Canon R7 & EF 100-400 II: My Favorite Setup for Bird Photography

Hi everyone, I hope you're all having an amazing day! This is gonna be just a short compilation video of some bird shots that I captured in our backyard. The setup has been the same, my Canon R7 with the EF 100-400mm telephoto zoom, the second iteration with image stabilization. I absolutely love this combination, the results have been exceptional for both stills and birds in flight. If you'd like to know how I customized the body for wildlife photography and for bird photography in particular, then you should check out this video as well. Before jumping to the images, I'd like to point out how good the new AI-powered denoise function is in Lightroom. If you use a crop sensor body, such as the R7 with high megapixel density, if you shoot, let's say over 1000, you're gonna introduce a fair bit of noise and this new function is definitely gonna be able to take care of that. I normally use the default settings with the enhanced option and even though it takes a little bit more time, it's definitely worth it. Anyway, let's have a look at my most recent bird shots that I took in our neighborhood and mostly in our backyard. Let's start with a few images of a relatively small species, a noisy miner. Just like their name suggests, they can be quite noisy, as you heard at the start of the video, but I still love them. These birds are endemic to eastern and southern Australia and belong to the family of honey eaters. Their plumage is mainly gray and off-white and I really love the distinctive patch of yellow skin behind the eye. They primarily feed on nectar, fruit and insects, but they also seem to love rodents and accompany our Australian magpies quite frequently. I'm really fascinated by these interspecies associations and apparently, Australian magpies can understand the noisy miner's calls very clearly and use them for detection of terrestrial and aerial threats. I was really happy with this exceptionally detailed portrait, where I managed to get really close to this friendly miner that has been visiting us lately. Finally, I didn't have any clutter in the background and the nice soft light elevated the image as well. The next half a dozen shots that I'm about to show you are of Australian magpies. The first four portraits show the matriarch of the family that has been visiting us for almost two years on a daily basis and she's probably the most timid out of the four and likes to chill on the fig tree and keep an eye on the action from a distance. Even though she's quite shy, she's one of my favorite and quite a character, very intelligent. This next portrait is of a younger male. For this image, I exposed for the white plumage and because of the harsh backlighting, I had to increase shadow detail substantially but still managed to retain quite a bit of detail. Our last magpie portrait is of a young female we call little girl, who comes for a snack at least twice a day and she used to be a scaredy cat as well but she's become quite bold and approachable. Here you can see her drinking with a few water droplets hanging off her lower beak. Our second last series of images are just two simple in-flight shots of a laughing kookaburra that I managed to capture on a morning walk. Unfortunately for the second image, the wingtips were clipped as I couldn't keep it in the frame while tracking. I really love these birds, even though they can be quite raucous with their characteristic cackle. I left a very common bird species last, domesticated pigeon, the light was beautiful when I captured these images. I used one-shot eye-detect autofocus for these images as the subject wasn't moving erratically. I really love the reliability and effectiveness of the face and eye-detect autofocus in the Canon R7. It's not perfect for every scenario, but pretty impressive nonetheless. Thank you so much for watching, don't forget to subscribe if you enjoyed this video and you're new to my channel. You might also want to have a look at these next. Thanks again and catch you all very soon in the next one. Bye.