and combined with the 2x tele convertor and the EF-RF adapter makes the setup very front heavy and unwieldy for handhold shooting. The RF 800/11 on the other hand is very hand holdable and with shutter speeds above 1/400, the IS and IBIS provide very nice results.

 

[AlanLichty]

Nice work with the combo. The 100-400 is a heavy lens and combined with the 2x tele convertor and the EF-RF adapter makes the setup very front heavy and unwieldy for handhold shooting. The RF 800/11 on the other hand is very hand holdable and with shutter speeds above 1/400, the IS and IBIS provide very nice results.

Thanks Jameel - yeah the combination of the RF-EF converter, 2x converter, and the 100-400mm (first generation) is not lightweight by any means. I am starting to become accustomed to working with a monopod to offset the weight and more importantly the far front center of gravity. I leave the ball head unlocked so I have a lot of freedom of motion while still get support where I need it. The RF 800/11 looks nice but I do like the range of focal length with a 200-800 zoom. I need to let my piggy bank recover from the R5m2 and the RF 24-105/4 first