EOS R5 Excessive Noise

[hervegodbout]

I do lots of wildlife photography with my R5 and compare it with my fellow photographers who have the same body camera for some reason, I have lots of noise in my images and they don't.
I always shoot with electronic high-speed continuous plus.
Can someone tell me if I have to adjust any settings in the menu?

[Peter]

Upload a couple of raw files you feel are noisy.

[hervegodbout]

[lwatawala]

Hello Peter, I shoot wildlife on an R5 with a RF 100-500 lens. Usually I get sharp, low noise images I am very happy with. But this most recent time I did some shooting I feel that the images are not as crisp. I'm wondering if something happened to the camera. If I upload a couple of good (taken previously) and bad (most recent) raw files, could you please help me understand what may be happening. Thank you.

[Peter]

Upload to Google Drive and share, or WeTransfer.

Put the link here.

[lwatawala]

Thank you Peter. I have uploaded 4 files to Google Drive at:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LVfkYER9bsZf77L-cUTBp7D6HFvWurHP?usp=sharing

Good Image - 1.CR3

Good Image - 2.CR3

Bad Image - 1.CR3

Bad Image - 2.CR3

[Peter]

Heat distortion is my guess, so not a problem with your equipment.

You have some hot pixels visible in daylight, so perform a sensor cleaning via the camera menu to remove them. Perhaps more visible due to camera temperature.

[lwatawala]

Thank you Peter. Heat Distortion sounds reasonable. It was around 8:15AM on Feb 22nd in Sarasota, Florida. Morning sun was shining on grass that was wet with dew. That must have formed distorting water vapor. The Eagle was on that grass. So, your explanation makes good sense.

I uploaded one more photo from that day:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QAvFQh0s-tK5q0IhfzifqMR3jgU8gbpV/view?usp=sharing

This is even more odd looking. I'm curious what may have caused that? 

[johnrmoyer]

Distortion from variations in atmospheric density will increase with distance to subject. A closer subject should appear to be sharper and less distorted than a subject further away when everything else is the same. If the air is moving, making several photos and keeping the lucky one might work sometimes.

[johnrmoyer]

I hope some of this might help.

The differences I noticed between bad image 1 and good image 1 include camera temperature as Peter mentioned. It seems to me that with my EOS R5, noise increases rapidly as camera temperature increases. I have read that for CMOS sensors, thermal noise doubles for each 6 degree C increase in temperature, so one might expect bad image to have roughly 4 times the noise as good image. For a camera with IBIS, cooling the sensor chip is more difficult.

Camera settings that seem to me to increase noise include enabling auto lighting optimizer or enabling peripheral illumination correction. Those are easily done later in Canon DPP software.

Camera temperature seems to stay lower for me if I close the live view screen and in power settings have the viewfinder turn off quickly.