A few members of the local camera club often speak of the importance of ‘personal projects’ - I have always taken it a bit too seriously thinking that you produce some sort of heart stopping anthology of work - that seemed like a bit of a pain in the neck and too much of a commitment to get involved in, the regularity of my posts on this site will prove my point here!

Anyway, I have found myself in the very fortunate position to have been able to upgrade my equipment, there will be a long winded article about that at some point. I am now a full frame Canon shooter, along with the RF100-500 F4.5-7.1. The main reason for the upgrade was low light performance and the Fuji 100-400 just couldn’t focus when light was failing.

Needless to say, I A) need to get value out of the purchase and B) need to master the equipment. The first thing I did was to go into the field and start trying to take photographs of swallows hunting flies above the crops. To say this is a test is an understatement, the tiny size of the birds coupled with the acceleration, change of direction and distance covered are all very challenging but also the fact that the change in elevation means the AF needs to jump back and forth every time the bird gets lost in the hedgerow.

The performance of the camera’s autofocus is remarkable as is 40FPS - the issues I faced were with only (!!) 24mp, the tiny size of the bird means the ability to crop is somewhat limited and at F7.1 at 500mm the lens isn’t especially fast - this meant with high ISO, the dark features of the birds detail was very difficult to get. I am relying heavily on denoising software. I think this was the perfect test of the camera and lens combination and has given me a good grounding in getting the best out of the camera. I tried this side by side with the Fuji and it just could not do it, nothing at all, maybe a fluke shot in focus but with the ISO being so high there was just no detail.

I think I must have taken 20,000-30,000 shots which at 40FPS isn’t quite as much as it sounds and there were a hell of a lot in the bin! I expect I could probably get some better shots if I was to find £20k down the back of the sofa for an R1 and 600mm F4. I had a lot of fun doing so and have learned a lot - I expect that is the purpose of a personal project. The rugby season starts next week and I am looking forward to some slightly bigger and slower moving subjects!

The majority of these photos were shot in the same region of settings, 1/2,500-1/3,200 shutter speed, at 500mm F7.1 and ISO between 2000-4000, edited in Lightroom and Topaz.

There are very few images that will win many competitions but it was an excellent lesson in pushing the limits of this technology.

Personal Project: Swallows in Flight.

Manchester 24