Canon R5 - One Year On Review

Yesterday (or actually two days ago now, if I end up finishing writing this post tonight) marked a year since I got an R5 as the successor for my 7D. Its funny how, earlier this evening, I'd been wondering: "Hah... I wonder what day exactly it was that I got my new camera last new year... I'm sure it was around this time of year-ish"

This is a follow-up to my earlier posts a week in, and a few months in. 

Key Points:

* Overall, I ended up filling 2x 256GBmemory cards (give or take) this year with this camera - Which also means, I've quickly burned through half a TB of disk storage (vs under/around 150 GB a year previously)... More on this in a bit

* By and large, it has now ended up becoming my daily driver. While initially it was just to get used to it under different lighting conditions, later the increased image quality + better performance in a wide range of lighting conditions was a major drawcard.

* I've been on two multi-day trips with this camera now, so can say quite a bit more about how it handles for such usage

* In terms of battery life - I've got a total of 3 batteries, though in practice, I've only really needed 2 (with the third coming into its on those occasions where I'm too lazy to charge the one in use (and forgot to charge the other one, which had gone flat a while earlier). For typical cycles, they usually average around 400-600 (centered around 550 ish), though sometimes that figure can be as high as 1100 - 1300. Lowest would've been around 250 - 300 ish.

* The improved light gathering capabilities have really come in handy with the increased major Aurora storms this past year, meaning that I've been able to see + capture Aurorae for the first time in my life

[Darktable Trials] Testing out a New Photo Management / Editing Workflow - Part 1

Over this past week, I've been kicking the tyres on Darktable again -- partly to see if I can now make it work for me, but also partly out of necessity (as my usual workstation + office-space are out of commission currently, but I had a bunch of photos needing editing, and Picasa - which I've been using to date - will eventually bite the dust in a bad way as it's been long deprecated so I wanted to avoid putting it on yet another machine... plus, I kept forgetting to grab the installer from my backup drive when I plugged it in).

Maybe there's a bit of "Stockholm Syndrome" here, but early indications are that with the latest current version (4.8.1 when I went to download it recently), Darktable has resolved a whole bunch of idiosyncrasies that made it an annoying non-started previously, along with offering a bunch of new capabilities that present a good way of achieving some of the "Ultimate Photo Editing" tool points I mentioned previously.

 

Update Notes: 

* 25/11/2024 -  Original Post. May end up tacking on more details in a later revision, in which case these update notes will be updated.

Wishlist for My Ultimate Photo Management + Editing Tool

Now that my project schedule is freeing up again (and most importantly, I'm finally free of my various university contracts / commitments over the past few years, with the rather onerous IP provisions those came with), my attention has again been turning towards what sorts of projects I may want to start working on in my free time going forwards.

 

The key operative principle though for any such projects I now take on is this:

From now on, any passion-projects I dedicate my free time to (and with full force) will necessarily only be ones that I fully control + own. Unfortunately, experience and hindsight have taught me that merely having something be open source (but still part of someone else's platform / hosted by some other funding org) is ultimately not the answer I once believed it to be.

Note: This is also NOT a firm commitment to actually embarking on building all of these things. But rather, just some open-air brainstorming, hoping that someone will build it all for me (and then not put it behind a hideous subscription-based paywall). Heck, maybe the mere act of brainstorming these designs then releasing them as blueprints to hopefully inspire a whole ecosystem of interfaces should be the actual project!

Enough framing boilerplate. Let's get down to the original topic for today's ramblings:

What my ideal "next-gen" photo management + editing tool solution should look like, were I to go through the effort to set one up.

Mirrorless Camera Observations - A Few Months In (Part 2 in Series)

As a followup to Part 1, here are my observations on the mirrorless camera having used it for a few more months (and for long periods instead of my old DSLR).

 

Pros:

Unfortunately, this list is currently still a lot smaller than it should probably be... especially given the price tag on this thing.

1)  As mentioned last time, the overall improved sharpness + richness of colour range the sensor are capturing are a definite improvement. Especially loving being able to use decent / normal-ish shutter-speeds that I want to be using at night, and *still* getting the shots with reasonable quality is something that's been a real benefit of using this at night and/or in marginal lighting conditions

2) As expected, when dealing with sharply varying lighting conditions (e.g. shooting birds in a backlit tree, where taking one step to either side can land you in a patch of bright sunlight + a different exposure), having a digital viewfinder is a real improvement as it allows seeing in real-time the exposure changes. Also, just having this all be via a digital screen vs sun-rays passing through a zoom lens direct to eyeball is a real safety measure that's good to have. Same too the ability to use the viewfinder while recording video. Basically all the expected benefits of shooting with a mirrorless camera (and subsequently having "live view" in the viewfinder) are proving to be as I epected

3) When it works, the auto-focus is good for tracking moving objects - Operative word: "when" it works... More on this later.

4) Having 3 (or actually 4, if counting the one on the new-style lenses) dials able to be used for controlling various settings is a big improvement on only have 2! Particularly as the third one can now be mapped to controlling ISO in manual mode, making that mode actually useful if you want to lock in camera behaviours with the other 2 then use ISO to get the desired exposure (i.e. typically underexposing relative to what the camera's metering things the scene requires)

Cons:

This list is unfortunately still a lot longer than I'd like, with a bunch of these being ever-frustrating things that grind you down everytime you use it. (Nothing puts these into focus as much as just switching back to shooting on old DSLR for a change, and suddenly no longer having to deal with most of this crap)

Mirrorless Camera Observations - First Week Impressions

Recently I bit the bullet and proceeded to get a new camera to supplement my ageing (and also apparently somewhat ailing though still trustworthy) 7D DSLR. After sticking with one camera for over a decade, switching to anything else was always going to come with a learning curve. What I didn't expect though was what some of those learnings would be!

 

Short Summary of Key Points

Pros:

* Between a nice new higher-quality standard lens, and new sensor tech (and being FF this time too), images are a lot sharper in general. Especially when shooting landscape stuff (e.g. treelines against sunsets in particular, but also tiny text on small labels on things in frame) are now often very sharp + clear with this setup, whereas it used to be somewhat hit and miss whether the same applied before with my old standard lens setup

* There are now 3 dials on the body that can be used to adjust various things, along with an additional mappable control-ring on the new-generation lenses. As you'd expect, in Full Manual Mode, these dials have been mapped so that the two that used to be present still control shutter speed + aperture as before, with the new one handling ISO - exactly as I'd been wishing for many years.

* New sensor == Higher ISO levels you can use (and with less obvious grain when that happens)

* Auto-focus available during video recording

* Can use EVF for "through the lens" live-view preview of what you're recording during video recording - which is better for situations where holding at arms length to see the LCD was problematic

* Can also choose to use the LCD screen in  "pop out" mode out the side, with some angling support available

* A whole bunch of new + more advanced autofocus modes + settings to choose from, along with a wider array of focus points that can be used