LUTFIALI BIRD PHOTOGRAPHY: MY GEAR PART 1
After I started getting involved in bird photography and birding since 2010, I have purchased quite a collection of photographic equipments, and spent quite a sum of money for them. I am sure i will not stop buying more gear that can help me improve my photography, unless the price is prohibitive. I thought I share with you the gear that I have used for my bird photography, the good and bad of each item if any, so you do not make the same mistakes I did. Bear in mind that I am a Canon shooter so most of the gear are Canon or third party for Canon DSLR. I have used other cameras for birding like Panasonic Lumix FZ-100 bridge camera but it was not suitable for birding, even if the zoom was massive. The AF was not up to the job. I was interested to buy Nikon D7000 at first because I know Nikon was a very good brand with a good reputation, but after trying out the camera, I opted for the Canon 60D DSLR.
The price was a bit cheaper, the ergonomics was better, felt good in my hand and the diopter suit my eyes. The Nikon diopter power was not suitable for my eyes, since I wear correction glasses it is the most important when shooting without glasses. You cannot shoot what you cannot see! At that time Canon 7D with a higher frame rates per second was also available but it was outside my budget. Canon 60D was the camera that I used when I started my birding and bird photography. I also used it to take macro shots of plants and insects paired with Tamron 90mm f2.8 macro lens and it did a good job at it. I paired my 60D with Canon 70-300L IS f5.6 and Sigma 150-500 OS f4.5-6.3. These combination gave me some good focal lengths after adding the 1.6 crop factor since 60D is an APSC body. 60D has limited 9 AF points only.
The 60D has only nine focus points in a diamond shape which cover mostly in the centre. You can either select all nine or one each, and they do not cover to the edge of the screen. It does not have zone, grouping, centre point with helper points like the 5D3 or 7D2. The frames rate per second was low at 5.3 frames per second. At a second thought I should have coughed out a bit more and buy the 7D with 8 frames per second. The 60D eventually gave way to Canon 5D3 which is a full frame camera which I bought in 2012 at more than twice the price of 60D! Still, the 60D is a good camera for back up, macro photography which does not need fast AF, and no issue with ISO performance since I can use the speedlight in low light conditions. The 5D3 gives so many things that the 60D cannot give. It is a full frame body which means the image quality is better especially in low light conditions even though the resolution is only slightly more than the 60D at 22.3 MB vs 18 MB. Higher resolution is not everything in photography.
When they tried to cramp all those pixels in a certain fixed size, the pixels have to get smaller which reduces the ability to gather light from the lens. This resulted in more noise which is noticeable at high ISO. The pixel size is called "pixel pitch". The cons in going full frame is that you will lose the 1.6 crop factor which is a big deal in bird photography. With the 5D3 I cannot pair it with the Sigma 150-500 since the lens was designed for an APSC body. Using it on my 5D3 will result in a lot of vignetting since the lens image is smaller than the full frame sensor. The part that did not get the light from the lens will be darker than the rest. The only long lens I have to pair with the 5D3 are Canon 400mm f5.6 and Canon 70-300 L f4-5.6 IS. 5D3 different metering modes. I use evaluative metering most of the times.
However, the 5D3 still can do the job for bird photography due to its 6 frames per second frame rate and an awesome AF capability which can be customised to your liking. This AF is similar to the one in 7D2. There are 6 preset AF Cases with different sensitivity and priority in the menu which you can adjust to suite different situations. My favourite are centre point with 4 helper points for bird in flight and a single point for non-skittish birds. 5D3 allows you to use all 61AF points, just the cross-type AF points, 15 or 9 AF points. The 5D3 is also more robust build and weather resistant than 6D, so I do not have to worry with knocks and exposure to dust and water. Once I rinsed it under tap water after coming back from sea trip, of course I had to use a hair dryer to dry it before turning it on again. It still functions until today.
