Going off-road with the Canon EOS R3

Motorsport never used to be Vladimir Rys' passion, until he received an assignment to cover a Formula 1 race in 2005.

"I was bitten by the bug straight away," the Canon Ambassador says. "Motorsports is amazing for a photographer. You can do portraits, you can do action, you can even take a landscape photography approach if you want. It gives you the freedom to be creative."

Vladimir had a couple of shots in mind that he wanted to capture, but he spent the first day looking around the location – Austria's Erzberg mine – to work out the best angles. "Christine was really good fun to work with. In the beginning I didn't know her abilities, but we asked her to do some crazy stuff with the STARD C3 ERX electric rally car, and you could see straight away that she's a really good driver."

To keep up with such a high-performance car, Vladimir took full advantage of the Canon EOS R3's breakneck shooting speed of 30 frames per second.

"Looking through the sequences of pictures I'd taken was like watching a movie," he says. "In situations where there's no time to think, such as a crash, being able to use 30fps is fantastic. And the Canon EOS R3 can maintain that speed for RAW files as well as JPEGs. When you think about what's having to happen inside the camera in order to capture so many RAW images in so little time, it's just incredible."

Shooting at 30fps does mean you can end up filling memory cards at a more rapid rate than before. "I shot something like 5,000 images over the three-day rally car shoot, whereas I'd normally take about 3,000 images during the four days of a Formula 1 Grand Prix," say Vladimir. "You certainly give yourself a lot of data to pick from afterwards, but it's fantastic. The Canon EOS R3 supports CFexpress and USB-C, so everything downloaded really fast."

Despite powering through more frames than he normally would on a job like this, Vladimir says that the battery of the Canon EOS R3 showed no sign of slowing him down. "The camera uses the same LP-E19 battery pack as the EOS-1D X Mark III, and I think you could easily do two, maybe three days on one charge," says Vladimir.

As well as breaking new ground in shooting speed, the Canon EOS R3 is also a record breaker when it comes to shutter speed. So, what does the ability to freeze action at 1/64000 sec enable Vladimir to capture that he couldn't before?

Of course, there's little benefit in shooting rapid-fire sequences if all the frames are blurred. But with Eye Control AF, low-light focusing down to -7.5 EV and a vehicle detection mode, autofocus is another area of performance where the Canon EOS R3 leads the way.

"The vehicle tracking capabilities meant that as soon as the car entered the viewfinder, the camera would pick it up and follow it," explains Vladimir. "You just need to point the lens in the right direction and everything else is done for you.

"Even photographing the rally car in clouds of dust, the camera had no trouble in tracking it and keeping it sharp. In fact, the shape of the car seemed much easier for the system to follow."

In addition to the intelligent vehicle detection, the Canon EOS R3 gains extra precision via a new Spot detection option. Once this is enabled, the EOS R3 will automatically focus on the driver in an open cockpit car or rider rather than the vehicle," Vladimir says.

Vladimir found the vehicle tracking on the Canon EOS R3 to be so fast and reliable that he kept it activated for most of the shoot – although he did also find time to test out the camera's Eye Control AF function. "It takes just 10 to 15 seconds to calibrate for your eye," he says. "Then, when you move your eyeball, the camera follows the focus. Again, it was very impressive."

In fact, the large electronic viewfinder on the EOS R3 was one of the standout highlights for Vladimir. "The colour transmission and the detail you can see in the viewfinder are very impressive. It was a bit like looking at a home cinema. The screen is massive. I usually use an eyecup with my EOS-1D X Mark III so that I don't get irritated by side lighting. But as the Canon EOS R3's EVF is pretty deep and quite protected from stray light, I didn't need one on this shoot. I also didn't notice any lag when shooting the fast-moving car, so it was literally easy on the eye."

So, was Vladimir happy with the shots he managed to commit to memory card? Before he arrived at the location, he says, he had two shots in mind: "one that captured all of the dust and the mud while the car is coming through a corner, and another that showed the car with the landscape of the mine in the background, both of which we achieved. Many other shots were beautiful as well, so I was more than satisfied with the Canon EOS R3's performance at the end of the day."