Sam curled up and slept on my lap as I watched a documentary about the Druid wolf pack in Yellowstone. He woke when they showed some noisy ravens on a wolf kill and stood transfixed before the television, something I’ve not seen from him before. Suddenly wolves dashed across the screen and he jumped up and swatted madly at them. His claws were retracted so I let him have his fun attacking wolves and coyotes and elk and bison and all the animals of that great land.

Finally, exhausted from the hunt, he settled back down to sleep on my legs. The documentary didn’t flinch from the brutality of the wolves to other animals and neighboring wolf packs, but even so, I hope for their sake they never have to face my little hunter. Particularly if I were to let slip the lie that they’re the reason he has to get his flea treatments.

These pictures are the first I’ve taken using the live view on the back of the camera instead of the optical viewfinder, something I can’t do with my older cameras. The live view allowed me to lower the camera to his eye level as he slept on my legs and get a much more intimate portrait.

I was off for two weeks over Christmas and spent most every day at Ridgefield, arriving near sunrise and leaving near sunset. I hadn’t originally planned to spend all my time there, but each day brought something new and I had great fun taking advantage of the fog, frost, wind, sun, rain, and even a little snow.

It was also a good time to better learn my Canon 7D, which until now I had been shooting mostly like my dear departed 20D. I brought the camera manual with me each day so I could read it during slow times or bad light and ended up reading it cover-to-cover and started playing with the new features.

When not at the refuge, I started some upgrades necessitated by the new camera. First up was a large and fast memory card which makes the camera a lot more fun to use. Next up was a large external hard drive to deal with the camera’s huge files. Finally I got a portable hard drive for off-site backups. An unanticipated upgrade was a new wireless router, the old one started needing daily reboots, but it also has many nice new features which we are enjoying.

Sadly there is another unanticipated upgrade to come, during my daily Ridgefield trips I realized my 1.4X teleconverter is not working right, optically it’s OK but I have to underexpose by a stop. And then I usually forget to reset the exposure when I take the converter off, meaning I end up with a lot of severely underexposed pictures. So replacing that will bump some other upgrades down the priority scale.

The teleconverter is one of my oldest pieces of camera equipment still in use as it goes back to my early photography days. My camera bag is also of a similar vintage and is still going strong despite some problems. These two pieces of gear have been with me on every trip and every hike for the past fifteen years so I’m a little attached to them. Another piece of old gear, my telephoto zoom, still works but will need to go in for servicing sometime soon.

But I had a relaxing two weeks at the refuge and saw otters just about every day for the first week but rarely got off a picture. On this day I had seen them further up and waited in the car in a spot where I had a good view into the water and people had plenty of room to go by. But right as they swam into view, another photographer came speeding up, left their noisy car running, and jumped out to take pictures. Before the otters fled I got off some quick pictures as they surfaced to eat the fish they had caught, but they remain one of my white whales.

Sam and Emma underneath the Christmas tree, a slightly calmer scene than yesterday. I was going to title yesterday’s post “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”, but since I recently got a nice new camera I couldn’t do it in good conscience.

Today’s cameras really are remarkable. I took both of these pictures tonight, handheld, with the Christmas tree lights providing the only illumination. I decided to try the 7D at ISO 3200 and used the image stabilization in the lens to compensate for the slow shutter speed.

Another flash test with Scout, also bounced off the ceiling as fill-flash.

One of the things I like about my new camera is the battery system, which is both more accurate and more detailed about how much life is left in the battery. All of my previous cameras used the same battery system, which had three indicators:

1. Your battery is full
2. Your battery is about to die
3. Your camera is shutting down

A slight exaggeration, but not by much. The new battery is one of the nice little touches to the 7D that doesn’t make the headlines.

The downside of course is that I can’t use the same batteries from my old cameras, and I found out this morning just how painful that could be. After visiting Ridgefield last weekend, I left the battery in the camera during the week so I could take pictures of the pets. Last night I put it in the charger but went to bed before it finished.

As you may have guessed by now, I got up before sunrise this morning to go back out to Ridgefield, arrived at the refuge and realized the 7D’s battery was still sitting in its charger. At home, 30 minutes away.

Sigh.

There’s a reason I get my camera gear together the night before I go hiking, a morning person I am not. On the plus side, I did bring my old Canon 10D along, so I wasn’t completely dead in the water. And water there was, it rained hard the entire time I was there.

It reminded me of a time years ago when I was in grad school and not long after I had gotten my first tripod. On a day hike in nearby West Virginia, I forgot my tripod and ended up missing a nice shot of a bat hanging in a tree. On my next trip, eager to avoid the same mistake, I checked, double-checked, and triple-checked that I packed the tripod before leaving.

Yet when I got to West Virginia, I realized I had brought the tripod, yet left the camera at home.

I haven’t had much time for blogging or learning the new camera with NaNoWriMo going on this month (after a slow start I’m currently at 44,195 words and barring unforeseen mishaps should cross the 50,000 word finish line before Monday).

I did make sure the hot shoe worked by hooking up my flash and using it as fill-flash on one of my favorite subjects, sleeping in front of our biggest picture window with a bit of fall color behind her.

