Birds with the 7D

This is a quick summary of the 7D and Sigma 120-400OS at lunch time today, taking my 1 year old son for a walk around the local pond to feed the ducks (and seagulls, intimidating geese etc!)

Fundamentally, I was wandering around the small pond at Poole Park with a pack of muffins that were just out-of-date, my 7D and my son.  I stopped at various posts around the pond to throw bits of bread and attract the birds and take a few shots.  Oz (my son Oscar) was loving it until he fell asleep!

So, once again, this is not what the equipment is capable of in the best of circumstance, but more what the equipment is capable of with a bit of setting up before a shoot and then very little flexibility while shooting (have you ever tried throwing bread in one hand and shooting with a 400mm lens in the other?!!!).

I'd been doing some research about the 7D for BIF (Birds in Flight) shooting, and my initial setup was as follows:

• ISO 400 fixed (I've been using auto ISO for a while as it's fairly good ont he 7D, but the choice of shutter speed is usually not good for BIF).
• Aperture set to f8 - experience has shown that this lens is good at f8, not that good at f5.6 and I don't really want to use smaller apertures as it'll just reduce the shutter speed.
• Av mode - obviously if the aperture is fixed at f8 I can only be in manual or aperture priority - I didn't want to think about changing the shutter speed while learning what's good and what's not with the 7D/120-400 combination, so I let the camera do the work.
• Centre focus point with 4 assist points - the 7D has 5 (yes, 5) autofocus point modes, on top of the 3 drive modes, and a load of custom functions!  This is a truly configurable camera as far as AF is concerned, but if I'm going to decide what's good and what's not, the best way is to pick something and run with it, then assess the successes and failures and try to modify things for next time.
• AI servo mode (continuous auto-focus) - the birds are flying all over the place - no point in using one-shot AF.
• Although this lens has Optical Stabillsation, I switched this off as I was looking for high shutter speed shots (> 1/640s ideally, but hopefully up towards 1/1000s).

And on with the shots.  These first set are ones I actually like - they are a bit different to typical bird shos with gulls, ducks and geese, and have some action in:

 

  

  

And these further shots, while I'm not quite so excited about them, give a bit of a view of the capabilities of the camera/lens combo in the situation I described above:

 

  

  

  

  

 

With all these images, if you click on them you can see the original uploaded image, which is a scaled down version of the original (unless otherwise stated, I generally don't post 100% crops unless I'm trying to prove a point, but I also try to only post images that would view well at 100% crop).

Overall, I'm very pleased.  My shooting conditions wern't perfect, and I plan on repeating this with an appropriate helper throwing the bread so I can concentrate more on the birds themselves.  Considering the situation I was in (one handed shooting) I think I got some pretty good shots, and a few interesting ones that are a bit different from the normal flying gull shot I see quite regularly!