I had 2 days at the Conowingo Dam with a 3 day old 7D last week. The weather on day 1 was horrible (dark, overcast & rainy) and the activity on day 2 was minimal (I could only stay until noon before a 7 hr drive home).
I am very impressed with the tracking ability of the 7D though. I just could not miss using the following settings:
AF area - Center point with the 4 assist points
AI servo tracking sensitivity - Slow
AI servo AF tracking method - 0: continuous AF track
I left C.Fn III-3 on 0, which I wouldn\'t normally do. After reading the manual a few times. I was afraid if set to 1, and the camera locked on the background (which every Canon I\'ve owned has a tendency to do) it would be difficult to get focus back on the bird. The 7D never jumped to the background on me though, even on the busiest of backgrounds when the bird was just barely covering the center AF point. It locked on and stayed locked unless something got in front of the bird (which is understandable based on my setting of this C.Fn)
I\'m still on the fence as far as IQ is concerned. It\'s certainly not in the same league as my 5DII or my old 1DIII, but most of my images had to be cropped a lot. I\'ll need some subjects to fill the frame in better light before I can make a fair IQ judgement.
This series was quickly processed in ACR 5.6(beta), neat image 7D iso 1000 profile, usm 250, .5, 0. cropped around 50-60% & resized.
500 f/4L IS +1.4x, ISO 1000, 1/1250 sec, wide open at f/5.6
busy background torture test (from day 2, with better light ISO 400):
I had 2 days at the Conowingo Dam with a 3 day old 7D last week. The weather on day 1 was horrible (dark, overcast & rainy) and the activity on day 2 was minimal (I could only stay until noon before a 7 hr drive home).
I am very impressed with the tracking ability of the 7D though. I just could not miss using the following settings:
AF area - Center point with the 4 assist points
AI servo tracking sensitivity - Slow
AI servo AF tracking method - 0: continuous AF track
I left C.Fn III-3 on 0, which I wouldn\'t normally do. After reading the manual a few times. I was afraid if set to 1, and the camera locked on the background (which every Canon I\'ve owned has a tendency to do) it would be difficult to get focus back on the bird. The 7D never jumped to the background on me though, even on the busiest of backgrounds when the bird was just barely covering the center AF point. It locked on and stayed locked unless something got in front of the bird (which is understandable based on my setting of this C.Fn)
I\'m still on the fence as far as IQ is concerned. It\'s certainly not in the same league as my 5DII or my old 1DIII, but most of my images had to be cropped a lot. I\'ll need some subjects to fill the frame in better light before I can make a fair IQ judgement.
This series was quickly processed in ACR 5.6(beta), neat image 7D iso 1000 profile, usm 250, .5, 0. cropped around 50-60% & resized.
500 f/4L IS +1.4x, ISO 1000, 1/1250 sec, wide open at f/5.6
busy background torture test:
100% crop
Nov 20, 2009 at 12:38 PM
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