I hope this isn't too off topic, but those of you who kindly helped me find a compact camera that I could take backpacking might want to see the results.
I was busy huffing and puffing to keep up with the teenage Boy Scouts, and didn't have much time to shoot, so please be forgiving. http://acuff.smugmug.com/gallery/3338164 has a lot of shots. Here are 3 I like: http://acuff.smugmug.com/gallery/3338164/1/186008539/Large http://acuff.smugmug.com/gallery/3338164/1/186030767/Large http://acuff.smugmug.com/gallery/3338164/1/186041150/Large Things I noticed about the G7 relative to my 1D Mark II: - I was worried about battery life, but used less than 2 batteries to come home with about 800 frames (with many more deleted in the field). The boot time was pretty quick, so I pretty much only turned it on to shoot, and then back off. I did use IS pretty much all the time, and the LCD (the optical viewfinder is really almost useless, and even when I tried to use it I got frustrated turning on the LCD to see/change settings like flash, exposure, and focus) - Size, weight, and handling worked well for me. The button feel and speed of response aren't up to the big 1D, but not as bad as I'd feared. It's too big for a shirt pocket, but a small Lowepro Z10 worked well. I ditched the stock neckstrap in favor of a soft wrist strap and that worked out well. - Quality of the results was kind of as expected. Unfortunately, many of the scenes were bright and high contrast, which it seems is the Achilles' heel of all the compacts. I was able to help matters by tweaking the exposure carefully, but there just isn't a lot of subtlety in the bright tones, at least compared to the 1D. Not having RAW made this tougher, and I did use the AEB function a fair bit. There is more "room" at the dark end. I was able to "bring up" the shadow part of this shot with PS: http://acuff.smugmug.com/gallery/3338164/1/186065825/Large - The flash worked well enough to use for fill on a number of heavily backlit shots, but not from any further than about 10 feet: http://acuff.smugmug.com/gallery/3338164/1/186035352/Large - IS worked very well, which is good since anything over 100 ISO does get yucky. I won't be selling the 1D because of it, but the little G7 works pretty well for a small guy (or, at least, so far; maybe I should reserve judgment until I see what the prints look like!) Thanks again to those who made suggestions. * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
