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2024 Photography

Like recent years, 2024 was another year where I didn't do too much photography. That will probably be the case for a couple of more years until I retire. For now I am enjoying photography when the mood strikes, but getting plenty of sleep and excercise is a higher priority for my spare time. I have been having more fun in recent years making prints than posting online. You'll see most of the recent photos posted here are sized to 13x19 dimensions, since that is the size I usually print. During the peak periods for bird photgraphy in the spring and fall I just didn't have the time to devote to it. Ohio was in a drought during what was a hot and dry late spring, summer and fall in 2024. That limited photo opportuninies in cental Ohio when I did have time to get out with the camera. I did get a couple of new lenses as I move into the Canon R system.


 
Eastern Screech Owl, Robert's Pass Bike Trail, March 27, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF100-500mm f4.5-7.1L IS L lens with 1.4x at 700mm
f11, 1/250th sec., ISO 2000

I used to carry a camera and lenses in panniers with me when biking. Since getting a 32" unicycle several years ago my bike hasn't left the garage. It could be possible to bring some camera equipment along in a backpack while unicycling, but that isn't very enjoyable or comfortable. I had been seeing this bird on my rides and fortunately it was close enough to walk to from a place I could park my car.

I have had the 100-500 for a couple of years. I find it to be a terrific lens, but really never used it much for bird photography
since it is a bit on the short side for the opportunities present around here in central Ohio. I have used it mostly on wildflowers where it does well with (aftermarket) extension tubes. In the past I have owned the EF 300 f2.8 lenses and had the 400 f4 DO II for a while, but I never used them much after the EF 100-400 L II came out and I sold them years ago without regret. I also had the RF 800 f11 for a couple of years, but never found much use for it. The RF 100-500 is like a Swiss army knife covering a wide range in a small package. and works well with the 1.4x for my uses. One lens I did feel a pressing need to replace was the EF 600mm f4L IS II lens that I owned for two years. While I appreciated its optics, it was definitely not a lens I wanted to keep using in my retirement. I found it very heavy and didn't like the way it balanced on a tripod after using the EF 800mm L for many years. Canon will stop servicing the lens in 2025 and the price of used ones was dropping fast. It was time for me to unload it while I could. It might have been a good time to switch to Nikon or Sony, but I feel more comfortable with the controls of the Canon cameras that I have been using for decades now. After a nice tax refund in 2024 I got a refurbished RF 600mm f4. I love it. I just wish I had more time to get out and use it. The results with the RF 1.4 and 2x extenders on the RF 600L sure look great to me. I have read a lot of opinions online, but to my eyes when viewing the full 45mp files of the R5 at 100% the results with the 2x definitely look better than what I was getting with EF 600 f4 IS II and the EF 2xIII.  I have made hundreds of 13"x19" prints of birds taken over the years with a variety of cameras and lenses. From normal viewing distances of maybe a foot or two away in ordinary light, I must say it is very difficult to tell whether they were taken with the original EF 600mm f4L IS with a 2x on a 8mp Canon 1D2, an EF 800mmL + 1,4x on a 16mp 1D4, or a RF 600L + 2x on the 45mp R5. Putting on reading glasses and viewing from a few inches with a flashlight does reveal big differences, though.


Blue-winged Warbler on chestnut sapling, Waterloo Wildlife Area, April 28, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 600mm f4 L IS + 2x
f10, 1/1000th sec., ISO 800

After poking around the Zaleski State Forest without finding any very cooperative birds on my first outing with the lens, I headed to the Waterloo Wildlfe Area on the east side of the forest where there was a small area with some exprimental genetically modified, blight resistant chestnut saplings. Some early succesional birds were present including this Blue-winged. My single biggest frustration above all others from my years using the effective f8 EF 600mm lenses with a 2x or the 800mm with a 1.4x on SLRs is that I was limited to using the central focusing sensor. I found it to be crippling. To me the single biggest advantage for bird photography with the mirrorless cameras is to be be able to focus on the eye anywhere in the frame to get the compoistitions I want. I sure wish I had that 25 years ago.


Ovenbird, Waterloo Wildlife Area, April 28, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 600mm f4 L IS + 2x
f10, 1/640th sec., ISO 5000

A short way down the road in the poorly lit forest I found a cooperative Ovenbird. Another major leap forward for bird photography in recent years is the noise reduction software. In the past I would have never have even tried to photgraph a bird in such lighting conditions. I use Adobe Camera RAW to process my files in Photoshop. With one click of the mouse the full size file looks clean with no noise and full detail remaining. To someone like me who started their bird photography using slow transparency films and manually focusing lenses, this is all amazing stuff.


