Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

[Mercutio]

I almost never tax the buffer in my cameras to the point that it becomes an issue. It's just not how I shoot. I've found the R6 can shoot for over 5 seconds at 20fps with an RF lens, or about 12.5 seconds at 10fps at 10fps with an EF lens. I've been able to do that with the Extreme Pro UHS-I cards.

 

[LunarMist]

I'm not sure how much RAM it has, the same as the R5? How many losslessly compressed RAW files can you shoot in one minute and then the second minute after that?

 

[LunarMist]

The R7 is looking to be rather meh, being a functional successor to the 90D rather than the 7D II.
I'm still hoping that Nikon can make a superior MILS successor to the D500. No DSLR cropper was ever in its league.

 

[Mercutio]

32MP sensor with IBIS and the fantastic AF tricks the R5 and R6 have? No overheat in 4k? No video recording limits? Digital hot shoe? There's A LOT to like in that R7 body.

 

[LunarMist]

From what I can find it still has the old-tech (slow scanning) sensor and lowly 12-bit depth in electronic shutter so you need to use the mechanical shutter for action subjects or higher IQ. I'm still about 98% sure that it won't AF a 600/4 worth a damn on OOF subjects. I may rent one for October, if the virus is not too bad in the other hemispheres.

 

[Mercutio]

We have very different shooting needs. The R7 looks like a great choice second body to me. I'm most curious to know if I can switch the video profile easily, since that's a sore spot on both my RP and R6. I'll be sorely tempted if it does.

 

[LunarMist]

Keep in mind that the 32.5MP R7 sensor will be quite noisy compared to what you are used to with the R6, but I don't know what shutter angles you use for videos and what degree of studio/location lighting is implemented. I found the 90D video to be mediocre, so it has to be an improvement over that though sensor noise is mostly reduced now with software rather than the diminishing hardware improvements. A major problem is that there are no native, fast RF-S lenses for use in natural light. There may be some adapters for the f/1.4 or similar APS-C 3rd party lenses if AF is not important. The R10 may sell in enough volume for there to be Sigma or other brand that comes in with some good AF RF-S lenses eventually.

The R7 is more notable for what it is not than what it is. Not having a better sensor design is just too mediocre in 2022. If it had a really good sensor, then I'd probably buy one. Canon currently has only the R3 with the BIS, fast readout, and 14 bits.

The older I get the less I like the products that are good but lacking. It's like buying a $50K vehicle that will never be satisfying compared to buying a utilitarian $30K vehicle or an expensive luxury vehicle that you actually want to drive.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm not at a point where I can pick the no compromise option in equipment. I'm mostly using EF lenses as it is. I've found them to work as well or better on my RF bodies than they did on my 5d2. Even my RP focuses faster and even with older third party lenses.

The sensor in the R7 certainly won't be worse than the RP's though. I can sell my RP and gimbal and get a big step up in my second body. Makes perfect sense to me.

 

[Mercutio]

Canonrumors has an "all but confirmed by multiple sources" story that Canon will have 100MP+ full frame sensor camera in early 2023. That seems excessive to me, but maybe there's a newer CF Express format on the way that can deal with whatever absurd burst rate that thing will support. It's also supposed to have a bunch of relatively inexpensive RF-S lenses coming real soon now. The RF mount doesn't have many inexpensive lenses as it is, so any move in that direction will probably be seen as a positive step.

It only took me a little over a day to sell my RP, an EF lens adapter, a few EF lenses (35mm/2, 50mm/1.8, 85/1.8, 18-135mm/4-7 EF-S) and my gimbal. I might be short a camera body this summer, but that will cover what the R7 costs. The 85/1.8 hurts a little bit, but I like and use a 135mm/2 a lot more. The rest of those lenses really haven't been used in years.

 

[LunarMist]

Their level of stupidity buggers the mind. The brains of the Canon operation have long been replaced by marketroids and milleniums that don't actually work in the field.

 

[Mercutio]

Fuji has had larger-than-full-frame with high MP readouts for a while now and they seem to do OK. I have no idea who uses those guys. I think I've only ever seen a Fuji GFX out in the world one time and that was some Asian guy taking pictures of marble statues at the Atlanta Museum of Art. And he had a Canon lens on it.

 

[LunarMist]

The GFX 100S is a surprisingly inexpensive and really compact semi-MF camera with 100MP. You will mostly see them used for travel and landscape off the beaten path. Some people use them in the studio too, but there are better options for that. Canon lenses don't cover 55mm other than the TS/Es, so that part is questionable.

From ~30-20 years ago I used the Fuji G series 6x9 "supersized" RF cameras with fine results. Unfortunately the GFX 44mm sensor width is a little short for my needs, which don't include much water. If the GF lens coverage were 60mm and sensor 3:2 I'd do it or maybe if I worked often with the waters.

 

[Mercutio]

If you're working with 100MP, maybe losing a little off the top isn't such a big deal? The red ring around the lens is what made me look closer in the first place.

