Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Winter Wildlife With The 7D Mark II

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.

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.


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.

Gobblers: Canon 7D MK II-Canon 500mm f 4.0 IS L-ISO 400-1/800 sec- f 5.0
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.

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.