Today's post features some photos taken with the new Canon 7D MK II,
which I have been informally testing for the last few weeks. Even with
the big glass it is often hard to get close enough for frame filling
photos of wildlife without using a blind, so all of today's images are
cropped substantially. The 7D MK III has a 20 MP un-cropped image. The
photo below is cropped to 6.3 mega pixel, which is the same size as my
first digital camera, a Canon 10D, would produce utilizing the full
image.
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| Tufted Titmouse: Canon 7D MK II-Canon 600mm f 4.0 IS L-ISO 200-1/1600 sec- f 5.0 |
The photo of the spike buck is a 6.7 MP vertical crop pulled from a horizontal frame.
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| Spike Buck: Canon 7D MK II-Canon 300mm f 2.8 L IS -ISO 200-1/320 sec- f 5.0 |
For last I will post two photos of mature Eastern
Wild Turkey gobblers huddled on a distant hillside during a
snow-squall. This would have been a good situation for the 600mm lens,
but I didn't have it along that day so I used the biggest available,
which was the 500mm. Both are 6.3 megapixel crops.
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| Gobblers: Canon 7D MK II-Canon 500mm f 4.0 IS L-ISO 400-1/800 sec- f 5.0 |
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| Gobblers: Canon 7D MK II-Canon 500mm f 4.0 IS L -ISO 400-1/800 sec- f 5.0 |
Below is an un-cropped version of the the last shot.
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| Gobblers: Canon 7D MK II-Canon 500mm f 4.0 IS L -ISO 400-1/800 sec- f 5.0 |
So what do I think of
the 7D MK II so far? It is too early too tell, but after getting most
of my lenses micro-adjusted with it I find I am using it quite a bit. I
am not at all sure at this point that there is any significant gain in
image quality over the 70D, but I do prefer it for shooting still
photographs as the auto-focus seems to be very accurate and I prefer the
layout of the focusing points in the finder as well. I have not tried
the camera for shooting video as of yet, but the lack of a touch-screen
or rotating LCD is a big minus for shooting video.
I
do not pretend to be a DSLR expert and do not intend to do intense
testing with the camera in a short period of time, but rather my
approach is to do some shooting as needed to micro-adjust the camera and
to give it a fair trial in actual field use. Over time it will be
interesting to see which camera I gravitate to for most of my use.
