White-tailed Deer on Peebles Island

I've shot a lot of deer on Peebles Island and lately I usually just wave and walk past looking for Eagles or something out of the ordinary. Today, though, I used the deer as subjects to test out the image quality of my EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II lens with the EF extender 1.4x II with the EOS 7D.

I've decided that the image quality with the EF extender 2x II is not good enough to use on a regular basis and have taken that out of my bag. The 1.4x extender is sharper but it's borderline quality as to whether it's worth it or not. I'll keep it in the bag for unique occasions but don't expect it to see a lot of use. I actually find it more useful for extreme closeups than to bring distant objects closer.

Autumn is a great time to shoot deer as the colors in the environment are warmer and antlers are at their peak. Here are three shots from this morning. The first two shots were landscape orientation compositions cropped to a 3x4 ratio portrait orientation composition. The third is only cropped from 2x3 to 3x4 format. I actually had to back off the zoom to get the deer in the frame. I would have had a better quality photo without the extender.

The first one is yet another example of how I remain used to my long lenses being single focal length lenses and keep forgetting to zoom out to the long end. If I had zoomed out I would have been at 280mm and would not have had to crop as much. The background and foreground would also have been more out of focus.

215mm, f/4, 1/125 sec., ISO 400

280mm, f/4, 1/180 sec., ISO 100

155mm, f/4, 1/125 sec., ISO 100