Kentucky Warbler, Scioto Trail State Forest, May 8, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 600mm f4 + 2x
f10, 1/2500th sec, ISO 1600

I had to wait another week before I had the opportunity to get out with the lens agiain, this time heading to the Scioto Trail State Forest. The forest was already leafed out making photography difficult, but this Kentucky hopped onto a bare branch for me. Kentuckies have always been common at Scioto Trail and their numbers there seem to be holding up well there through the years. There has been a lot of clear cutting at Scioto Trail in recent decades and they seem to be doing well in the regenerating undergrowth. The same can't be said for many other species. During the 90's before I was seriously trying to photograph the birds there, I used to drive around the forests counting the birds I heard over the course of the day. The numbers of Cerulean Warblers are the most alarming to me. I used to regularly count 60 singing male Ceruleans on a drive around Scioto Trail. Now there are only a few left, mostly in the valleys away from the roads, and they are completely absent on the ridges. While camera equipment has advanced beyond my dreams in recent years, the state of the birds themselves is very disturbing compared to 30 years ago. Habitat is disappearing at an alarming rate and here in Ohio the amount of litter everywhere is sickening.

I had to wait until late May and June before I could get out  to do more photography. By then bird photography is limited with birds being more secretive and nesting. It was also very dry in 2024 and many usually productive fields weren't very interesting. Summer months are better for pulling out the unicycle and hitting the trails than driving around in the heat, but I did make a few trips to some favorite open areas to check out with limited photographic success.


Bell's Vireo, Big Island Wildlife Area, June 3, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 600mm f4 L IS + 2x
f10, 1/2000th sec., ISO 1600

Bell's Vireos are favorites of mine. They are uncommon in Ohio and central Ohio is the eastern edge of their range. They do turn up regularly at places I like to visit. Their numbers do seem to fluctuate some from what I can tell. They usually can be found near standing water, or at least where there is standing water when they arrive in early May. With this year being so dry I didn't come across very many. I only found two in the Deer Creek area this year, although I didn't look too hard for them. I found at least a dozen there in 2019 which was a much wetter year. This year was the first time since I first rode my bike down the the Prairie Grass Trail in Madison County in 2017 that I didn't find any Bell's. Again, 2019 was the best year for them with 4 singing males present in June along that trail. I went to Big Island hoping to photograph marsh birds like Swamp Sparrows and Marsh Wrens, but the few I heard were far off and would have meant wading a long way through water of unknown depth. This Bell's Vireo was a very nice consolation prize.



Prairie Warbler on blackberries, Tri-Valley Wildlife Area, June 11, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 600mm f4 L IS + 2x
f13, 1/500th sec., ISO 1250

I think f13 was a mistake in the above photo. f10 seems to be the magic aperture for maximum sharpness for the 600+2x on the R5, stopping down enough, but not too much before diffraction kicks in. With that said, the full size file of the above photo at 100% is still incredibly sharp with great fine feather detail.


Prairie Warbler, Tri-Valley Wildlife Area, June 11, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 600mm f4 L IS + 2x
f10, 1/1000th sec., ISO 800

Ohio's state wildlife areas on reclaimed strip mines are always worth visting in the summer months for birds of open areas. In the above photo the berries the plant is on are pretty, but it is a very invasive autumn olive. They have taken over large areas at Tri-Valley. Areas that used to be grasslands filled with species such as Grasshopper and Henslow's Sparrows not long ago and are now covered with autumn olives. Along with the Cerulean Warbler, from my perspective, the Grasshopper Sparrow has had one of the most precipitous declines in Ohio since I have been birding. Invasive species like the autumn olive in protected places like Tri-Valley only make things worse. Huge corporate farms, development of open areas, and excessive mowing for hay before the young fledge have really paid a huge toll on them in Ohio (and most places in their range). Grasshopper Sparrows used to be easy to find and photograph at Tri-Valley, but now they are few and far between.

I wanted to tidy up my R lens selection. Now that I no longer owned any EF telephotos, I finally sold my last and all time favorite DSLR, my 1D Mark 4. I hadn't used it in years. It wasn't worth much, but I really had no use for it. I also sold my Canon EF 24-70 f4L IS and got the RF 24-105 f4L IS. I'm not really wild about the 24-105 at its extremes, but it is good in the middle of its range for my limited uses.


