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Saturday 19 December 2009

Canon EOS 7D Review Lists

A couple of links to sites with a list of reviews for the Canon EOS 7D. Both were kind enough to link to my own mini-review.

Northlight Images
Planet 7D

Some links are listed on both sites, but look out for the one by Ole Jørgen Liodden that also looks at weather sealing, with a photo of the 7D half buried in snow.

New Series of Images of The Meads

I've uploaded images of The Meads, near Bridgwater, part of the Somerset Levels. One image is embedded below, but a bigger selection will ba available on my main site, when I've finished uploading.

Saturday 12 December 2009

Out and About with the 7D

After the almost constant rain of the last six weeks or so, it's been a pleasant surprise to see the sun and get some decent light. I've spent my spare time so far, using the Canon EOS 7D with my newest lens, the EF 50mm f/1.4. In many ways, it's almost been like relearning photography, as I have always tended to shoot my landscapes wider, to get wide open landscapes with alot of depth of field. Of course, at 50mm, you don't have as much depth of field to work with and coupled with the 7D showing up the effects of diffraction to a greater degree, due to the higher pixel density, I'm having to modify the way I shoot. At the moment, it's a bit hit and miss with the depth of field, as I'm trying to stay with f/8 to f/11, so I'm trying to work out the best way of finding the hyperfocal distance, when the scale goes from 3 metres to infinity and I need around 7 metres.
Some experimentation has shown up the diffraction problems. last week, I photographed the same scene at f/8 and f/16 and apart from the nearest foreground, the f/8 image was much sharper than the one taken at f/16, enough to make me realise, I didn't want to be shooting at f/16, unless I really needed the depth of field. It may mean that I have to consider not including foreground as close as I normally like to, which will reduce the depth in my images, but if I need something like that, then I can still use the 40D, with the smaller image being the compromise.
On a slightly different note, while I was out this afternoon, I had the perfect opportunity to test out the tracking, when a buzzard decided to land in a tree in my chosen scene. While the image is a little noisy, because the head was in deep shadow, with the sun directly behind the tree, the focus tracked the bird as it took off, without any problems, until I lost it momentarily, as it passed the sun (I didn't fancy pointing a 400mm lens at the sun).

Durleigh and Hamp Brooks, The Mead, Bridgwater.