Every photographer have their own "style" and what they want from their camera and a lot of that has to do with the genre of photography that you are into. As wildlife photography is what I do about 90 percent of the time, naturally some things I would prefer in a camera will naturally be very different to someone that photographs landscapes or weddings for example.  One of the first elements that you want to look at when photographing wildlife or sports is a camera that has high frame rates.  This allows you to snap off up to 30 photos per second on the R5II which means your chances of capturing that perfect moment is so much greater.  Another aspect that I was looking at was high resolution.  This basically means that you have a lot more information in your images which has many benefits such as being able to crop a lot and also give you a lot of information if you're looking to print large prints.  The down side of this is the resolution combined with the fast frame rate means that you will need a very fast memory card as well as cards that have a lot of memory like a 256GB or 512GB cards.

Last but not least, one of the elements that I was most excited about was the incredible autofocus system and eye tracking capabilities.  Once again as a wildlife photographer, moments tend to happen pretty quickly and can change direction very quickly.  Manually moving your focal point around can often result missing an incredible image.  With the built in AI subject identification and eye tracking, the autofocus system not only finds your subject with relative ease, but also locks onto the subject during key action moments.

Another absolute game changer on the R5II is pre capture which is now available.  What this basically means is when activated, the camera starts recording images when the shutter is half pressed.  Once you press the shutter down it not only records the image after the shutter is pressed down, but also the few seconds before then.  This works incredibly well for capturing birds in flight!

The last part that I look for in a camera is dealing well with low light conditions.  In wildlife photography most of the action happens shortly before sunrise and shortly after sunset where a lot of the times you have to push your ISO in order to get the desired results.  I must be honest, I am a little disappointed in this regard with the R5II or maybe I was just expecting way too much.  I've pushed ISO's quite a bit and found that there was still quite a bit of noise with ISO 8000 and upwards.  Yes I totally get it, that is still a very high ISO and usually ISO 6400 is still very workable, but I really did feel that given the hype about the camera that it would have been a bit better in low light conditions.  With all of that being said, with all the software available now to deal with noise, this is not as big of an issue.