Scioto Trail State Forest, April 25, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 24-105mm f4L IS at 32mm
f11, 1/500th sec., ISO 400

Wide angles, on the other hand, are my most used lenses and I have a lot of fun with them. They have also given me a lot of frustration over the years. I have owned or at least tried many of the ones made by Canon. When I got my R5 in 2020 it was clear that my EF Canon wide angle lenses at the time weren't up to the task for the 45mp sensor, and I sold them all off. The EF 14mm L II, a long time favorite, was a disaster with chromatic aberrations in the corners. My EF 16-35 was banged up a lot when I used to take it on bike rides. I had to send it in for repairs several times including twice to get the IS unit replaced. I spent more money on repairs for that lens than I paid for it in the first place. Every time it came back from being serviced it was a completely different lens, being  sharper at one end or the other or having one corner or side visibly softer than the rest. Canon always claimed it was within "factory specifications". Moving up from the 30mp of the 5D Mark 4 to the 45mp R5 only magnified its shortcomings. I dumped all my Canon wide angles soon after I got the R5 and got a Sigma 14-24 f2.8 ART DG HSM in EF mount. It's really a great lens with amazing corner to corner contrast and sharpness through the range with zero detctable  chromatic aberrations and very little distortion or field curvature. It works flawlessly with the EF to R adapter. I was my most used lens in early 2021 when I had the time to do a lot of hiking at the end of the pandemic. I also got the wonderful Sigma 28mm f1.4 ART refurbished directly from Sigma a few months later. I still have them and have no intention of selling them. More recently I also picked up the stunning 40mm f1.4 ART. As much as I love those lenses, I still wated a smaller wide angle for my R5. In May and June I tried 4 different copies of the Canon RF 14-35 F4 L IS. I really, really wanted to like that lens, but I ended up sending all of them back. There was a lot of variation between them. ALL of them had one seriously soft corner at the wider end, but a different corner on all of them. They all had what I call field curvature wider than 24mm. I'm not an optics expert and don't know the correct terms for certain things, but I do know that the RF 14-35 f4 would give me fits and that I would never enjoy using it.
I then bit the bullet and tried the RF 15-35 f2.8 L IS. It is definitely sharper in the corners than the 14-35 f4, but it is is twice the price of the Sigma that I already had and a had lot more field curvature. After some side-by-side comparison tests between the RF15-35L and the Sigma, the Sigma won every time. I saw no reason to keep it either.
Just as I was about to give up on Canon wide angles all together, I saw a used RF 10-20 f4 L IS for sale online and ordered it on a whim. It was selling for considerably less than a new one which at the time was hard to come by. About an hour later I tried to cancel, but it was too late and it had already been shipped. Of course I tried it when it came and instantly realized that was what I was looking for.  It is a revolutionarty new design, but has the same driving feel of the EF 14mm L that I loved. At no point in the overlapping 14-20mm range does the RF 10-20 hold a candle to the Sigma 14-24 ART when viewing the full files at 100% in the corners and edges, but the RF 10-20L is a blast to use and I can get the results from it that I want in the end.



Deer Creek Wildlife Area, July 2, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 10-20mm f4 L IS cropped from 10mm
f10, 1/640th sec., ISO 400

July is good month to photograph prairie wildflowers in central Ohio, with the middle of the month being best. Again, time was limited for me during the month and I never got a a good free afternoon with nice light and little wind to get out until it was too late. One of my favorite prairie wildflowers is the Royal Catchfly, which are also favorites of hummingbirds. I have been planting them in front of my house for several years and now have a good number of them coming up. This year for the first time I had a few of the pink variety come up.


Pink Royal Catchfly, June 28, 2024
Canon EOS R5, EF 100mm f2.8 L IS macro
f3.5, 1/500th sec., ISO 1600

Excluding my Sigma ART lenses in EF mount, the only Canon EF lens I still have is the 100 f2.8 L IS macro. I see no need to replace it with the RF version. It works perfectly well for my casual use. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

There were only a few remnant populations of Royal Catchfly that ecsaped the plow in Ohio. Two of those areas are small pioneer cemeteries in Madison county. Another is along the old rail line that is now the Prairie Grass Bike Trail. On this page scroll down to photos from July 9, and you can see some Royal Catchflies in bloom :


Prairie Grass Bike Trail - 2018-2019

A few pink pixels on one of those photos are the pink variant. While that bike trail is a great place to observe prairie wildflowers in the summer, going in there with biking shorts is not a good way to photograph them as I quickly found out the hard way long ago. It's filled with poison ivy. Royal Catchfly seeds (along with numerous other species) were collected from these remnant tracts and now can be found in numerous reconstructed prairies in central Ohio, most notably in the Battelle-Darby and Prairie Oaks Metroparks.

