A few photos with the Canon 80D

(Skip to photos of leaves, ducks, or trees?)

Recently I bought a new (used) camera, the Canon 80D. I used to use a Nikon D3300, but it disappeared while moving. Anyway, this new one is quite a bit nicer. The most noticeable differences for me are a far better live view mode (useful when I’m taking pictures at awkward angles) with a moveable touch screen (compared to the D3300’s static non-touch screen), more AF points when using the OVF, and a higher maximum frequency for taking photos.

Leaves

This was from the first time I went on an outing specifically to take pictures with this camera. I used the lens that came with it: the Canon EF-S 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM. It’s in Trädgårdsföreningen, Göteborg. I think I got quite lucky with the weather on this day; some of the last warm sun we’ll have this year, I would guess.

Ducks

The following three images are also taken in Trädgårdsföreningen, but on the next weekend. Mainly I was playing around with fast shutter speeds to try and capture the birds doing interesting things. The main challenge was trying to get the pictures to be sharp, which was difficult since I had to increase the ISO to make up for the shutter speed.

All of these photos are taken with the same 135mmm zoom lens mentioned above.

The duck above had just dived underwater and resurfaced. It’s quite cool seeing the water run off the hydrophobic feathers.

This duck was relaxing on a protruding wooden stake sticking out of the river, although I cropped the photo quite close to see how much detail I could see. I could have got a much better quality image here if I used a shutter speed closer to, say, 1/800s. 1/2000 meant that I had to use a very high ISO, which wasn’t ideal. Not sure why I did that…

I quite like this one, but there’s still a lot to improve on for next time. Opposite to the last photo, this one should have been shot with a significantly faster shutter to reduce the blur around his wings. I would have also liked to get a bit further down to the bird’s eye level. Partly this is just to get some more separation from the background.

Trees

Here are a couple of photos from a nice forest just a few minutes from my apartment. I took these yesterday, to experiment with a second-hand lens I bought: a Canon EF 50mm f1.8 STM.

This is the first prime lens I’ve ever used – that is, it has a fixed focal length. Another thing to note is that it’s an EF lens, which means it’s for full-frame cameras. My Canon 80D is not full-frame, which means that I only “see” a section cropped out from the middle of what the lens sees. This is both a good and bad thing, depending. This 50mm lens becomes effectively 80mm for this reason, which can be good or bad.

Since lenses tend to be sharper nearer the center, in theory I should get sharper results with this than using it on a full-frame camera. On the other hand, if the lens was just sharp enough to produce a sharp image on a full-frame sensor, then the fact that I’m zoomed in could reveal softness.

I was quite happy with this photo. Usually when I take photos of trees in scenes like this, the composition isn’t great and the picture looks boring. Here, the clearing between the foreground bushes and the background forest makes it a bit more interesting.

This is part of a hiking trail through the same woods as the previous photo. Everything looked very yellow here because it’s Autumn, and this particular type of long grass was everywhere in this boggy area of the route.

These wooden planks were for getting over those boggy areas, and in one part they have a long long path made of them which crosses a big reedy pond.

I’m not sure exactly what I think of this lens. In these two photos it was fine, but when I had the aperture very open (1.8-2.0) and had bright highlights, the lens was very prone to pink-coloured haze around these objects. This is something I can work around though, and I got the lens for a pretty good price, so I can’t complain :)

Written 13 Oct 2024 by Jacob Garby