Thanks Joe - the timing bit gets easier when you are shooting at 30 frames/second. The hard part is wading through all the frames to find the right one
Thanks Jim - these birds have a really slow descent compared to ducks and geese. I have a string of 4 shots before this frame starting with the bird's feet about a foot over the water and 6 more after it touches the water but isn't quite standing on the bottom yet. This was the frame where the feet were the closest but not quite touching yet. Ducks and geese almost skid when they land and kick up rooster tails of water behind them while this egret barely even made a ripple landing. Likely much better for not disturbing potential lunch.
Thanks! I have caught sequences with these guys taking off but never landing before.
Thanks Trent - it's fun scrolling through how they land and especially how they use their wings to almost float out of the air in slow motion. I have never had a camera that could do something like this before its a new learning experience for me.
Thanks Jameel - this is making trips to my local marsh a lot more fun than what I could do with my old DSLRs. I wasn't quite sure how much I would use the action modes of this camera body when I got it but now I'm hooked.
Thanks Eric - so true about picking through the pile. Between the flight from near where I was to where this egret ended up I have well over 200 RAW images. For Sunday's 1/2 hour shooting session I ended up with just over 2500 images. I have now whittled that down to just over 300.
Does the Cannon have programmable buttons Alan? My Om-1 will allow what you are talking about. Might be in the menu somewhere??
I think it does and I need to spend some more quality time with the manual (only 1200 pages long) to see how close I can come to what I want. My dream would be a button that says make this one a single shot and then immediately revert to continuous but I think one button for each mode is about as close as I might be able to get. There is a control ring on the lenses that can be used for shortcuts but it's limited to some specific functions like changing shutter speed and f/stops and not fully reprogrammable.
Turns out I can customize buttons but the way Canon has set up the interface for the drive mode is with an on-screen/viewfinder menu that shows the drive options for you to choose from. I can program a button to bring that menu up on the screen but I don't have the ability to program a button for one of those specific menu items without chasing through the menu choices. What I would like is a button that lets me press and immediately be in high speed fps mode.
I already have two profiles set up in C1 and C2. When you start digging into the weeds with how to set up all of the AF options it can take quite a bit of time to get the settings tweaked the way you want to use the camera and for me the bird photo stuff is a world apart from my usual landscape fare.
Sweet image, Alan.
Thanks Doug!