Better late than never, or so I thought,  I headed to the Bigelow Cemetery State Nature Preserve on July 23rd. I have found it to a great place to photograph wildflowers during the third week of July in past years, but the 23rd was already well past peak in 2024. There were still some Royal Catchflies in bloom. The tiny cemetery surrounded by farmland in every direction was loaded with young hummers with pollen on their heads. Fortunately I also brought along my 600mm lens.



Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Bigelow Cemetery State Nature Preserve, July 23, 2004
Canon EOS R5, RF 600mm f4 L IS + 1.4x
f6.3, 1/2000th sec., ISO 800

I used the mechanical shutter for the above photo. I'm sure the new R5 Mark II, which wasn't yet even available at that date, would have been better, but I've spent more than enough money on camera gear recently and it will have to wait a while.

August and early September were hot and a great time for regular evening unicycle rides, but not very inviting for photography of any sort. Late September and October were very busy and I never had a chance to get out with the camera during that period and had to miss out on doing any photography during fall migration and the peak of fall colors.

In November I headed to the Deer Creek Area where I thought I could at least find some sparrows to photograph, but it was very dry and sparrows were few and far between. My guess is that with the drought many things didn't go to seed and sparrows and other seed-eating birds moved on. Chipping and Field Sparrows were scarce everywhere after they finished nesting and I saw few of either in the fall. I don't think I saw a single Fox Sparrow anywhere this fall.



Quiet and dry field in Deer Creek State Park, Nov. 7, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 10-20mm f4 L IS at 16mm
f11, 1/320th sec., ISO 400

The only flocks of sparrows that day I found were in some dried up smartweeds that sprang up where a pond dried up. There were a lot of Song, Swamp, Linclon's, White-crowned, and White-throated Sparrows in the area. There were were also some deer hunters that weren't welcoming to me wandering around. I went back the next day to the same spot but it was windy and few birds were around. I only photographed one bird all fall with my wonderful new lens, when a first year White-crowned popped up.


First year White-crowned Sparrow, Deer Creek Wildlife Area, Nov. 8, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 600mm f4 L IS + 2x
f10, 1/800th sec., ISO 800


130 degree view of the Deer Creek, Nov. 7, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 10-20mm f4 L IS at 10mm
f10, 1/320th sec., ISO 400

With weather cooling off in November and December, it was a good time to skip some unicycle rides and go on hikes instead with the 10-20. I also added the tiny and inexpensive RF 28mm f.2.8 to carry in my coat pocket which kept me from missing being able to zoom out beyond 20mm, but I rarely used it. The little 28 is really a pretty good lens lens for what it is, though. Stopped down where I use it to f8 or so, it is better from edge to edge than either the RF 14-35 f4L or the RF 24-105 f4L zooms at 28mm. Below is a random sample of some photos taken on walks with the 10-20.


Scioto Trail State Forest, Nov. 12, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 10-20mm f4 L IS cropped from 12mm
f10, 1/640th sec., ISO 400

I have found myself using the full scope of the wide end of the 10-20 often. Going as wide as 10mm and then cropping can also be useful to include more sky in the photo, keeping trees vertical, keeping your shadow out of the frame, or putting the horizon out of the center of the frame. In the photo above it was all of the those. There is a lot of hocus pocus going on with the lens to keep it small and light. Below is what the unedited RAW file looks like with all the lens corrections turned off. This was only at 12 mm and the distortion and vignetting is more extreme at 10mm.


Unedited RAW file of the above



Battelle-Darby Metropark, Nov. 9, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 10-20mm L IS at 12 mm
f10, 1/400th sec., ISO 400


Battelle Darby Metropark, Nov. 9, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 10-20mm f4 L IS cropped from 10mm
f11, 1/320th sec., ISO 400


Battelle-Darby Metropark, Nov. 30, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 10-20mm f4 L IS at 15mm
f10, 1/400th sec., ISO 400


Battelle-Darby Metropark, Dec. 26, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 10-20mm f4 L IS at 17mm
f8, 1/125th sec., ISO 400


Battelle-Darby Metropark, Dec 26, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 10-20mm f4 L IS at 12mm
f10, 1/400th sec., ISO 400


Battelle Darby Metropark, Dec. 26, 2024
Canon EOS R5, RF 10-20mm f4 L IS at 12mm
f9, 1/250th sec., ISO 400