Just About Ready To Buy A 7D...

[Lance Warley]

...and I'm wondering if anyone would paste a link to a thread that probably already exists about BPN'ers experiences with the 7D, especially with settings for bif?

I did find this excellent article by Greg Basco, with a photo by Doug Brown: http://www.deepgreenphotography.com/blog/?p=226

Any recommendations/thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[DickLudwig]

Lance, Greg's blog should answer your questions it did mine.

[Doug Brown]

Actually, both the photo and the article are mine. I wrote the setup guide and let Greg publish it on his site.

[Lance Warley]

Thanks, guys.

Superb article, Doug. Thanks for taking the time.

[Fabs Forns]

Lance, I'm getting one tomorrow :)

[Markus Jais]

I've set up my 7D as Doug described it in his article and it works very well for me.
Don't expect 100% keepers, that doesn't work for BIF but the results are very good (I use mostly the central sensor with the 4 sensors next to it or Zone AF with the central 9 sensors). My keepers rate is much higher than with the 40D. I even get very sharp results when using the 1.4x on my 4/500 but the percentage of sharp images is lower than without the extender.

Markus

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Markus nailed it. I migrated from a 40D to 7D as well.

I have read Greg's config article and used most of the settings.

[Greg Basco]

Hi to all. Just wanted to clarify that the article (both text and photos) are by Doug Brown. Thanks so much to Doug for letting me publish his great guide on my blog, and I'm glad that so many people have found it useful.

Cheers,
Greg Basco

[Don Hamilton Jr.]

Lance, you'll be a happy camper for sure, we've met before out at Waco! 7D is an awesome camera, especially after i followed Doug's Setup! I'm currently usinf the one center AF point/sensor!
One question for you guys, are you saying you are shooting more of you BIF, using the Expanded AF central with top bottom, left and right sensors activated... Thks don

[Markus Jais]

Don, when there is a good change that I can keep the central sensor on the bird (for example when a bird if flying directly towards me) I prefer the central sensor only.
With some bird it is not as easy to keep the central sensor on the bird, for example with some gulls or fast flying kestrels. In those cases I had good results with the central sensor and AF point expansion (using the 4 sensors next to the central sensor, too) or with the Zone AF using the central 9 sensors.
This does not work very well with swimming birds. In those cases it is easy to have one sensor (often the lowest one) on the water and then the 7D may focus on the water and the bird will be OOF.

Markus

[Jack Faller]

Many thanks to Doug for the recommended 7D settings. I've had a 7D for two days and having some guidelines has really been helpful. The setting for AF tracking sensitivity [CFnIII-1 to slow] was particularly useful. The settings that disable the first two entries for AF point selection [CFnIII-6] also make the operations of AF point selection more sensible.