Advice on Canon 7D

[Tony G]

I am using a 40D at the moment and was wanting to upgrade this Christmas. I would like a 5Dii but it will not fit into my budget. Can anyone pass on any advice on the 7D? Does anyone currently use one for aviation photography that can pass on what the results are like. I have read reviews on a few wedsites ( non aviation ) that say the photos are quite noisey with the cropped sensor.
My other thought was to go up to a 50d as my battery grip etc, will transfer over however the 7D has better features and later technology

Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you.

[Gareth Forwood]

Hi Tony,

I've been using a 7D for almost a year now, and I really love it. The noise has been the only issue with an otherwise amazing camera. I generally find that when the images are resized to 1600px, the noise is mainly an issue for me in the blue sky - if you know your way around photoshop this is really easy to correct. The noise can also be minimised by turning off the built-in sharpening, contrast etc settings.

I've never used the 50D but have also heard great things about it.

If you take a look at my JetPhotos shots (the link is in my signature) you'll get an idea of the quality its capable of. Most of the recent shots are from the 7D.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Gareth

[Tony G]

Thanks for your input Gareth. Awesome photos, I got caught up looking at them for over an hour. I dont have photoshop, I only use a house software disk that came with the 40D, I just crop and adjust the contrast when I need too, I may also level some photos out once in a while, lol, but im no photoshop expert. I'll do a little more research and go from there, i still have a few more weeks before i look to buy. At this stage the 7D is in front as it seems to be a better built camera ( stronger and better dust and moisture protection ) also having better and later technology. The only thing that concerns me is photo editing, with my 40d, I am very happy with the results and do not edit much, only as stated above. Do you find that you have to edit most of your shots due to noise?

[David Knudsen]

Hi Tony, I've also been using the 7D now for about a year (upgraded from 40D) and don't have a bad word to say about it! The noise issue I've read about doesn't seem to show on anything I've taken with it (I use it for a lot of other stuff other than aviation, but certainly it creates less noise than my 40D did, especially in time exposures) - if you're going to use the included software my advice would be to shoot in RAW and use Canon Digital Photo Professional to play with the images, it can offer some amazing results and adjustment ability.

As for the 5DII, I used one for about 2 weeks before I got my 7D including 4 days straight at the airport and while the results were amazingly sharp, the amount of vignetting when using my Canon 100-400, as well as the fairly slow fps meant that it wasn't as suitable for aviation use in my opinion.

[Tony G]

Thanks David. I appreciate your experience.