Canon 7D

The 7D will find a good home between the 50D and the 5D mark II however from the initial look of the spec sheet, the camera will not be so much of an upgrade that many 50D users will be tempted to upgrade. I imagine that a lot of professional sports and wildlife shooters will be looking to this camera because of its fast frame rate 8fps and the weather sealing that is offered, very comparable to the professional 1 series cameras for a fraction of the price.

Key features of the 7D will include:

• 18MP APS-C CMOS sensor
• 8 frames per second continuous shooting
• 1080p HD video recording with manual controls
• 3.0 inch Clear View II LCD screen with 920,000 dots
• 19-point AF system (all cross-type)
• 1.0x magnification and 100% coverage viewfinder
• Wireless flash control
• Environmental sealing

Press release via www.dpreview.com

Hands on preview via www.dpreview.com

This weekends, weekend one comes from the Sunday walking street market in Chiang Mai, Thailand. This market is a great place to spend some time and take photos, especially if you are there early and there is still a bit of light to use. After dark the vendors all use fluorescent lighting so there are still many photos to be had but fast lenses become increasingly important.

I also took 4 batteries with me. Usually this is more than enough by a factor of two. Four batteries will usually last me minimum of four days of shooting between charges and while I have never been in a situation that put me longer than four days between charges, this trip was nearly a challenge to this. However, not because charges were not available but because they are so expensive that one stops to think twice about charging batteries at the end of the day. Charges are so expensive in fact that a single battery charge in the mountains, will buy an aftermarket battery back home. Done differently I would have taken two extra batteries (a total of six) with me. I would rather pay the money and have an extra battery in my bag than have to pay $10 for a single battery charge.

One of the other pieces of gear that I experienced problems with on the trip was the  Foto File Traveler AW T-1 camera bag that I had been using for a number of years prior to the trip. To be honest I didn’t really know what I was getting into in the way of gear I would be having to carry personally. I found out the first day that the porters were far fitter than our group and had a tendency to be either way behind (talking with friends and family) or way ahead. This meant that I had to carry all of the gear that I wanted to use in the day myself.  This meant that I was carrying two camera bodies, five lenses, filters, batteries memory cards and other bits and bobs of camera gear. I also had to carry a jacket two liters of water and other things that I would need during the day. I had many of these strapped to the outside of the bag because the bag simply did not have enough room to accommodate everything. Long story short the bag failed. One of the shoulder straps began to rip off at the seam half way through the trip, and at the bottom three quarters of the way through. Thankfully the bag made it to the end of the trip in tack, only on the last day once we were back in Kathmandu did the strap finally break fully. I was not a problem but it could have potentially been a big problem, had it happened at the start of the trip, carrying that much gear on one shoulder would have been a nightmare. Not to mention putting twice the load on the other remaining strap.

The bag also failed to stand up to half a day of medium heavy snow. The in pack rain cover was quickly soaked through. Thankfully I had a dry bag with me which I placed over the bag to keep the snows from soaking through the pack. However the straps as such that they absorb water and send it dripping down into the top of the pack. My gear got a thorough soaking that day, thankfully the gear stood up to the soaking far better than the pack did.

So I guess I will be in search of a new pack in the next few months. I am not in too much of a hurry because I don’t have travel planed that will require more gear than the Lowepro Inverse AW100 that I am using for short day and weekend shooting. I have been hearing a lot of good things about Thinktank and Lowepro bags lately but I still have not completely discounted Fotofile. Their bags have shown a lot of improvement in the few years since I had purchased this bag. The quality and craftsmanship has gone way up, so they are not off the list just yet.

Monkey before the eyes at Monkey Temple, Kathmandu

Photographically speaking the trip was a mixed bag, some things went really well others offered more challenges than I had expected. I took a lot of photos during the trip, close to the full 20GB that I brought with me and some of the images I am very happy with while others I missed.  I think my biggest let down this trip was of photographing Mt. Everest. The mountain was covered with cloud for most of the trip and from all of the view points that we hiked to. The one exception was on the last day that we were to see Everest.

The original plan was to hike up Kalipatar early in the morning because our guide has said that this offered the best chance to catch Mt.Everest with no cloud cover. We set out at about six thirty but by the time we reached the summit of Katlipatar clouds had completely obscured the view. Not to mention the howling wind that blew through us chilling us to the bone.  Despite my earnest desire to stay and wait for better weather and conditions, I simply could not. Our group had to back off to the relative warmth of the valley below. That afternoon we watched the small sliver of Mt.Everest that would have been visible if clouds had not been obscuring it. All afternoon, nothing was visible.

