You may remember when I was using the pre-production Canon R1 camera and Canon R5 Mark II at the Summer Olympics in Paris, this was the first time I had really put the new pre-capture feature to good use.
For those not familiar with this new feature, it allows the user to press halfway down on the shutter button of the camera (to start the camera writing images to the internal memory buffer) and then when pressing all the way down, it will go back half a second and grab those images and write them to the memory card. thus capturing images that we might have otherwise missed. To make that simpler, the camera captures a burst of images before we even hit the shutter button. And this can be done with JPEG or RAW photos.
When I first heard about this feature, my first thought was "this would be perfect for capturing birds and other wildlife that move fast." But as it turns out, it benefited me first at the Olympics.
I knew that capturing images of Simone Biles was important for these Olympics, and I did not want to miss any key shots of the GOAT in action. I think that this was the first time I turned on pre-capture. When setting up both cameras, I added the pre-capture menu to the green "My menu" screen so that I could easily turn this on and off.
You might be thinking that, with this cool feature, why would I not use it all the time? And I will tell you why. It adds an additional 15 or so images every time I hit the shutter button. This is great for those key moments with unpredictable action, but I did not want to shoot hundreds more images than needed. It was just more images to go through, and with my crazy fast deadlines, this was a killer.
For the first water polo game that I photographed in Paris, I left pre-capture on for the whole game and ended up with 5700 images by the end of the match. That was WAY too many to sort through in my 15 minute deadline. I promised myself that this was the last time I would do that! But I did turn on pre-capture whenever there was a penalty shot. These shots happen very fast and I did capture some really nice photos that I probably would have missed without this new feature.
When photographing sports like badminton and volleyball (beach and indoor), I relied on the pre-capture pretty heavily. These are sports that I have not captured very often and I found myself missing some of the best action shots. Once I turned on pre-capture, then I was able to get more "peak of action" shots, like the ones you see above and below.
Two weeks ago I was down in the rain forest of Costa Rica for yet another photo tour and this gave me a chance to put the pre-capture to good use for nature photography.
While we were out searching for monkeys and other wildlife to photograph, we came across this Roadside Hawk. It was perched on this post and I saw this as the perfect time to put pre-capture to it's test. Remember, this was the moment I had first visualized when being told about the new feature at a Canon briefing.
In the past, when waiting for these birds to take off, myself and most of my tour guests would get tired of holding the cameras in position and miss that moment ending up with shots like this. Arghhh.
This time I was using pre-capture and hoping to get the hawk taking off from the post. I had the shutter button pressed half way down and saw the bird poop. Usually, when a bird poops, it is about to take off. In this case the pre-capture ended up capturing the bird pooping and then...
...the bird took off and I got the shot that I otherwise would have missed.
Within the 28 frames that I captured, I got numerous photos of the bird in flight
Later that same day, we saw about 20 Scarlet Macaw taking turns grabbing fruit from this palm tree. I used the pre-capture to capture as many frames as I could, The goal was to get the best image of the birds with their wings open and showing as much color as possible.
If you saw any of my social media posts, you know that we had a ton of rain on this trip. Way more than normal! But even with the bad weather, we managed to go out for the dolphin watching tour. The pre-capture feature worked VERY well in this instance. The Spinner dolphins would jump high out of the water and we had a split second to point the camera in the right direction, achieve focus and then hope for the dolphin to do another jump. Those of us who had the cameras with pre-capture would hold the button halfway down and hope to get another jump. Look at the height that this dolphin jumped!
I also used the pre-capture when the dolphins were riding the wake of the boat. The second I would see their heads emerge from the water I would press the shutter button all the way down, knowing that the camera would capture the entire sequence, from beginning to end. Then, when viewing the photos on my computer, I could select my favorites.
On our last day of the Costa Rica photo tour, we took a boat ride on the Sierpe River. We saw this Little blue heron on the shoreline. As we approached the bird, I locked focus on it's face and hoped that it would take off. Before I expected this, it flew off. Without pre-capture I know for sure that I would have missed this shot. After the bird was gone, I looked into the viewfinder of the Canon R5 Mark II and saw this image. I love that the heron almost looks like a ballet dancer in this shot.
I was happy to see that I also had numerous other photos of the bird in flight.
This last image is of a Tropical kingbird. It was sitting on this branch and we all focused our lenses on this little guy. As it turns out, the bird did not fly away, but it did jump up in the air to change positions. Seeing this happen, I pressed the shutter button all the way down and got this photo of the bird in mid air. Something that happened before I even hit the shutter button. So cool!
I know that other cameras have had this feature for some time, and I am glad that Canon has added this to their lineup. Currently, the Canon R1, Canon R5 Mark II, and Canon R6 Mark II (with a slightly different take on pre-capture) have this feature, but I expect this to be available in many more models in the future.
I would love to know how you all are using pre-capture.
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