Last week I went on my first photo safari.  I've posted my final photos from the trip and wanted to share a few thoughts from the experience.

The Safari

The photo safari was the 4-day "Wildlife of the West Kootenays" provided by Canada Photo Safaris.  It was a donated safari to support the Woodland Park Zoo's Jungle Auction.

I could go on and on about how impressed I was with the guide, Paul Stone, but really the photos speak for themselves.  He repeatedly put us in positions with great lighting and great animals.  We were dealing with wild animals, and yet he was able to say things like, "we're going to this place at this time, and there will be beautiful golden light on the field with deer walking through it" or "we're going to put out some apples here and we'll see a bear" and more often than not that's exactly what would happen.

I was impressed enough with the trip that I'm eyeing the other safaris that Paul offers, like the Ultimate Grizzly Safari.

The safari was based out of Grand Forks, which is ~2.5 hours north of the Spokane airport, so if you live in the Pacific Northwest it's a very accessible safari.  I only took 2 days of vacation to do it.

SeeHorse Inn

If I visit Grand Forks again, I'm staying at the SeeHorse Inn again.  The view was incredible, but the most amazing thing was Sylvia's cooking.  Seriously, if you ever stay there, pay Sylvia whatever it takes to get her to make you her Doukhabor Borscht dinner.  It was so good that as I type this blog entry, I am trying to reconstruct the recipe based on some info I found on the web.  Her bread, home-made wine, and apple pie were also incredible complements to the main course.

The Canon 7D

I got the Canon 7D just in time for this trip.  Prior to this trip I had used the Canon 20D for 5 years.

Given all the secondary features (better screen, 8 frames per second, integrated sensor cleaning, etc.) the 7D is a worthwhile upgrade from the 20D.  I thought I wouldn't care for 18 megapixels, but I've gotten addicted to how much I can crop my images and still have a usable photo.

The one thing I wanted from the 7D was significantly better ISO performance than the 20D, and the jury is still out on whether this is the case.  Here's an example of an ISO 1600 image (with the background cleaned up with NeatImage), and here's an ISO 6400 image (not cleaned up at all).  The camera is definitely no 5D Mark II when it comes to noise performance, but I was grateful that ISO 6400 was available for me to get photos of the bear after sundown.

In terms of autofocus, the 7D's AI Servo mode hasn't gained my trust yet.  Before going on the trip I read a ton of reports on the web about the various autofocus settings to try, and for most of the safari I used AI Focus with it set to autoselect which of the 19 points to use.  In that mode, the 7D worked superbly.  However, whenever I tried AI Servo, the percentage of shots that were critically sharp went down enough for me to immediately switch back to AI Focus.

One experience in particular is seared into my memory:  I'm photographing the rams clash over and over again.  I'm using AI Focus and it's working wonderfully (easily > 90% keeper rate).  After ~30 minutes of action I know I have enough good photos to play around a bit.  I switch to AI Servo with Zone AF, fire off a series as the rams clash, and most of the series is out of focus.  I immediately switch back to AI Focus.  Two brief birding outings (not on the safari) haven't changed my opinion of AI Servo.

Overall I'm still happy with my purchase (I would still buy the camera again, given the choice), but I am expecting Canon to release a firmware update to address the AI Servo autofocus performance.