Tuesday, November 23, 2010

New camera and new lens

Much to my wife's disapproval, I bought myself a new camera (Canon 7D) and a new lens (Canon 50 mm f/2.5 compact macro), and added them to the ever growing Kenya trip bill...
Anyway this morning I had little time to try both. I began with ringing at Ashdod which was pretty slow and without any decent photography objects, results further down the post.
After ringing, I spent some time in the area trying the 7D with both my 400 and 500 lenses. I aimed mainly at tracking flying birds, to test the AF system. I was very impressed by its ability to stay locked on flying birds against responsive backgrounds. It was especially notable when I had birds flying against the sky and then dropping down against a different background. With my 40D I'd almost always lose the bird, but the 7D copes well with this and I got some promising results. This was a very preliminary test, and I really had no real photo-ops.

Grey Heron
The huge file size is a great advantage. I can easily crop the images quite violently and still have enough meat left. This is about 50% crop:

Little Egret
I know this is not ultra-sharp and overexposed, but I was really pleased with the AF system staying locked on the bird with all this mess in the background.

Northern Lapwing

Of course it works well with static birds too. Shifting between different AF settings is very easy and allows to shift between static and mobile objects very quickly.

Armenian Gull 1cy


The 50 mm f/2.5 macro is extremely sharp and produces very rich colours. I still need to master the art of macro photography. Especially difficult for me is to shift from the two-dimensional world of telephotography to three-dimensional birds. But with some practice and careful posing of the birds (if they cooperate) this lens should produce super in-hand images.

Stonechat

Bluethroat


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