Back to the inadequate pictures… These were the first test pictures of the day, after John realized the Canon R7 was not performing as well as he expected. John believes that the only change for these pictures was using the smaller “Spot Auto-focus” instead of the “Single Point Auto-focus”. Most of the pictures are cropped way down, so that the problems are visible.

We started the morning looking for wolves, but we did not see anything moving on the hill that they hang out on. There was one dark spot further to the right than normal, but it never moved. Since there were no wolves, John took a picture of the Bison in the valley below.

If you look closely at the picture, the Bison horns are blurry. It looks like the camera is focused 10 feet in front of the Bison. There was also some heat shimmer that probably impacted the focus.

We also stopped at Elk Antler Creek to photograph the ducks. John tried to get a picture of the Green-winged Teal with its green Zoro bandit mask and rust colored Mohawk, but they are came out a little (or a lot) blurry. The eye is out of focus in all of them.

This one was especially blurry. The camera shutter speed should have been fast enough to compensate for the slow duck movement.

This one came out better than expected. Swallows were flying all around, and John managed to catch one swooping through the scene. The focus is not perfect, but it is okay for such a small and fast moving bird.

A similar problem occurred with the Lesser Scaup pictures. They are mostly just a little off in focus. For being decent light, the focus on the male Lesser Scaup is terrible.

For being focused on the female Lesser Scaup (i.e., the male should be slightly out of focus), this one is probably one of the best for focus, during this test.

And it was not even distance, the Mallard couple was not that far away, and they are still blurry. If you look at the male Mallard eye, it is clearly out of focus.

Clearly, there is a knowledge or configuration issue. It should not really be a skill issue because modern cameras do all the focusing for you. Back in the day where you had to manually focus on a moving target with a single attempt to capture the subject, it took a lot of skill. These days the only thing that takes much skill is knowing where to be to see the animal and capturing birds in flight.