The Canon 7D – First impressions and a 7D Kaikoura wedding

I took delivery of a 7D early last week, the timing was perfect as my 1DsMKII went off to the Canon workshops for it’s second shutter replacement, the current one lasting not very long! That’s another story and we won’t even go there at the moment.

I had a keen interest in the 7D as soon as I heard the rumours of it’s upcoming release, seems Canon had decided to up the ante on their prosumer range of gear and the features list seemed worth having a look at. I put my order in with the good folk at Photo & Video and got a pleasant surprise when they rang me in the first week of October to say the shipment had arrived.

The obligatory glance through the manual while  having my 3rd flat white on the morning the camera was dropped off by the courier, then I plugged on a lens and set it to work. Well, not really work,  a couple of days of sorting it out which could have been one day if I had read the manual properly in the first place.
There’s a lot of new and useful technology in the 7D and you need to read the book to make the best of it.

A week has now gone by since it arrived and I’ve now had a chance to test the 7D in the rigours of a wedding day. I did all the shooting for the day with the 7D except for the ceremony when I had two camera/lens combinations on the go.

So.. what’s to like with the 7D.

Handling/ergonomics

Out of the box the 7D feels nice. It almost feels like a 1 series build with a solid feel and nice grippy textured rubber in all the right places. The finger and thumb positioning is perfect for my (average size) hands, all the buttons are well placed and after one week I can operate the camera easily without second guessing any of the controls.
After a few years of using 1 series canons I am well used to the bulk of a battery booster and like the balance and handling they give to the camera, I have my order in for a booster for the 7D.

Viewfinder/focus

The first time you look through the viewfinder on the 7D you hardly know where to look, it’s big, bright and beautiful. Can be set to display a grid and electronic level, perfect for folk like myself who don’t know straight from crooked.

The Auto focus is impressive with 19 points and selectable focus zones. Very fast and seems accurate.

Shooting speed

The 7d is a race horse with a shoot speed of 8 frames per second and a burst buffer of 126 jpgs or 15 RAW images. That’s faster than I’m going to need for most of my photography but very useful for when I get out for a bird or wildlife shoot.

Wireless flash control

I’m loving this and used it several times on jobs in the last week. Speedlights can be run wirelessly from the camera. Just set the Speedlights to slave mode and go wild either in ETTL or Manual with ratios and all settings done remotely from the camera. Set your flash to 1/2 power manual and it magically is set and fires as commanded. I’ve used it for interior real estate shoots and it works great, seems to be reliable indoors where there are plenty of places for the infared to bounce and trigger the flash but haven’t tested it outdoors yet.

ISO

ISO 12800! Don’t know how useful that can be but I’ve made a 1/2 second exposure at f4.0 of my back lawn in the pitch dark and can see my kids’s pet rabbits in their cage. There is a fair bit of noise happening but it is still an image. Using the camera at ISO 1600 seems to make very usable  and not over noisy files.

Any problems?

Nothing major. I shot a set of images with 70 – 200 2.8 lens wide open and none of them were focused. They looked fine on the 7D LCD but they were trash when I ingested them. Of course they happened to be the first images I looked at and I had a major flip out when it crossed my mind I had shot a whole day of unfocused images. I did a focus test on the 70 -200 and it was miles out for some reason. They were the only images I shot with the lens full open all day luckily, a reminder to test gear before setting into a job. Did an AF micro adjustment on the lens and it is focusing sweet. Tested my other lenses and they were all good.

I’ve always been a bit suspect about Hi resolution APS-C sensor cameras after using 1 series Canons with their huge sensors, big pixels and low noise. The 7D files do have a different look than I am used to with a little more noise, not unpleasant it’s almost like a film grain. The next project is to sort out a RAW processing workflow that makes things look nice. Lightroom or ACR are working in beta but the results did not seem too impressive. I guess shooting JPG would solve a lot of problems but I always end up going back to RAW because I enjoy it.
RAW developer turned out to be the trick. It’s a good grunty RAW processor made by a proactive developer who already has it tweaked for 7D files.

And the verdict…

Liking it! It handles nice,  the performance is good, image quality is looking good – I’m looking forward to a long and productive summer with this peice of gear.
And there’s the video to check out yet!

Gallery of good looking people – images made with Canon 7D

And a couple of useful links;

Photo & Video – Kick Ass camera suppliers

Check focus on your DSLR

Seriously serious RAW processor

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These have gotta be the best camera straps there is….

I thought I had a wrist strap for my Canon G9, seems I did then I didn’t, I’m not sure, but ends up I don’t. You really need a wrist strap for these compact hi tech digi cameras that don’t have a decent viewfinder. Having a wrist strap means you can make images while holding your camera at arm length with the comforting feeling of knowing that if your finger grip gives out your camera isn’t going to land on the concrete or fall over a bluff.
I’d rather a decent viewfinder, but it seems that isn’t going to happen any time soon, and anyway, you can make some pretty cool images while waving your camera around at arms length.
I got on to these Gordy camera straps and liked the look of the simple, no gimmick, no logo, no bling design and build. Looked good to me so I ordered one and it arrived from the other side of the world a bit over a week later. I was a little excited about opening the bubble wrap envelope when it arrived and I gasped when I got a healthy smell of real cured leather when I opened the envelope flap.
First impressions – simple, solid and quality. Fitting the strap to the camera reaffirmed all these things, Gordy obviously hand builds these straps with a lot of pride and quality control. They are as tough as the proverbial leather hide, the leather is none-slip on your wrist, they are as comfortable as grandma’s old leather sofa and I reckon will probably outlast 1/2 dozen Canon G9s.
If you need a camera strap I would seriously suggest checking these out at Gordy’s web site.
As for the Canon G9, yeah that’s not bad either. I’m going to write a users review of that soon too, as if the internet really needs another self appointed expert G9 review!

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