Sunday was one of those rare autumn days where the weather completely defied the forecast and turned from drearily cold to sunny and inviting. I had the good fortune to spend the day at Ricketts Glen State Park with my friend Mike, who had brought his camera club up from New York City for a bit of rural adventure. We were lucky enough to have the tour bus drop us all off at the top, letting us take the easier option of hiking down the falls, where the bus would be waiting at the bottom.
The weather began clearing at the same time that we started down the trail. The elevation of Ricketts Glen meant that there was snow at the top of the trail, which provided us with some of those iconic snow & foliage images that happen all to rarely. However, by the time we really started down the gorge, most of the snow had melted off, or never managed to collect at all. Still, a dozen waterfalls and brightly colored leaves are a combination that’s hard to beat, and I ended up with several shots I am very pleased with.
The combination of the new 7D and Slik tripod worked out very, very well. The Slik is all the tripod I’ll ever need and does its job very well. The legs are tight and don’t flop open or closed and it is rock solid. I used it extensively, since most of my exposures were a second or more in length. Had I been willing to lay down on the wet rocks, I could have gotten even lower than I did.
The 7D also met all my expectations. Aside from some quick shots I posted earlier, this was its first “trial by fire.” I used the 28-135mm IS & 17-40mm lenses throughout the day, and since I was working with waterfalls, nearly all my exposures were taken at ISO 100\ and f/8 – f/16. A combination of a polarizer and ND filters helped extend the exposures past 1 second.
Focus, metering, and performance were all excellent. (There were only a few occasions when the auto-focus selection didn’t get the spot I wanted, in which case I switched to manual point selection.) I started out using my wireless remote, but soon found it difficult to juggle the remote, tripod, and camera between locations, so I switched to just using the 2-second timer, along with the mirror lock up. (If I was going to be more stationary, I’d have stuck with the remote, which worked fine.)
The only problem I encountered came when I attempted to used a second ND filter in conjunction with the other two. The combination of all three filters threw off the white balance and resulted in a strong red color cast throughout the entire image. Attempting to correct for this with a user-defined Kelvin setting was only partially successful. Taking a custom white balance might have worked as well, but instead I just removed the second ND filter, since it wasn’t having that much of an effect on the exposure time anyway. Once removed, the default Cloudy white balance once more worked correctly.
Battery life during the day was excellent – four hours of shooting – most of them long exposures with mirror lock-up – still left me with over 75% battery power, according to the battery info screen. While I initially lamented the change to the new battery pack, I have to say, it really does seem to be an improvement in terms of power capacity and usage.
Since all of the day’s shooting took place at ISO 100 or 200, I can’t report on noise performance. At the settings I used, noise wasn’t an issue, which is what we’d all expect. I can say that I very much like the look of the images capture with the camera, and I do feel that they are an improvement over previous models.
On a final note, the increased megapixel count does eat into storage space. If you haven’t guessed it yet, 18mp reduces your shot count per memory card; my 8GB card now yields about 300 shots, depending on the circumstances. The greater implication here is that any card under 4GB in size becomes almost useless in any sort of serious shooting situation. I’d say that 4GB is the smallest size you should buy; if you plan to do wedding or commercial work, don’t bother with anything smaller than 8GB, with 16GB being an even better choice.