I don't see people with ILC cameras of any sort very often. My R6 and camera bag go almost everywhere with me, but other than the museum campus areas in Chicago, they aren't common at all. Even when I'm at the Indiana Dunes or some similarly touristy spot, a camera is definitely an oddity.

 

[LunarMist]

I don't bring camera gear in public unless it's to the airport. Are you mostly in the States?

Nobody would use a lens that is designed to lose 40% of the image unless it is a long tele or some other special purpose lens that is not available at all. Even then it would not be a main working lens.

 

[Mercutio]

The only other country I've visited is Canada. I was supposed to travel to Vietnam with a friend in 2020 but we had to put that off. I have a brother who lives in Prague, so that's another option.

Fortunately, there's enough going on in Chicago that I have plenty of reasons to keep gear handy.

 

[Mercutio]

The improvement in performance in Topaz Denoise 3.7 is absolutely incredible. Processing time on my photos when from 10 - 12 seconds to about 2 seconds.

 

[LunarMist]

How are you using it - plug-in or standalone?

 

[LunarMist]

So I tried 3.7, but the RAW conversion is still not good. I would use this on a TIF only. The low light mode, which I normally use, looks to be a bit cleaner than the older version. According to the change log 3.7 now uses RTX video card functions for better accelerations.

 

[Mercutio]

I run standalone conversions on TIFFs. I had a stress test of photos that I'd taken of stage sets at the club where my friends work, and some of those images went all the way up to 25k ISO. The latest version of Topaz had chewed through ~300 images in about the amount of time it took to make a pot of coffee.

 

[LunarMist]

So you just use one setting for all images? Then they return to PS or something?
I've already found some ugly artifacts from the 3.7, so I'm not sure it is so good.

 

[LunarMist]

The higher refresh rate reduces nausea more than Rolaids.

 

[Mercutio]

So you just use one setting for all images? Then they return to PS or something?
I've already found some ugly artifacts from the 3.7, so I'm not sure it is so good.

I usually use one setting for a given ISO value and only on ISOs 12k and above. Normally, the lightly tuned low-light preset does what I need. The biggest problem I noticed when running things that way is that I'll lose some detail in hair, but since these are often images taken a 1/250th of a second and in extremely unusual lighting, hair detail probably isn't perfect anyway.

 

[Mercutio]

Also for what it's worth, my current workflow is to dump my card to a folder per shoot, run that folder through Optyx for photo selection, import culled photos into a new Capture 1 catalog per shoot, where I do most of my develop work. 1. I'll export TIFFs and pick those up in Topaz Products as a last step before making JPGs if I need to. The raw files get pulled off my working drives and on to my file server after a month and full SD cards wind up in a special wallet that's in a safe deposit box at my office, which used to be a bank.

My roommate is an Adobe Suite fan but she's on a $10/month student account right now. I can't bring myself to give Adobe money.

 

[LunarMist]

So you let some bot access your work and choose which ones it thinks are best?

 

[Mercutio]

So you let some bot access your work and choose which ones it thinks are best?

Usually, yes. I can override or add to its selections if I want, but if for example I have five shots of the same subject taken in the same in the same small period of time, it's probably going to pick the one picture with the best combination of facial expression and pose, which saves me from having to agonize over it. It groups the pictures together by overall similarities and shows me which picture it like and occasionally highlights why it picked one photo in a set by drawing boxes of various colors around specific parts of an image. It also respects my in-camera ratings. if I bother to make any. It's extremely helpful.

 

[Mercutio]

As I've said repeatedly, I do most of my processing with Capture One. My roommate is an Adobe person.

The newest version of Lightroom does something that's flat out amazing, though. It has special magic now that can replicate masks in different photos. It's not dumb; if she masks someone's hair on a portrait in one image and applies it to the next 50 images of that same person, it'll pick up the hair on all of them, no matter how they're positioned in the photo.

Lightroom can also auto-detect subjects, and those two tools can be combined, so she can do things like "Pick the foreground subject in this image, increase exposure by a third of a stop, decrease shadows by 20%, apply a 25% skin smoothing routine and then apply the result to the next 30 pictures in the library." It chews on that for about three minutes and it's done on every image in the sequence.

I'm honestly jealous.

 

[LunarMist]

So you prefer to fake it in processing rather than take fine photographs to begin with. That's nothing to be proud or jealous about.

 

[LunarMist]

I was far south in July and used up to ISO 6400 on the R5. Between all the software of Topaz, DXO, Neat Image, etc. I'm still not satisfied that the IQ is up to par without losing fine details in the feathers or fur. Although results are usable with some masking and manual intervention, 3200 or less makes denoising less painful.

 

[LunarMist]

The R7 has a crappy design where the shutter vibrates the camera and blurs the image. The ES mode is not so good either since the sensor readout is quite slow, even compared to the R5. That may be because it is derived from the old sensor in the M6 and 90D. I suppose the R7 will be most usable in bright light with fast lenses or for relatively stationary subjects.

