Fergus Kennedy on the challenge of photographing Komodo dragons

For his dragon photos, Fergus took his Canon EOS 5D Mark IV and mainly relied on a Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM zoom lens. "I kept the 100-400mm lens on the camera pretty much all of the time, apart from one shot in the video where we put the 11-24mm lens on and put the camera down in the path of a Komodo dragon. It walked right over the top of it, which created a great shot. I wanted to do that with stills, too, but in the end we didn't get another chance."

The footage in the video was possible because Komodo dragons are creatures of habit – they often follow a particular path, so it was possible to anticipate the direction they'd walk in, just not what they'd do along the route, or when they came to a halt. "Once we put the camera, with a wide lens on it, as near to a dragon as we dared to go," laughs Fergus. "We hoped the dragon would move, but it just didn't – it was having a snooze and wanted to stay put."

He was glad to have the Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM zoom lens to rely on, to produce close crops of the dragons from a safe distance away. "The lens has really good image stabilisation – it was pretty shady in the forest so the shutter speeds were getting lower than you would want to shoot with if you didn't have IS. It's also really sharp throughout the zoom range."

As well as having a reliable telezoom, Fergus prized working with the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV. "The bump up in resolution from the Canon EOS 5D Mark III (30 megapixels from 22.3) is really nice – there's noticeably more detail there, so that's great. You get really clean images out of it at high ISOs.

"There's still that familiar form factor because I've been using the 5D series ever since the first one. Being able to pick it up and just shoot with it without having to adjust your style is great. As with the previous 5Ds, the weather sealing is very useful – when we were with the Komodo dragons it was pretty dusty, so it's always good to know you don't have to be too precious with the camera."

Fergus almost exclusively shoots RAW, which he then adjusts and saves as two versions: smaller JPEGs for web use, and high resolution JPEGs for magazines and print clients.

Fergus captures huge volumes of wildlife images, telling us that on a recent project he shot 4,000 images in one morning. His Komodo dragon shoot was not dissimilar. "Once we had a dragon in the right place I tended to put the camera onto continuous shooting at a high burst rate of about seven frames per second, and in AI Servo focus mode to track the Komodo dragons as they moved towards me. So I shot a lot of photos in a short period of time.

"We didn't have that long once we found dragons in their natural habitat – we were only with them for 10-15 minutes a couple of times, followed by lots of frustration trying to find other ones."

The shoot was difficult, but well worth it. "Finding a dragon in an authentic setting (not by the ranger hut), in good light, was a big challenge. I would love to have captured more images in really low evening light, but it was still fun – a real adventure."

To find out more about the latest in the Canon 5D series, visit the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV product page.