They will work if you manually put the camera into crop mode. the R does that automatically for EF-S Canon lenses but not for third party. I think the resulting file is about 12MP or so.

If you do any 4K shooting they're worth keeping for that as the crop is really similar.

I have been past most of those farms and have also lived in WV. Those farms are all real close to town as farms go, it looks like they are all Palmer or the bluff area so 10-15 minutes from all the amenities you mention. The average WV rural resident is almost certain to live further from medical care or schools or large shopping centers.

For travel I'd get an M6mkii . Amazing, truly pocket sized little camera with proper small travel lenses or the option to stick a great big L lens on at home. The detachable viewfinder eliminates the problem of your nose touching the screen so I see it as a feature, not a bug.

I've used both and don't think there is a huge difference in performance in real world shooting at all. They are very similar in real use. I like the R better in the hand and the Canon colors ~slightly~ better so it's what I bought for myself.

something people should know in relation to SD cards: I bought some SD cards on Amazon this year and EVERY SINGLE ONE was a fake. They looked good but they had far less storage than they were supposed to. This will lead to card failures, unwritten files and other bad things

If you don't already buy all your storage media from a reputable bricks and mortar store or a specialty camera or electronics online store. Amazon mixes inventory from different suppliers and has no way to control fakes. Also they don't seem to care much, imho.

This is nonsense, as is half of your assertions about environmental laws. you can't bribe an inspector in CA to let you avoid seismic regulations and build a house of quarried rock and only a true moron would want to.

PG&E don't avoid cutting brush because of environmental laws. They've been court ordered to cut brush, they just didn't/ weren't able to do it enough. They have programmatic permits although they are pretty famous for not bothering to abide by them nothing ever happens to them when they don't.

And I would like to see the building code for the mythical places you assert force people to build wooden homes in CA in the forest and prevent you from using fire proof materials because my professional experience the exact opposite is the reality- you are required to make structures fire proof.

Finally you can't just put high transmission power lines "in a pipe". They need heavy insulation or to be cabled in a vault. There are a lot of safety issues for linemen working in vaults with high transmission lines. You need access, which means a lot of very expensive roads in remote areas. Environmentally permitting is a tiny part of that and PG&E already has rights to the easements.

Total nonsense. There is no loggable timber in any of the areas currently burning in Sonoma, Ventura or LA and never has been. It's fire adapted chaparral and savannah and it'll burn periodically no matter what you do.

CA has a huge amount of active logging going on to this very day. Look at Paradise on Google earth- its ringed with clearcuts because that whole area is actively being logged and has been for 100 years. There are less loggers employed because of automation and Maxxum and the other corporate raiders coming in in the 80s, clear cutting and raiding the pension funds of the old logging companies. PALCO was a perfectly sustainable and financially healthy company before that with 100 year plans for their lands. Maxxum sold off assets, clear cut recklessly and then declared bankruptcy and raided the pensions. Greedy corporate types from out of state, mostly Texas, put those loggers out of work, not "the government"- you can certainly read any of the numerous books or articles about it if you want to. But there is a robust forestry industry still in many areas of CA, focused nowadays on higher end products. Paradise burned because they built it in a fire corridor- simple as that. Nothing to do with the decline of the logging company town.

Don't believe everything you hear on TV.

1. Santa Rosa is not in the forest it's a mix of oak savannah and chaparral. Very few people in CA live "in the forest" and I agree, it's stupid.
1a- Paradise was bound to burn, it was out the mouth of the Feather River Canyon, which is a natural fire corridor with down valley winds, a Mediterranean climate and dry lightning storms in the fall. It burns very regularly and probably did long before people moved there. They shouldn't rebuild the town but "the government" can't really stop them in any legal way. Does the UK government prevent people from living in high flood prone areas? No, they don't.

2. All of CA has extremely strict building codes related to fire and Sonoma is amongst the stricter ones. Those houses are clad in inflammable materials and many other measures are taken. Trust me, those houses are far, far more fireproof than in the UK in terms of not catching on fire from stray embers in a wildlife. They've put a lot of work and research into this. They have a lot of laws related to clearing brush in most counties.

