Canon EOS R1 | RF 70-200 mm F2.8 L is USM Z | 200 mm | F4 | 1/1000 second | ISO 3200 Photo: Michelle Clarke |
Canon’s EOS R1 is the company’s first ‘1 series’ flagship camera which is mirrorless and is particularly aimed at sports and action photographers. Given its narrow focus, we wanted to test it in a professional game game – preferably supported by autofocus mode, which cannon says that when players are taking a specific action and focusing on them automatically.
Thankfully, we were able to get a media pass to take a picture of a spocane velocity FC game, which was the right opportunity to keep the EOS R1 for testing. A warning before starting: I am not a professional sports photographer in any way, nor am I a football specialist. However, the action priority part of the pitch for autofocus is that it is able to react to what is happening automatically in the game, which made it a particularly interesting test of its abilities, even though most people are seeing the possibility of buying R1, are fully capable of shooting a game without it.
So how to do it? Quite well, I found. This made the shooting feel natural; I will move the camera with action, and most of the time, it just handled the subject selection, making sure that the player was one in the focus in the ball control. However, it was clearly not a magical replacement for talent, either. For some time it was decided to track a player who was not involved in the action, although it was relatively easy to fix it by putting the AF tracking point on the player manually.
RF 70-200 mm F2.8 L is USM Z | 200 mm | F2.8 | 1/1000 second | ISO 1600 Photo: Michelle Clarke |
Despite my topical misunderstanding, when reviewed my shots, I found that the action priority mode achieved me better results than a combination of my football-tracking skills and standard theme recognition. The EOS R1 was very difficult to track people and excellently performed on keeping them in mind – which if you have skills and knowledge then it is necessary to know who to track and when someone else has to start tracking.
I really got a chance to talk to someone with those skills. One of the professional photographers in the game asked with whom I was shooting, then said that they also use an EOS R1; Previously, they used an EOS R3. When I asked what they think about action priority mode, they said that they did not think that it made a difference. Given that they would be essentially trained Self To do what it does, it is not surprising that they do not find it as useful as I – no one without that training. However, he found sticky compared to the EOS R3 to detect the standard theme of EOS R1, especially when the players were passing in front of each other and behind.
They were very fond of the camera eye control autofocus, where the camera automatically holds the focus point on what you are seeing. Despite calibrating it for some time, I could not work enough to work firmly to be a property instead of an obligation. I tried to do it a little in the game, but closed it. However, it is easy to see how it can improve shooting experience if it works for you – rather to find out what the player is important instead of relying on the camera, you can simply follow the action with your eye.
Going back to action priority mode, I collided against some limitations with the system. It is only available when using electronic shutters and cannot be used with anti-flicker feature of EOS R1. While the readout of the camera is jaw-dropping-I did not notice any rolling shutter artifacts on football balls in the middle-ups-you will still see banding on the electronic screen and some LED lights.
The former was definitely an issue in the Spochen One Stadium, and I found myself to select myself between capturing the game with action priority and giving myself a better chance with some quite distracted artifacts in the background. Along with this, it was said that the mechanical shutter on EOS R1 can shoot at 12fps instead of only 40, which helped to make the decision a little easier.
I also wished myself that the pre-barster capture feature was configured. This amount is based on the speed of your shooting: Cannon’s manual says that in 40 shots per second mode, it will buffer in about half a second, but there is no setting to control how many shots you would like to buffer.
Because my shooting style involves starting focus trekking with half-presses of the shutter button before taking a photo, I fill about one third of my storage in the first half of the game because I had saved 20 shots before from each shot. Instead of trying to use yourself to focus back-button,In the middle of the game, I closed it, but I think I could have received some more good shots if I could use pre-speech capture, but was set to save only five or ten photos before the shutter press.
* And, in fact, cannot be set to start the pre-conscience, something that I talked about.
Also, canon, while my focus, why can I not set one of my custom buttons to turn on and off the pre-burst capture? To go around it, I followed Brian Worli’s move Establish a custom mode, which is similar to my manual shooting mode, except the pre-container, but even it is a bad solution. For one, there is only a button that you can assign to switch between the mode, but also, if I have made any changes, while I was shooting for a pre-capture, will not be taken to them when I switched the mode to close it.
When I have selected a lot of knots here, EOS R1 corrected a lot of things. Its buffer looked endless – during the game, the camera ever turned off the shoot when I removed my finger from the shutter, and never because it had to stop and write the photo on the card. At home, I allowed it to walk on 40fps for about 20 seconds and still did not reach the bottom of the buffer.
The battery had equal amount of stamina. During the 90-Esh minute game I shot mostly using the viewfinder and took around 9000 photos. (If you are not convinced that you can catch the decisive moment, you can also capture Everyone Moment.) At the end of the day, I still had a battery three times out of four and would have felt quite comfortable shooting for another 90 minutes. I Certainly it cannot be, but the camera may do.
This is probably the moral of the story. It is no shock that using EOS R1 did not immediately make me a Pro Sports Photographer. Action priority mode, however, let me catch the moments that not only pro sports photographers could do before, and I suspect that the eye control can also do if I could get it to work strongly for me.
It is easy to imagine that this type of thing is really exciting because it makes its way in a more accessible model-there is always some of a catch-22 where entry-level cameras purpose the beginners come with the autofocus system to the beginners that provide the least support. Some parents like action priority mode or I control can help capture their children’s sports achievements, without the need to become a pro photographer or buy a high end camera costing thousands of dollars.
RF 70-200 mm F2.8 L is USM Z | 200 mm | F4 | 1/1000 | ISO 1250 Photo: Michelle Clarke |
This future can close in a way, however, and it does not really help tell the story of EOS R1, a camera almost especially for professionals. This is not to say that they will not use those characteristics, just that they will have different thoughts while doing so; Is action priority worth reducing your shooting options and giving some manual control so that you can fully focus on the composition and understand the situation of the game, and can you rely on the control of the eye when everything on the line is on the line?
Really, I am not a person answering those questions. However, it is interesting that Canon added many characteristics designed to build a camera, which will possibly be easily used by professionals. It is like coming and searching in an F1 car, with all manual controls, it is actually a fairly capable self-driving system. The surprising part is not that the EOS R1 was dependent on the shooting of the game – it is essentially designed from the ground to do so – but I was not expecting it to help me so much on the way.