Costa Rica 2024

Photo equipment

I thought long and hard about what pho­to equip­ment I should take with me to Cos­ta Rica. As we would be trav­el­ing with a rental car for large parts of the trip and a num­ber of tours were planned by foot, I want­ed to lim­it the whole thing to a sin­gle back­pack that was­n’t too big. So my 400mm f/2.8L IS II USM and the Sig­ma 60-600mm F4.5-6.3 DG OS HSM Sports* stayed at home.

In order to still have enough reach in the tele­pho­to range, I bought an APS-C Canon EOS R7* body to accom­pa­ny my Canon EOS R5. Thanks to its crop fac­tor of 1.6, the R7 achieves an equiv­a­lent image frame with my EF 100-400 f4.5-5.6 IS USM II as a 640mm focal length on a full-frame body.

In addi­tion, the EOS R7 offers a RAW burst mode. This allows the cam­era to con­tin­u­ous­ly cap­ture up to 30 images/s as long as the shut­ter release but­ton is pressed halfway. When the shut­ter is released, the images from the last 1/2 sec­ond are also saved. I was hop­ing to be able to catch birds tak­ing off with this function.

I had also bought a water­proof case* for my iPhone 15 Pro for the planned snor­kel­ing tour. And my DJI Mini 4 Pro drone also came along.

So my equip­ment con­sist­ed of:

Cam­eras

• Canon EOS R5 with Drop-In Fil­ter Mount Adapter EF-EOS R*
• Canon EOS R7 with Con­trol Ring Mount Adapter EF-EOS R*
• iPhone 15 Pro

Lens­es

• Samyang AF 14mm f/2.8 EF
• Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM
• Canon EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS II USM
• Canon EF 100-400 f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM
• Canon Exten­der 2x III

Drone

• DJI Mini 4 Pro

Also includ­ed were a tri­pod, bat­ter­ies, pow­er banks, a 14-inch Leno­vo lap­top, an iPad and var­i­ous oth­er small parts. With the excep­tion of the Exten­der 2x, every­thing was used.

Small statistics

After­wards, I was inter­est­ed to see how I used the equip­ment that I had tak­en with me in prac­tice. After import­ing all the images into Adobe Light­room Clas­sic, I took a clos­er look at the library. This time, as expect­ed, I main­ly used the new­ly acquired Canon EOS R7. Of the approx­i­mate­ly 9,000 images I took:

• 20% with the Canon EOS R5,
• 49% with the Canon EOS R7,
• 18% with the DJI Mini 4 Pro und
• 12% with my iPhone 15 Pro

The edit­ed images take up almost 420GB of stor­age space on my com­put­er’s hard disk.

As for the lens­es, I took 71% of the pic­tures with the EF 100-400 f/4.5-5.6L IS USM II, 74% of them at the longest focal length of 400mm.

Retrospective

Would I take the same items with me on my next trip?

I did notice a few short­com­ings when edit­ing the pic­tures. I would prob­a­bly do two things differently:

Telephoto lens

The Canon EF 100-400 f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM is indeed a very sharp lens, it real­ly comes close to my EF 400mm f/2.8L IS II USM, which I have test­ed on sev­er­al safaris. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, sharp­ness is not every­thing. In many pic­tures I clear­ly missed the dream­like creamy bokeh of my 400mm f/2.8, I espe­cial­ly noticed this with the R7. In many pic­tures, the back­ground seems to me to be too busy.

Canon EoS R7

The Canon EOS R7 is def­i­nite­ly a good APS-C cam­era. But I have real­ized that I am now spoiled by the full-frame for­mat. When post-pro­cess­ing the images, I often noticed that the R7 has far few­er reserves in terms of the noise lev­els and crop options than I’m used to with the R5.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the RAW burst mode, which I had relied on for pho­tograph­ing the fast hum­ming­birds, also did­n’t work for my pur­pos­es. Nat­u­ral­ly, this only works with the elec­tron­ic shut­ter and the EOS R7 pro­duces a very pro­nounced rolling shut­ter effect. As a result, the fast-flap­ping wings of the small birds are cap­tured with a creepy bend, which makes the images com­plete­ly unus­able. I would like to show an exam­ple here, but I delet­ed the test images on the spot because of their poor quality.

In addi­tion, the way the RAW burst mode is imple­ment­ed is also sub­op­ti­mal. The R7 writes the RAW burst images into a sin­gle large CR3 RAW file. The indi­vid­ual images have to be extract­ed from this lat­er, which cur­rent­ly only works with Canon’s Dig­i­tal Pho­to Pro­fes­sion­al 4 Raw devel­op­er or direct­ly in camera.

Based on these expe­ri­ences, I would in future rather take two full-frame bod­ies and either the 400mm f/2.8 with exten­ders or, more like­ly, the Sig­ma 60-600mm F4.5-6.3 DG OS HSM Sports* to Cos­ta Rica.

*=Affil­i­ate Link