It's been a little under a week now with the Canon 7D in my hands and it's really reawakened my love of a good digital camera. For a while now I'd been babying my 30D, knowing that any frame could be its last. So I really hadn't been shooting much, instead using it as a backup even for my film education. Now with a new toy in my hands I've been shooting anything and everything.

Again with the digital reproduction

Not that I never did any post-processing magic with my film work; in fact I did a lot of it, but with digital I guess I'm not as reticent to take an image and divorce it from its original look. The first shot above, for instance, has a lot more contrast and black levels than it first looked and the clouds have been brought out with the aid of a grad filter tool - all in Lightroom.

And some in-camera quality

On the other hand, this shot -- one of many I took of this model -- I didn't do anything to other than some cropping and warming. It's sharp, there was tons of real estate to work with, and also lots of exposure room. What I expect from a pro camera body.

Need bigger cards

I mentioned previously the wall I hit with my existing CF cards. They simply are not big enough. 18mpx RAW files have made my 2gb and 4gb cards obsolete. It's not that I am going to fill them with video (though of course I will some times), it's just that 187 shots on a 4gb card during a model shoot isn't going to cut it. Yes, I can hear my film voice nagging me. That's more rolls of film than I've ever shot at one point. But that's a little like throttling a racecar because you're used to saving fuel. When you have the power, you use it. Now if I could only get some more track...

And again with the manual lenses

Now that I have a good digital again what do I do? I put on some of my old manual lenses. It's something I did to save money in the past and I still have the adapters. Unfortunately, I found that some of my M42 adapters have spacing issues. I don't know why yet but I seem to have lost infinity focus on my Carl Zeiss lenses. Time to research that. However, my Adaptall-2 lenses seem to be just fine. Back comes my favourite street lens: that old crappy but fast focusing Adaptall-2 28mm f/2.5. Feels great.

Night shots now with greater clarity

One of the most wonderful things about the 7D is the greatly expanded ISO range and quality. My late-great 30D went up to 3200 but really anything at 1600 or more was like a still grab from a bad security camera. This shot above here is at 2000 ISO. Very much usable. Grainy but not ugly. The 7D goes up to 6400 but from what I've seen anything past 2000 is just in aid of getting any image.

What's next?

What do you do when you've bought an expensive camera? Take it on the road, that's what. Be back on Monday with more tales and hopefully some pics.