A New Tool Arrives-The Canon 7d

It was basically a given with me that I was going to upgrade my DSLR battery when Canon introduced a camera in the class of the 40D that had the option to record HD video. This happened recently and I pre-ordered one so that hopefully it would ship soon after B&H re-opened from the Holidays. They were out of stock for a short time, but they got a new shipment over the weekend of Oct. 17th, and the camera shipped on Tuesday.

I am somewhat conflicted about getting a new piece of equipment as in many cases, it forces one to address a lot of issues until everything is working properly and one can actually settle down to using the equipment as a new tool for wildlife photography without having to dwell on the nuts and bolts aspect of the situation.

That being said, it was still a great thrill to receive the package from B&H last Thursday, but I restrained myself long enough to take it to my favorite photographic area for the ritual of pressing a new camera into service.

The New Arrival

I Can't Wait To Get My Hands On It!

Pristine Canon 7D-It Won't Look That Way Long With Heavy Field Use

While I do not expect this to replace the XL-H1 as my primary video acquisition camera, I do have hopes that it will enable me to shoot video clips at times I am primarily concentrating on still photography and am not carrying the camcorder. As a result some of my first tests of the camera were mounting it on a video tripod and shooting a few video clips.

Mounted On Bogen Video Tripod With Homemade Adapter

7D In Video Mode

It actually works reasonably well as a camcorder and I hope to post some clips, or a short film soon, but for today we will settle for a still image taken with it and the 300mm F4 Canon L.

Mature Easter Wild Turkey Gobblers

On the plus side, while this camera does feel slightly larger than the 40D, it has a "better" feel in the hand (I know that is entirely subjective-some may prefer the 40D). The viewfinder is brighter and overall more pleasing to look through, while the LCD is much sharper enabling one to evaluate the quality of a photograph much more readily. The camera is 18 mp, vs the 10.5 mp of the 40D.

I previously hinted at a downside and there always is one-at least from a financial standpoint. In this case there where three problems, some of which have easy work arounds. I shoot in Raw and there is no upgrade to CS3 to handle the 7D files. There is a method to convert them to DNG by the free DNG converter, but this creates an extra step and raises some concerns, so suffice it to say I did upgrade to CS4, which was another $200.oo.

The video editing program cannot handle the video files without converting them to an intermediate codec, so I had to upgrade this aspect of my editing software, which was actually quite reasonable at $70.00.

This is not the major problem, however. My Photoshop computer is an old Dell 2400 with Windows XP, which can only handle 1 GD of RAM. This worked very well with CS2 and The Canon 10D files, which were only 6.3 mp. Things really slowed down when I went to the 40D, but the system was still usable. I installed a trial version of CS4 soon after it came out and found that it slowed things down even further, so I did not purchase it.

The bottom line is that I need a much more powerful desktop. As a short term solution, I installed the CS4 on my Toshiba laptop, which has the Vista 64 Bit operating system, 4GB of memory and a 2.3 GHz AMD Turion Dual Core Processor. This system handles the 7D files and CS4 quite well, but I really don't like using a laptop for my serious photo editing.

Look for more photos and some video clips, hopefully in the near future as I explore the features of the 7D under field conditions. At this point in time, I am very impressed.