EOS R5 How to improve autofocus for birds

[luciano]

I have a Canon R5 and took this photograph of a Great (Parus major) this morning in dull conditions. Camera focused roughly on the branch at the red square rather than the bird.

Any autofocus settings I can use that would make it more likely the camera would find the bird in this sort of photo? Does camera have digital zoom to make bird larger in frame so that there are less twigs to distract the autofocus?

[Sorry, but our system won't let the bird's proper name be typed out.  We substituted it with its scientific name.]

[johnrmoyer]

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@luciano wrote:

1.6x crop mode might be what I need - this is basically digital zoom right? Can I assign it to a single button that will enable/disable it?

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It is not digital zoom unless you use software outside of the camera later. I have the C3 mode set to 1.6x and Av. I do not think a singe button can enable/disable crop mode. If I will end up cropping later anyway, then nothing is lost by cropping 1.6x when I make the photo. In my example, even at 800mm much cropping would have been needed. I cropped my example to 3600x2400 and then reduced it to 50% when I put it on my web server. The 1.6x crop mode is only a few less pixels than I got with my EOS 80D.

Others say that the 1.6x crop mode does not help eye detection. Yesterday when it was cloudy and the bird was among foliage, the camera was focusing on everything but the bird until I switched to crop mode. This is my experience.

[Tronhard]

"If I will end up cropping later anyway, then nothing is lost by cropping 1.6x when I make the photo."  With respect, I disagree with this statement.

This is from the EOS R5 Advanced User guide, P923 - note that number of recorded pixels is reduced when shooting in 1.6 crop. See: Canon EOS R5 Advanced User Guide 

Just to be sure that this was not a phenomena related to JPGs, I just shot the same image in 1.0 and 1.6 crops, using RAW and had the image appear cropped and the the pixel size reduced according to that value on the bottom row.

[johnrmoyer]

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@Tronhard wrote:

"If I will end up cropping later anyway, then nothing is lost by cropping 1.6x when I make the photo."  With respect, I disagree with this statement.

This is from the EOS R5 Advanced User guide, P923 - note that number of recorded pixels is reduced when shooting in 1.6 crop. See: Canon EOS R5 Advanced User Guide 

...

Just to be sure that this was not a phenomena related to JPGs, I just shot the same image in 1.0 and 1.6 crops, using RAW and had the image appear cropped and the the pixel size reduced according to that value on the bottom row.

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In the case of my example, I ended up cropping to 3600x2400. None of the missing pixels would have been used. I could not get closer to the bird, because one is restricted to staying on the trails at that wildlife refuge. The reduced pixels when I use the 1.6x crop on my EOS R5 is only a few less than on my EOS 80D and is a few more than on my EOS 500D. I knew in advance that the extra pixels would be discarded.

I did shoot that photo with DPRAW and used Canon DPP to increase the fine detail contrast in the DPRAW "Fine Tuning Sharpness" tool.

[Tronhard]

I totally agree that cropping a FF image in post and doing so via the in-body camera are very similar, the main benefit in the R5 being one sees a magnified image in real time,  which is convenient for composition.  I just wanted to clarify that using 1.6 crop mode will reduce the image size and the full image is not stored as I took your comment to suggest.
All that said, I think that the OP's issue is not the FoV but that his camera was focusing on the nearest object according to the box displaying the point of focus.  That is why I suggested taking more control of that, to locate the focus point on the bird's eye (especially when there is more that one bird), combined with eye tracking to follow it, once selected.