When I look at the picture, I’m reminded of two things:

1. How much I love my black-and-white cat
2. How much I need to clean the window

After receiving my new camera last week and playing around with some shots of our cat Sam, I didn’t have a chance to do much more with it until Saturday. I got up before the sun to head out to my favorite park, Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, to break the camera in under more demanding conditions. Of course, since I hadn’t had time to read the manual any further, I knew better than to try and play around with any of the complicated new settings.

But so much on the camera is different than my other cameras, even some simple things weren’t so simple.

Once I got there, I realized right away that the autofocus was still linked to the shutter button, something I disable immediately on all my cameras. Since even the menu system on the camera is completely different than my past three, it took me a while to find the custom function to disable it. The new camera has a dedicated autofocus button on the back, which I like, but my muscle memory isn’t yet trained to reach for it instead of another nearby button, although I did get a bit better as the day went along.

And then there’s the three buttons on top that set six functions on the camera. Those same three buttons are on the 7D, and the six functions are still there, but now they’re mapped in different ways to the buttons.

Alrighty then! Another muscle memory issue that will make switching between the 7D and 10D not as seamless as I’d like.

But the biggest problem I had was that the mode dial kept changing on its own. So while I mostly shoot in aperture priority mode, once I found it in shutter priority mode, and once in program mode. It’s either a lot easier to bump into the next position than my old cameras, or I just had bad luck, but that’s something I’m going to need to keep an eye on.

But the rest of the body features have been tickling my fancy.

When I first arrived at the refuge, it was a bit foggy but near-in visibility was fine. Halfway through the auto tour a whole family of river otters moved from one lake to another right in front of my car. Couldn’t manage any pictures, but still a nice welcome to the refuge after a six month absence.

Shortly thereafter a small flock of yellow-ish birds flew beside the car but my brain couldn’t pick up the ID. Eventually the rusty gears kicked into motion and I realized they were western meadowlarks. By this time they were a bit further off, but I was able to make an environmental portrait of this one on the teasel. Part of my confusion may have been rust, but part may have been that I’m not sure I’ve seen them in nonbreeding plumage before. The brown V that separates the yellow of its chin and chest will turn a conspicuous dark black in the spring and through the breeding season, so I was thrown for a bit.

The meadowlark is the state bird of Oregon, selected by schoolchildren in 1927, although I believe there have been efforts to change it. While I have seen them in Oregon, this one is from Washington, whose state bird is a different kind of yellow, the American goldfinch.

After photographing my state bird in another state, I started laughing quietly as I continued on the auto tour, and then couldn’t stop laughing. Normally a sign of either lack of sleep or impending mental collapse, but in this case it was camera induced. While photographing the meadowlark, I held the shutter down for the normal time, intending to take a few frames, but the 7D shoots at 8 frames per second and rattled off a whole sequence, catching me offguard.

One pleasant surprise is how much quieter and softer the shutter sound is on the 7D compared to the 20D. When I went from the 10D to the 20D, the harsher shutter sound of the 20D was about the only drawback, so I’m happy to be back to a quieter sound. And since the 7D’s shutter (and mirror) are working a lot harder than on my previous cameras, I definitely tip my hat to the engineers at Canon for this one.

After finally seeing raccoons again, but far enough off that I could only make an environmental portrait, I assumed it wasn’t going to be a great day for close-ups. And I was OK with it, as it was fun to be back at one of my favorite haunts, and I had already come across snow geese, the first time I’ve ever seen them there, plus the raccoons and the otters.

But then I saw a hunting heron snag a vole near the road, came across the biggest flock of female redwings I’ve ever seen, and finally saw a raccoon up close for my best pictures yet of this common but elusive (for me) species, then a female canvasback close to the road.

One other thing became clear: I’m going to need to get new memory cards, and soon. Even my 8GB card filled up in no time, and my once large 2GB cards now seem comically small. And the huge files are making my MacBook cry for mercy.

But yeah, I think I’m going to love this camera.

I worked from home today so that I could greet the UPS man who was bringing my new camera, the Canon 7D. He arrived in the afternoon and after letting the battery charge up, I wanted to take some trial pictures to make sure the camera was working. There wasn’t much light from outside and I didn’t want to mess with external flash yet, so I used our normal room lighting. Of course I chose my favorite target in this lighting, our cat Sam, who was sleeping on top of the cat tree. His orange fur is a good match to the warm color of the overhead lamp, which lets me leave the color balance rather warm.

I started reading the manual a bit but some of the new features jumped out at me without needing to turn a page. One is the nice big LCD on the back, my previous cameras had a 1.8″ screen with 118,000 points and the new one has a 3.0″ screen with 920,000 points. Very noticeable difference, even at a quick glance, and one of the smaller touches I’m looking forward to enjoying down the road.

One drawback to using such a new camera is that the converter that I typically use (Adobe Camera Raw) doesn’t support it yet, and I’ve never been too good at using the one Canon supplies, so I played around with a new one tonight, Raw Photo Processor. I can’t say I’m comfortable with it but a passable first attempt at my sleepy kitten.

I took time tonight to do some writing, even with a siren tempting me across the room, and while I’m not caught up yet in NaNoWriMo, at least I didn’t lose any more ground.