The Canon R7 is the Best Canon Camera for Wild Animals
I continue to be amazed at the number of “pro” photographers who continue to not understand crop sensors and the importance of pixel pitch, especially for wildlife photography. After watching a number of YouTube videos about rumored upcoming Canon cameras, every single one talks about the full frame sensor as an advantage, and this is exactly wrong.
32.5 megapixels on a full frame camera is not equal to 32.5 MP on a crop sensor like the R7. Even 45 MP on a full frame camera is not as good as 32.5 MP on an APS-C crop sensor. Instead you need double the number of pixels on a full frame camera to match a crop sensor because sensor size doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is how many pixels you can get on the bird (or insect, or spider, or whatever.) Unless you’re shooting tame geese in a park, you can’t get all the pixels of a full frame camera on the bird. If you’re shooting a warbler or a sparrow at anything beyond minimum focusing distance, you’re lucky to fill the frame of an APS-C sensor. Yes, there are lucky shots, but 90% of the time you’re cropping way smaller than the APS-C sensor size anyway. The full size sensor is just wasted space.
For example, here’s a Red-bellied Woodpecker shot at a quite long 500mm without cropping on a Canon R7:
I still have to crop this down to get the shot I want:
If I had used my 800mm lens, I could have gotten maybe twice as many pixels on the bird, still not enough to fill even the APS-C frame. If I’d taken this on my full frame R6, or even an R5, all that would give me is more sky and tree. I’d have a lot fewer bird pixels left at the end.
Now both these images were sized down for the blog, and this doesn’t matter as much as it did when cameras only started with 5 or 8 megapixels, and cropping could bring you down to the point where the picture wasn’t usable or salable for many purposes, but it’s still better to have more pixels to play with than fewer.
Here’s another example. In a city park with rather tame birds, I photographed this juvenile Ring-billed Gull at point blank range with a 500mm telephoto on my R7:
A Ring-billed Gull is larger than pretty much all songbirds except a few corvids, and I was below the minimum focusing distance for some long lenses. Nonetheless, I still need to crop out about half the pixels to get a good framing.
If you can’t fill the frame of an APS-C camera with a large bird like a gull with a 500mm lens from far closer than you’d ever get outside a zoo or city park, you simply don’t need a larger sensor.
For insects, it’s even more obvious. Most non-flying arthropods you can get close to — spiders, ants, springtails, etc. — are smaller than an APS-C sensor. Larger arthropods like dragonflies, centipedes, and butterflies are usually too fast or too far away to shoot at 1:1. There are a few beetles and spiders that sometimes fall into the gap between APS-C and fullsize, but again 90% of what I shoot easily fits in an APS-C sensor.
I am of course talking here about wildlife photography of animals in the wild. Studio setups with dead animals are very different. Portrait photography is different. Anytime you can walk right up to the subject and change your distance to the subject as needed to frame the shot, you can move closer to put more of your larger full-frame pixels on a subject. But in nature photography in the wild? Just not going to happen. You want the smallest, densest pixels current technology allows, and that is rarely available on a full-frame camera.
Yes, there can be many other reasons to prefer an R5, R5 Mark II, R3, etc. over an R7: better autofocus, better camera controls like a third dial on the back, faster frame rate, etc. — but sensor size just isn’t one of them. The R7 puts more pixels on the bird than any other Canon camera you can buy today. Even the 45 MP R5 isn’t close. You can use much longer, heavier, and pricier lenses like a 600mm f/4 on the Canon R5 and you still won’t be able to put as many pixels on the bird as you can with a 500mm lens on an R7. Even a 61mp Sony A7R IV comes up a little short compared to the R7 despite the astronomical increase in price. Crop sensors aren’t just cheaper. They’re better.
