Out on a limb

In preparation for our upcoming trip to Alaska, I rented a just-released Canon 7D Mark II camera. I'm hoping the 7D will allow me to capture more "keeper" images of the bald eagles (it will also be nice to have a second camera body on hand in case one of them fails for some reason).  The main reason for our trip is to see the naturally-occurring gathering of bald eagles along the Chilkat River just outside of Haines.  My 5D Mark II camera is not the best at capturing high-speed action (like eagles flying through the air), so I decided to give the 7D Mark II a try.  It has a much more advanced autofocus system than my 5D and shoots a lot more frames per second.  I've already had the camera for a couple of days and I've been trying it out on some of the local critters, like this squirrel in Grand Portage State Park.  It was my first opportunity photographing an animal with the camera and I think it performed quite well.  

The autofocus is indeed quick and should be a lot more accurate with its 65 autofocus points (compared to 9 in my 5D).  In fact, the limiting factor here is my budget-minded Tamron 150-600 lens.  The Tamron needs really good light and good technique to produce exceptionally sharp images.  I think I did a pretty good job with this squirrel.  The light wasn't the greatest, but it wasn't the worst either.  I shot this image at 600mm and ISO 1000 with the lens aperture set to f/8.  A lot of people have been curious about the image quality of the 7D Mark II, especially at ISO's above 800.  With this image, shot at ISO 1000, I'm very impressed with the image quality.  There seems to be very little noise at this ISO setting.  Even up to 1600 it seems to be quite acceptable.  The camera has a native ISO range of up to 16,000 but I haven't tried anything above 1600 yet.  I am really anxious to get up to Alaska and give this camera a try on all the eagles!