At 7:00 I decided that I would abandon all hope of getting a good shot of Everest and decided to simply spend the remainder of the  day in the lodge. Just as the sun was going down and the light was getting good, the small band of cloud that had been hiding Mt.Everest all day, evaporated, leaving the mountain bathed in the last beautiful rays of the day. Unfortunately by this point I was still drinking tea in the lodge, and had not made the hour and a half trip to a higher vantage point where Everest would have been fully visible. The only photos that I was able to get were of the peak of Everest sticking out behind Mt. Nuptste.

I am quite fond of this photo but still wish I had managed to capture the full view of Mt.Everest. A quick browse through flickr or google images and you will see what I mean. The Everest with white fluffy clouds (but not the ones that cover the mountain) and the deep blue saturated skies is one of the images that I had set out to capture this trip. I think to do that I would need a few more days at Gorakshep, just camping and waiting for the right combination of weather, light and place.

Photography Gear:

I have decided to take nearly all my camera gear to Nepal. This is in large part because we have hired a porter for this trip due to the altitude I won’t have to carry anything other than a jacket, my own water and my camera gear. The rest of my gear will be pawned off on one of the porters who are far more fit and able in the mountains than I.

Bodies: Canon 50D, Canon 350D
Lenses: Canon 10-22 f4-5.6
            Canon 24-105 f4 L
            Canon 200 f2.8
            Sigma 105 f2.8 macro

I was going to leave the macro lens behind but have since read that the wild flowers will be in full swing during the trip so I have decided to pack it and see.

I will also be taking a set of Cokin ND grad filters, a set of four batteries for each camera, 20GB worth of CF cards.
All will be carried in a fotofile photography bag because I will be able to carry additional items in this as well as the basic camera gear.

I will be taking a tripod but will not be carrying it myself and it will only be used when I am stopped at the end of each day. I do hope to get some spectacular sunsets on the mountains and will need the tripod to be able to get the sharpest photos possible.

In addition to the camera gear I will also be testing out some new outdoor gear that makes my life a lot more easy when I am shooting. I will do a review of some of the gear that I will be using on the trip and what has worked for me and what has not when I return.

Over the course of the last week I had been increasingly worried about the low battery life on my new 50D. I would charge the battery and by the end of a day of light shooting, it would be nearing the end of it’s life. I was starting to think that I had a bad battery, having bought an after market battery for the camera, but the problem would persist with the Canon battery that came with the camera as well.

It turns out that the camera comes with the default setting of having “Auto Power Off” set to never. This in turn drains the battery when the camera is not switched off manually. For someone like me who rarely or never turns the camera off while I am out shooting this can be a particularly troubling issue.

To change the default setting, enter the camera menu, under the first camera tools menu (the yellow one with the wrench) there is an option to change the auto power off settings. I have set mine to four minutes, the camera will power down and go into standby. It will come back to life on the first push of the shutter button. This ensures that you will not miss shots fiddling with the power on switch in the back and it has solved the battery life issues.

I still don’t know how much life I get out of a battery , after changing the auto power off setting, I have gone from a single day of light shooting to a week with the battery registering as fully charged.

I hope this helps with what I consider to be a major concern with this camera.

So what do I think of the camera? I won’t go into a full review that has already been done, in far more depth and far better then I ever could. What I will say is that the 50D is a joy to use. The buttons are all in the right places, the menu is easy to navigate and the camera, unlike the 350D does not feel too small in my hands.
Image quality has so far been a bit confusing, with huge file sizes it is very hard to make judgements on noise. The camera seems to have a bit more noise than the 350D at similar ISOs. However when viewing photos you have to keep in mind that the file sizes are huge and the noise levels at similar file sizes is much better. The noise also has a very soft feel and looks much better than digital noise I am use to. It looks very similar to film grain and has a very appealing effect.

The other thing I was surprised by was how few shots I got from the camera. The huge files sizes also function to reducing a 4gb cf card to 180 or so shots. This means that extended shoots with this camera will need a lot more memory than I had previously been using.

So far I have been very pleased with this camera and I imagine that I will be pleased for years to come as I tend to hold on to bodies for much longer than the current market cycle.

One thing that has been reinforced by this purchase is how little quality difference is made by an upgrade of bodies in comparison to and upgrade in lenses. When I traded my 70-300 f4-5.6 lens for the 200mm f 2.8 L, the jump in image quality was unbelievable.  I would highly recommend getting good glass before getting concerned that the newest camera has five more mega pixels or a boost in ISO.