Saturday was a cold, wet day in Northeastern PA, but I still managed to get in some test shots with the new Canon 7D. These were really the first shots I’d been able to take, excluding the few in my apartment that came after I unpacked the camera. There’s certainly nothing scientific about these photos – they’re test shots only in the sense that they’re the first time I really used the camera. And for me, that’s good enough – I’m much more interested in actual use images than I am in laboratory test images.
All of the following were shot RAW and processed to DNG using Adobe DNG Converter 5.5, which is currently the only third-party way of working with the 7D files. Since these are all shots I had an interest in keeping, they have been edited in Adobe Camera Raw, and again in Photoshop – but those edits are restricted to exposure, cropping, etc. There has been no cloning or noise reduction applied.
The first series continues my growing love for bird photography. These were taken through a kitchen window as songbirds visited the feeder outside – given the situation, I was even more impressed with how well they turned out. Photographed with the 7D + 70-300mm IS @ f/8, ISO 1250.
The second series comes from Salt Springs State Park, where we stopped to visit the llamas. Same post processing steps, same camera setup, except these were shot at f/5.6, ISO 400.
I am very pleased with these preliminary results. ISO 1250 is somewhere I’d rarely venture on the old 50D (and pretty much never on the 30D), yet on the 7D it looks very good. There is a low level of noise in the image, but as early reports stated, it looks more like fine film grain than digital noise. The level of feather detail that remains is even a bit of a surprise to me. Naturally, I’d expect the performance to decrease somewhat in a scene with deep shadows, but here in a well exposed image, I feel I can safely say that ISO 1250 is perfectly usable.
