The First Photographs from the Canon EOS 7D are up

Ever since I received the delivery of the Canon EOS 7D, the weather has been pretty awful, the sort of days that are totally uninspring, dull grey, uniform cloud cover or absolutely chucking it down. Not good for inspirational landscapes and not enough light for wildlife. I did manage to shoot a few successes with the help of flash in my back garden, but that was it.
Today though, it was a glorious day, classic autumn sunshine, with the soft golden light this afternoon. Even better, I had the afternoon off, so off I trotted to Shapwick Heath, one of the local nature reserves and one I frequent regularly and was so successful for otter sightings last year. I struck lucky quite early after arriving in mid-afternoon, as I had my best sighting of a kingfisher. It was a bit of a challenge for the autofocus, as there was alot of tree cover in front of it, with leaves and whole branches being blown in front of the bird. The focusing worked very well though, with a 100% success rate with the autofocus (much less with manual focus).

I was using the expanded point focus setting, which seemed fine for the static subject and wasn't fazed by the leaves and branches.

So my first real outing was deemed a success and so far, I'm happy with what I am getting. The noise seems an improvement over the 40D, if not a dramatic improvement, despite Adobe only providing early beta support for the camera.