It would seem my Buddliea took longer to arrive this year than in earlier seasons, and perhaps, it knew this was a strong likelihood, so delayed producing its bloom, because within days of flowering and attracting pollinators; bees and butterflies, the British Weather gave us an extended period of high winds, and to a lesser degree, rain.
I took advantage of the arrival of mainly a handful of butterflies, and to a lesser degree bees, to take my camera out with the Canon 70-200mm lens and the Sigma 2x Extender, and did my best to capture their efforts to feed on the rich nectar they sought. There were periods during which I had to patiently await a lull in the gusty wind that was battering my plum tree and Buddliea ferociously – I had already lost two dozen plums before they had ripened, and this number rose still higher, despite my earlier efforts to try to lessen the amount of movement the branches were accorded, by tying them to a large clay pottery flower pot.
The three Butterfly species I see most are the Small Tortoiseshell, Red Admiral and Cabbage White.The butterfly’s response to the wind was to lay their wings as flat as possible against the leaves to weather the gusts, then in the few lulls get back to delving into the florets. From my point of view, I was trying to get the most possible use of the loaned 2x Converter to help me decide whether to make the purchase. I was certainly finding that overall the issue that gave me greatest concern was how efficient autofocus would be when using the Converter.
The heartening result overall, was with the EOS R, although I would still often have to obtain initial focus manually, once I was close, the camera took over and locked on with ease. By the end of the afternoon I was convinced, and contacted Sigma to send me the invoice, as there was no need for me to return it!
Although at first sight, there may seem numerous duplicates within the gallery, there are subtle differences, and I was trying to see just how well the focus was maintained, and considering the amount of movement I was involved in trying to keep track, the camera was definitely less troubled, and I was able to recompose the images easily in post processing, especially when I was particularly pleased with some of the shapes formed by the leaves that allowed me to create good compositions, What that meant was that invariably the overall crop whilst taking was not tight, despite the greater enlargement, the quality of the mirrorless body’s files was still excellent, which has been a real benefit.
Readers of this blog will have noted how I have had to adapt my way of shooting, especially when panning, to accommodate to some of the different characteristics involved between my dSLR bodies such as the 7D MkII and 5D MkIII. Canon remain tight-lipped over my suggestions, with this issue, but admit I am not alone in suggesting a modification to the way in which bursts are handled by this camera to lessen the impact of the lag between the image in the viewfinder when a panning sequence is shot. The expensive but obvious alteration would be to have two parallel processors; one for Viewing, one for Capture, my suggestion however was to mitigate the effect by discontinuous sampling of the signal reaching the Viewfinder, as in my humble opinion this could be achieved by a separate setting for panning operations. Time will tell. The technique involved would not be too dissimilar from image stabilisation, and could be linked to the difference in inertia involved in the camera’s motion.