3. The Electric companies use the same style pylons here, they are not putting them just off the ground. The lines are coming down in dry wind storms with high gusts up to 80+mph, which you don't have in the UK. And many other fires are still sparked by dry lightning which you also don't have much of but but which is common in the US. When the lines come down they spark. The only way to prevent this is to insulate, bury (hard for high transmission lines) or shut the power off.

4. The UK power grid is no more robust- you've had massive National Grid outages all year and haven't 15 or so of your power companies gone bust in the past couple years? I wonder how their infrastructure is since they've been slowly going broke for a while now.

I've lived in the UK and in CA for multiple years in each place. As usual most situations cannot be boiled down to some snap judgement over the internet.

I'd bring the prime and the TC. You may get less shots but they'll be better, which is always my preference. It's OK to simply spend some time observing or watching via binoculars or whatever.

I personally always shoot with either a 100-400mm (large wildlife) or a 400mm prime (birds) and the only other lens I regularly carry is a 35mm prime. It works.

I take photos of flying birds all the time with my Canon R and 100-400mm, it's much better with the newest firmware update but it was Ok-ish before that too. With the latest 1.4.0 firmware it's a very competent AF at 6fps. I take photos of pretty fast flying birds like mergansers etc fairly regularly and my major problem is noise due to the low light and the slow aperture on the 100-400mm, not AF.

I have taken quite a few photos with the 2x extender and it's definitely not a low light rig or for flying swallows but it isn't bad at all in terms of AF if you have enough light. The IQ degrades a bit, and atmospheric conditions can cause a lot of softness at 800mm.

The 1.4x is a much better fit imho, the IQ is better and the AF is good enough to capture running pikas (like a rabbit but smaller) with the 1.4 and the 100-400mm.

I have the Canon 100-400mm II. It's a great lens but I don't think you'll be happy with it at low light night games at all. I think you'll be limited to very high ISOs and/or very slow shutter speeds.

I'd try the 70-200mm f2.8 or the 300mm f4. Or stick with your 70-200 f4 and crop. If you want to try another lens you can rent any of these from lens rentals or a similar place to try them out.

It's out of focus, probably too close to you, but I take a lot of fishing photos and that line lights up like that in the sun. I think it diffracts the light a bit but often it'll almost glow and look much thicker than it is. It's an effect that's been done to death in fly fishing films.

I find some of them useful- I appreciate the people who go to the trouble of taking RAW or unedited of detailed scenes that they repeat for each camera and lens, for example. Ken Rockwell takes photos of the same scene at all ISOs, which is the only useful part of his review for me but it's pretty useful. I find Mark Smith's photos of birds useful as an example of like- top performance for a camera and lens that could be achieved. I find Jared Polin pretty annoying but his galleries useful as he is actually a good photographer and does not just take photos of pigeons and rubbish bins. Steve Huff is in that category too- real photos and clear differences between how cameras render scenes.

DPPreview and similar galleries are useless and I don't see the point, I totally agree with you on that.

This video has been making the rounds for over a decade. They are very experienced Alaskan locals who are mildly well known for doing and writing about months long backcountry trips. They did have bear spray ready to go. The bear is much too far away from them to use spray and is just investigating them, it may never have seen people before given the location.

People calling them "dummies" are incorrect, they are doing EVERYTHING correctly here.



Bears don't understand warning shots. They generally ignore gunfire. Save your ammo.

Check out the new Canon M6II/ M5II coming out next week before you decide. I used to have an M10, then and M5. I moved up to an R and I miss the M cameras a lot- so much I might buy a new M camera next week. I also have a good friend with an Olympus E-M1 MKII so I have used it and seen it in action. His camera is vastly better for action, he shoots birds, but other than that I saw zero advantage over the M. The Olympus was bigger, heavier, the menus sucked, low light isn't great at all, limited ability to crop, ability to print large is limited, I see people over-sharpening photos from them a lot to get good contrast etc.

The M lens line up is very limited but the normal and prime lenses are very nice. I wouldn't bother with the long M zooms- the EF lenses work flawlessly. It's nice to have a camera that you can really and truly stick in your pocket OR put a Canon 70-300 or Sigma 150-600mm on, depending on your need that day.

Finally the M system is cheaper. Way, way cheaper. And fun to use with the touch focus and excellent EVF. The video was gorgeous from that camera. I really do miss that camera a lot!