White-tailed Deer and Bald Eagles

It's probably not surprising but whenever a new lens or camera body comes into your kit it seems that particular item is almost always chosen fur use until the novelty wears off. This has certainly been the case with the EOS 7D Mark II body I picked up last month. With the exception of one brief sunset I've not used my 5D Mark III bodies.

Yesterday and today saw the 7DII used for the purpose I acquired it, with the 70-300mm lens at 300mm. First, some backyard White-tailed Deer from yesterday. These are not cropped at all. The deer heard the shutter sound between the first and second shots. You can listen to the 10 frame per second shutter sound of the 7DII here. It slows down toward the end as the camera's buffer fills.

This morning I headed out to the Bald Eagle nest with the same setup. Apparently, sometime after last Friday (when the nest was empty) an egg or eggs were laid and are now being incubated. Now I have months of watching the nest to look forward to. These shots are 100% crops.

A Slow Start to March

It's been over two weeks since my last blog post and it's past time to get March started. But, while I've been shooting a bit here and there, no single outing warranted the space and effort. So, I'll combine a bunch of stuff into one post.

Continuing with the gear theme of the last post, I'm happy with the 7D Mark II decision although I haven't really had a chance to use it with any real intent. Here is what the eagle nest will look like with the 7DII and 70-300mm lens at a 100% crop.

Contrast that with an image from the same lens and one of my 5d Mark III bodies cropped to the same 1500x1000 resolution.

By the way, it's about time for the eagles to be incubating eggs on the nest. The 7DII photo was from Friday, May 8th.

My Photographer's Ephemeris app indicated that, from my usual vantage point, the sun would be setting behind the Peebles Island water tower on March 1st. Even though the sunset was not a good one I headed down to document it. Here is a shot with the 5D Mark III and 70-300mm lens at 200mm.

And, finally, here is the latest layout of my ThinkTank backpack with both 5DIII bodies and the 7DII. I picked up a Canon 50mm f/1.8 STM to use with the 24mm pancake lens on the 7DII with its built in flash for things like family gatherings, etc. And, my attempts to sell the Tamron 45mm lens not having born fruit, it's back in the bag.

Another New Beginning

There are those times when something just grabs you and you're excited about photography again. It can happen with some really great results. It can also happen when, after spending a lot of time and energy researching gear options, you come to a decision and move ahead with your plan.

With respect to gear options, I've felt this way numerous times. When I got my first full frame DSLR, an original Canon EOS 5D. Then I had two of them.

Then, after upgrading to a 5D Mark II, then selling it and going to a pair of crop sensor 7D bodies, it happened again when I got my first 5D Mark III. It happened once more when I got a second 5D Mark III and sold lower level crop sensor bodies.

The 5D Mark III is a great camera for most everything. Especially if you have a lot of expensive long, fast lenses. I don't have a lot of long, fast lenses.

So, the 5D Mark III is not something to drool over when thinking about field sports or wildlife (without long, fast, expensive lenses). I spent the past week or so trying to figure out how to most efficiently improve my ability to shoot sports and wildlife.

A Sigma 150-600mm lens was considered. It's really large and not at all fast. The Canon 100-400mm lens, with the option of an extender, was considered. A bit too expensive, even used. Plus, that would mean using one of my 5D Mark III bodies, with it's six frames a second shooting.

I considered Rebel level crop sensor bodies for the 1.6x lens field of view lengthening factor but even though those bodies are inexpensive new, they all have some fatal flaw which ruled them out. So, finally, I decided that what I needed was a 7D Mark II to go with my 5D Mark III bodies.

These two cameras are remarkably similar in design and control layout. They differ mostly in the fact that the 5D Mark III is a 22 megapixel full frame camera and the 7D Mark II is a 20 megapixel crop sensor camera. But, the 7D Mark II is super weather sealed, has amazing autofocus and shoots at 10 frames per second.

Because the 7D Mark II is now about 5 years old, used copies of the camera are now a less expensive alternative than any of the alternatives I had been contemplating. So, once I made my decision, I checked out eBay and found a seemingly good looking 7D Mark II being sold by a camera store in Indianapolis.

The pictures didn't show much but the description said "heavy LCD scratches." Scratches on the LCD will not effect image making in any way and it's not a really big fix since what is scratched is a covering over the LCD not the electronic device itself. Plus, they have a 30 day return policy.

I should have the camera on Monday. Here is a shot of the LCD from the eBay listing which, as you can see, doesn't really show much.

You can check out side by side comparisons of the 5D Mark III and 7D Mark II here and here.

UPDATE 2/25/19: The camera arrived today and is in fantastic condition. There are no scratches anywhere that I can see. The body is in better shape than either of my two 5D Mark III bodies. And, the shutter count is less than 25,000 out of a rated 200,000.

😁