Beach Walk with the 7D

Perhaps because its firmware had just be upgraded, I naturally picked up the 7D this morning for a walk around the beach.  Although some are saying that focusing is quicker with firmware 2.0.0, if so, I didn’t notice it.  This is not to say that focusing is slow with the 7D, I just did not notice a change.  In fact, this morning, I did not notice any changes at all from the firmware upgrade.

Perhaps I was really just walking although I did grab a few shots using the 70-200 mm zoom – my usual choice for walking the beach. 

For this shot, I was wishing for the 100-400mm zoom at max zoom; instead, this image is cropped to about 1/4 of the frame.  This just goes to show what you can get away with so long as the display is on screen over the ‘net.

While walking, I suddenly realized that a dolphin was surfacing and grabbed a few shots – again wishing for a longer lens but with considerable cropping turned out OK.

None of these are particularly outstanding shots but, with the walk, made for a pleasant morning.

PAW 47

 

Although in fits of sprinkles, the rain fell just often enough that I cowered under a roof on a pier instead of taking the long beach walk that was planned.  While waiting, I practiced my BIF (Birds in Flight) photography without much success.  Eventually I noticed this nice,  even though somewhat static, scene and zoomed the 100-400mm lens on the 7D to this composition.  The result was processed from RAW in ACR but otherwise pretty much untouched and not cropped.

To some, this may be a cluttered picture but to me this is a vertical format with a horizontal top.  The horizontal portion is another pier in the background and a bridge even farther in the background.

7D around the Harbor

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I took the 7D and 70-200mm IS f2.8 for an early morning walk around the beach and harbor hoping for a few good shots in addition to a practice session. The image above was the very first shot and is the in-camera JPEG. I’ve decided that I prefer the “Landscape” profile instead of the “Standard” profile. The difference as indicated by the menu is only one more notch of sharpness for Landscape but it seems to me that there are additional differences. Anyway, all these shots were taken with the Landscape profile.

Although the sky was rapidly brightening, a part of the harbor was still somewhat dark so I was tinkering with various ISO, aperture and shutter speeds. A few birds were flying so I increased the shutter speed to 1/800 and tried my hand at BIF (which I learned only recently is “Bird in Flight”!) without much success. The shot below was taken at ISO 400, f8 and 1/800 using AI Servo. Unfortunately, it is about 2 stops underexposed so I decided to push the exposure in the recently released ACR 5.6 RAW converter. The result was quite noisy so Noiseware was applied to reduce the noise. The resulting cropped shot below probably represents ¼ the original image size. Not very good but at least somewhat usable.





Later that morning, I came across some fishermen cleaning their catch and attracting many Brown Pelicans. This became a very active shooting session with many quick shots and much movement. All in all, I was more satisfied with the 7D than with my own skills.

The shots above and below would be more impressive if cropped but give an idea of the scene quickly developing in front of me. I was literally just swinging the 7D to my eye and pressing the shutter button.

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