Prior to our Alaska trip we'd heard a lot of rumors and discussions about Canon's newest pro camera, the 1D Mark III. Needless to say, we were a bit concerned going into an important trip where we were hoping to use the Mark IIIs as our principle cameras. Prior to going, I had done a test, photographing our IT guy, Abe Landis, riding his bicycle towards me as I followed him in with a 500mm lens mounted on my camera and then on Mary's. Operator error can be a problem with those tests, but I felt that Mary's camera (received about a month after I got mine - and not as a freebe from Canon, either!) was very accurate with the focus. Mine ... I wasn't as sure, but when I retested the lens with my reliable 1D Mark II, I felt that I had similar results. So we trusted the camera ... somewhat.
On one of our Katmai bear trips we had the opportunity to photograph tufted and horned puffins as they either lifted off the water at our approach in a bobbing skiff, or flying like rockets toward us as they returned to their nesting sites on a small island. For the latter we were seated on firm ground and used our Wimberley gimbal heads to follow the birds. Even then, my hands and fingers were cramping up, and I think they were doing so simply because of the stress and fatigue involved in repeatedly following the birds. It was almost funny -- scores of birds would sometimes swoop in a loose, circling flock, zipping in sometimes faster than we could get a lens on them.
The original RAW file of this was rather dark and contrasty, as I shot this Horned Puffin late in the shoot when the light was really failing. The ISO was 1250, giving me 1/600th's of a second for the shutter speed. As a 5x7 or perhaps even an 8x10 the image will look quite good.
The boat shooting was probably even more difficult, as we had to hand-hold our 500mm's and either sit, kneel, or squat to keep below the view of other photographers in our skiff. Mary tired quickly, holding up the 500, so she rested the front of the lens on the side of the boat as a support, and used that as a turret to follow the birds. In this way, she nailed the tufted puffin at the top of this page.
I continued to hand-hold, and when I got the bird within the frame in sufficient time, I tool captured some nice shots. This one is a composite of two shots milli-seconds apart, at the camera's fastest frame rate of 10fps.
The shutter speed for these was 1/4000th, with an ISO of 400.
While we're still in the process of editing our running brown bears (see the Brown Bear Trip Report), I'm pretty confident that I'll be happy with the focus on those images as well. So, does the Mark III's AF work? We certainly think so!
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