Canon 7D Field Review Antarctica
December 2nd, 2009 | Author: admin
I´m working my way through 10.000+ images (and some HD-video clips) taken with the Canon 7D on my recent photo expedition to Antarctica. This expedition was not meant as a test evaluation of the 7D, but the 7D was used together with the 5D Mark II and 1DS Mark III to get the best possible images overall. This expedition with the Canons, was mainly for stock agencies, magazines, books and fine art prints. I didn’t have the opportunity to test all of the different settings of the 7D such as ISO values, AF settings, and many of the other features. I used the 7D to get great images. For me there were four extremely important issues I wanted to check with the 7D:
1) Weather sealing – Would the 7D survive the rough conditions with rain, snow, sand, sea water and wind of the Antarctic climate?
2) Autofocus – Is the 7D AF system really fast and accurate, and does it perform in difficult lighting conditions with fast moving birds?
3) HD-Video – How does the 7D HD-video option operate in the field?
4) Image quality – How does the 7D perform compared to Canon 5D Mark II and 1DS Mark III?
I’ll break my 7D field review into these four articles, instead of one very large article.
OJL
Thanks to Bob Baillargeon for copy-editing!
10 Responses to “Canon 7D Field Review Antarctica”
Leave a Reply
1st June – Sandwich Terns
30th May – Avocets
thanks for your blog! it’s very interesting
I have a question for you
what about the 5D Mark II weather sealing? I’m hesitate between 1D Mark III and it, but I read many times the 5D
Mark II weather sealing is very bad :/ what your opinion about that?
(sorry for my bad English it’s not my native language )
Gaël (from France
)
Please do the AF and IQ part of the review first … this is the part of the review I am looking forward to
Hi
If anyone have comment on this please share youre thoughts.
I use flickr for backup, so in case of my house burn down/all my harddrives goes bad I have a backup.
I only use flickr for private backup and not sharing like facebook.
I feel that flickr is the most safe, in terms of backup and privacy, since it is owned by yahoo. Feel free to comment, just my thoughts.
Question.
Now video backup on flickr is not that great, so what are the good options for video bakcup, as flickr is for images ?
Ill be happy to pay for the service, only if it safe has flickr.
Has a professional what do you think about flickr as backup for images, and what are you using for video.
Hi Viking
I recommand you to buy another external harddrive and back-up all your stills and video, and store this harddrive somewhere else (family, work, friends or bank). That is in my opinion the best back-up solution. For HD-video you can also upload to ie. Vimeo (www.vimeo.com)
Best regard
Ole Jørgen
Hi Gael
I will answer this question very soon when writing about the weather sealing etc. on 7D……
OJL
Thanks
@Viking,
you can also look at Smugmug. I use that site and i think its much better than Flickr.
I like the admins suggestion. Depending on the amount of data you need to back up. Get a cheap docking port that holds internal drives as external drives. Buy a 1gb drive and back up to that. Then keep off site. If your needs are bigger and you want some added protection I sprung for a drobo pro and use acronis to do differential archives. It also allows for one or two disk failures while still maintaining data integrity. With iscsi it’s pretty fast too.
Looking forward to the rest of your review. Any timeline for posting?
Hi Ole,
I read your review so many times until now, it’s really great!
I’ve a question: I’ll be in Lapland (Finland) in middle january and I’ll use my 7D to take the most shots I can, how did you set up the WB?
Did you choose one of the standard settings or did you create your own setting?
Many thanks in advance!
Best regards
Angelo (from Italy)
My 7D stopped working in -30 C, according to an associate. I have yet to test this myself. I’m curious how cold the conditions were you were shooting in and if you noticed any issues.