CAMERA GEAR This is how I get my wildlife photos Canon R5

Hello and welcome to the Norfolk coast. I am super excited to be photographing grey seals this morning and there are about four seal pups on the beach next to me and they are absolutely adorable. I've already photographed two and they were just so unbelievably cute. Today I am doing a video about my equipment so I'm going to be talking about three pieces of kit that I use every day for my photography and the three pieces of equipment that I'm going to be talking about is my camera, the Canon R5, my lens, the Canon 300mm f2.8 and my teleconverters which help me get closer to the wildlife without having a bigger lens and I want to say a big thank you to MPB for sponsoring this video. All right let's go. What a gorgeous sunrise. In this video I'm talking about my equipment but I'm also going to be photographing the seal pups. It's really important to be aware of the behaviour of the animal you're photographing. Nervous seals will look around, they'll look for an escape route or to other seals. They will lift their heads to assess the area and their eyes will widen. A relaxed seal will close its eyes, continue sleeping and will yawn. I'm going to be super attentive whilst on the beach with these seal pups so my advice if you want to get close to sensitive subjects like baby seals is do your research and go with a professional guide or ecologist. It's late winter, most grey seals will give birth from November to December so I've come a few months after this. The birthing season is also timed with the mating season so the beach is busy with male, female and baby seals. It is always so beautiful to be surrounded by wildlife. One of the best feelings is approaching wildlife, getting the shots and leaving without causing disturbance. If you ask me what three pieces of equipment I could not live without it would be the equipment I'm going to feature today. This is my go-to gear and everything but my camera has actually been bought from MPB. I've been a customer for years. When starting a journey as a professional photographer I couldn't buy brand new equipment so second hand is a great option. I have always been a Canon user. My first camera was the 550D which is when my passion for wildlife photography exploded. Last year I upgraded to mirrorless but I still have my 5D Mark IV as my second camera. We were just walking on these dunes when we discovered a very chubby, happy and probably the most relaxed seal pup I have seen on this beach and he's currently on his back behind us. We've been here for about 20 minutes and he hasn't moved. I'm pretty sure he knows we're here and he is just sunbathing, relaxing, yawning, snoozing, snorting and not posing but whilst we wait I'm going to talk about my camera which is the Canon R5. Literally as I was about to speak about my camera the seal pup turns around and wakes up. The good thing is he's quite relaxed so he's scratching, he's yawning, he's pretty calm so I'm going to continue chatting and I'm going to talk about my camera. There are two major things I love about my R5 and the first thing is this. I love the flip screen. It has been so useful for photographing squirrels where I want the camera quite low and I can have it here and I can see exactly what's going on or if I'm filming myself I'm taking photos but if I'm filming myself I can flip it this way and actually see myself and I know that there are lots of cameras that have the flip screen but this is the first camera I've owned that has a flip screen and it has changed my life so that's the first thing. The second thing I love about my camera is of course the animal eye tracking. This is one of the major reasons I bought my R5 and it's just incredible. It flicks between the eyes so it will have a little box over each eye so I can even choose which eye I want focused but it has been working super well today. The seals have really lovely large round eyes and the Canon R5 is just nailing the animal eye tracking so well today. At this age these seal pups are mostly alone all day. As they get bigger and their white fur begins to molt, mum will visit less and less. The pups can be alone for almost two weeks before they have the courage to make the journey to see and become independent. As this seal pup was scratching you could see its baby fur blow in the wind. I'm pretty sure mum has already stopped feeding this pup and this little one will be in the sea very soon. We're going down to the beach now and it's really important that we don't stand up. The seals get really nervous if they see the silhouette of a human but if we stay low and stay on our knees or our bellies then they're far more relaxed and it's much easier to get photos. But I am using a big lens today. I have got my teleconverter which I will talk about and I can get great shots without being too close. Ready? I use my 2x and 1.4x teleconverters all the time and with the 1.6x crop factor on my camera I can get 960mm which is just great when you want close-up shots but you don't want to get closer to your subject. I can still crop my photos when editing and retain detail in my images. This pup mostly slept and scratched his head on the sand but he would occasionally yawn and quickly check on me. For the past couple of years I've been shooting almost completely with my 300mm f2.8 and I actually bought this lens two years ago from MPB and they were able to ship it all the way to northern Sweden and I absolutely love this lens. Since I've had it I haven't shot on my 100-400mm at all and I think I'm actually going to sell that lens now but the 300mm f2.8 is just so so sharp and so nice at f2.8 and it works really well with the 1.4x teleconverters so today I've been shooting with the 1.4 but I also have the 2x which means my 300mm goes up to 600mm which is just amazing for the weight of it because a 600mm lens is actually really heavy so that's great. The 1.4 allows me to be at 420mm at f4 which is a great focal length and if I want to take it off and go for 300mm at f2.8 I can also do that. Another thing I've been doing is using the crop functionality on the camera so I can get 1.6 times which is great so with this setup I can get really close-up shots without having to be too close to the animals. There are two black baby seal pups next to me and the entire time I've been here they haven't woken up and I'm obviously not going to wake them up but I think we can leave them be. Just as I was heading to leave I discovered the youngest seal pup I've seen on the beach. I had to be extra careful as mum was behind and a bull seal was guarding the female waiting for her to come into heat. Although on YouTube the time taken to wait or approach wildlife isn't shown, I actually spent half an hour slowly crawling and getting closer to this family of seals. I was delighted to see the pup suckling. A mum wouldn't feed her pup if she wasn't comfortable. I hope you've enjoyed learning about my equipment and what I shoot with and of course seeing baby seal pups. There's one just next to me, well about 10 meters away and it is so adorable, so cute. I've written a blog on the MPB website about my equipment and there are some photos from this trip and thank you for watching, thank you to MPB for sponsoring this video and thank you as always to my patrons who support my work. I'll see you in the next video.