 

[Mercutio]

So you prefer to fake it in processing rather than take fine photographs to begin with. That's nothing to be proud or jealous about.

We shoot very different sorts of subjects. Manually metering for constantly changing lights at an event isn't an option, but denoising and masking regions for better exposure, lifting shadows etc certainly are.

The last time I was able to go out and really shoot, before my toes were broken, I was in an actual nightclub, a place called Southern Nights in Ybor City. I shot in Shutter Priority with ISOs as low as 400 and as high as 25600 on apertures between 2 and 4.5. I'd say about 80% of the shots I took were usable, at least insofar as having focus where I wanted it, no motion blur and exposure generally correct. It's not an environment where composed shots are possible. This is why I find editing tools so important.

My R7 is still on order. I have no idea when I'll get it but I'm looking forward to trying it. I've missed all of July and it's really hampered what I planned to go and do this summer.

 

[LunarMist]

There are still no R7s are to be had unless you want to buy it with a a cheesy RF-s zoom. It's going to be simply stupid to spend more than half of the new body cost to rent one this fall and winter.
The R7 is not a very good camera in any case, but Canon is still stuck on 45MP FF exactly 5 years after the D850 and more than 6 years after the 50 MP 5Ds/R. A 72MP or so FF body would solve a lot of problems with a crop mode.

 

[Mercutio]

It looks like I'm not going to get my R7 until December. We're using a 12MP Lumix as a second body right now. It's like stepping back to the stone age with that thing.

 

[LunarMist]

Don't you have an R6 or can you buy the R7 kit? Alternatively rent an R7 and work that cost into your business model.
The only reason I want an R7 is that the 90D has some vibration issues at 700 or 840 mm (actual). So does the R7, but apparently at 15FPS EFCS is generally OK.

 

[Mercutio]

I don't charge for photography, really. Everything I get to do is for fun. Some people do insist on giving me money but it's not because I even asked them to. I do rent lenses from time to time, but I already know the R7 will be better than the RP I sold to pay for it. I'm looking forward to the digital hot shoe and leveling capability for video shooting.

I do charge for doing editing though. Resolve was pretty beastly to learn.

 

[LunarMist]

Have you found one yet? I suspect they built far more of the lens kits than anyone wants as those are readily available. I would not mind tossing a completely useless $200 lens, but $400 +tax is a bit much.

 

[Mercutio]

I haven't. I'm getting antsy about it. I ordered one direct from Canon and I haven't had any update on it.
There's an iphone 14 Max coming here soonish as well. I'll bet it shows up before my camera does.

I went over to the park near my house to take photos of my roommate playing on playground equipment yesterday. I'd been teasing her all day because she had to buy jeans from the Misses section (clothes for 11 - 14 year olds) and we were just going to have fun with it. She's not a super-confident model, and I had a 7" monitor mounted so she had feedback on what I was doing. We attracted a crowd, because they could see as well.

Some people there asked us to take pictures of their kids. I was able to live shoot and send the photos out in more or less real time, and these people were just handing us money for doing it. We made about $60 in 15 minutes.

Emergency Spare roommate is getting ready to start a Youtube channel devoted to what she calls Urban Exploration. I generally don't get involved because I am old, but I think both the people living with me might show up there, and I'm probably going to wind up editing some of the videos she makes. I'm kind of excited to do more editing work.

 

[LunarMist]

I haven't. I'm getting antsy about it. I ordered one direct from Canon and I haven't had any update on it.
There's an iphone 14 Max coming here soonish as well. I'll bet it shows up before my camera does.

The Canon store has been unreliable for a while now.
Do you not have a leveling bowl for your video head or are you using some sort of Steadicam/active gimbal?

 

[LunarMist]

I would also look at local stores or other small stores that can put your name on a list. NY stores are some of the worst for availability since they have so many buyers and the locals get some preference.
Unfortunately I don't live very close to physical stores and I travel so it is not feasible to order products of high value without a known delivery date.

 

[Mercutio]

The Canon store has been unreliable for a while now.
Do you not have a leveling bowl for your video head or are you using some sort of Steadicam/active gimbal?

I'm very often shooting video handheld. I had been using a gimbal, but that was sold for the R7 fund. Handheld with IBIS and lens stabilization is usually very good in my experience.

I've called stores around Chicago and Indianapolis regarding the R7. They have them, but only with the lens kit that no one wants. I don't want it either. I do have a friend who just got an R10 kit. I donated an off brand EF-RF adapter and a EF 50/1.8 to get her started.

 

[LunarMist]

I'm not a fan of the slightly shaky documentary look that was popular years ago. Maybe it is back in style.

I really want to see if the 100-500 holds up to the R7. MTF at 500mm doesn't drop much towards the edges and corners, but the center is not really excellent like the 500/4. f/8 still looks good on the R5. The combination of center MTF and the obviously quite large Airy disk at f/7.1 is worrisome.