Let's pop off to TankFest 2026. Technically it's called TANKFEST, all
capitals, but I'm not typing that. Life's too short. TankFest.
I visited
back in 2019, when Britain was at peace, and COVID hadn't happened yet,
and then again in 2023, when Britain was still at peace and COVID had happened. Now, in 2026, COVID
is a distant memory, and Britain's biggest foe is the sun. We did it no harm,
but it wants to kill us. Thanks, the sun!
TankFest began
in 2000, with some of the same tanks featured today, including the Matilda I
pictured above. Back then it was a low-key affair, but now it attracts around
24,000 visitors over three days in a space only slightly larger than a
telephone box. I went on Friday, and I skipped the afternoon display because
I've never died of heatstroke before and I don't want to start. The arena was
very dusty, and when I say "dusty" I mean "cinematic".
Back in 2019 and 2023 you could stand right next to the tank arena, but now
there are so many attendees the arena is mostly seating only, so I needed a
longer lens with a bit more reach in order to photograph the tanks.
In 2019 I took along a Canon 5D with a
300mm f/4L IS, which was mighty fine, but beyond 300mm the price shoots up, so for
TankFest 2026 I did a bit of lateral thinking. Why not use an APS-C camera
instead? It would be like having a permanent 1.6x teleconverter.
Furthermore I was always curious about the Canon 7D. Have a look at
this:
I call this image Desire and Depreciation. On the left, a Canon 5D
MkII, from 2008. It represents Desire. It's a full-frame digital SLR.
Purely as a camera it's mediocre. It was mediocre in 2008. It has the body and
autofocus of a 2005 Canon 5D MkI, but with a 21mp sensor and a larger screen
on the back. As a camera it came in for criticism at the time for its
conservatism.
But it had one killer feature. It could shoot 1080p hi-def movies. It wasn't
the first digital SLR that could capture video, but it was the first with a
full-frame 35mm sensor. The sensor is much larger than a digital camcorder
sensor, even larger than a frame of 35mm motion picture film. The result is
video footage that has a degree of depth separation only previously attainable
with 70mm film.
The 5D MkII quietly revolutionised the television and movie industries. I
bought one brand-new shortly afterwards for what was a painful sum of money.
Why did I spent that money? Desire. Desire clouds the minds of men. It
clouded my mine. I wanted to possess the secret of fire. Other tribes
possessed the secret of fire. I wanted to possess it myself.
I still have it! It's there, in the picture, up there, on the left. 37,000
photographs, sixteen years, and countless hours of video later, it still
functions. Canon replaced the 5D MkII a few years later, and 21mp is paltry in
comparison to the 45mp R5 MkII, but it's still pretty good as a stills camera
and total overkill for the internet.
On the right, depreciation. The 7D was launched about a year after the
5D MkII, in 2009. At the time there was a perception that Canon was weak in
the mid-range. The company had a popular series of professional digital SLRs,
but the mid-range 50D and 5D felt weak in comparison to the Nikon D200 and
D300. Nikon's not-quite-pro cameras had a degree of polish that Canon didn't
match.
Thus the 7D, which was an attempt to compete with the Nikon D300. It
essentially took the multi-point, multi-area autofocus system of the 1D / 1Ds
and squeezed it into a newer body that had some, but not all, of the 1D's
weather sealing. In the hand it feels more solid than the 5D MkII. The 5D's
card and battery doors flop open and dangle back and forth, whereas the 7D's
doors pop open on little springs, as if they want you to use them. The back
has a deeper thumb relief than the 5D and the rubber feels like rubber instead
of pleather. The 5D's shutter has a big hollow whirring sound whereas the 7D
has a 1D-style CLACK, and the button feels more responsive.
The viewfinder has 19 autofocus points, all of which are cross-type. They can
focus on horizontal and vertical edges equally well. In contrast the 5D MkII
only has 9 autofocus points, clustered in the middle of the frame, and only
the central point is cross-type. TankFest wasn't a great test of the 7D's
autofocus, because the tanks moved quite slowly, but looking through the
images it appears that the camera didn't miss a shot.
In continuous shooting
mode the 7D will capture 110 JPGs at a rate of 8fps, or 23 RAW files. Movie
mode has 1080p at 24/25fps, 720p at 50fps, and 640x480 at 50fps (PAL), or
alternatively 1080p at 24/30fps, 720p at 60fps, and 640x480 at 60fps (NTSC).
Irritatingly there doesn't appear to be a way to set the movie parameters
unless you have the mirror flipped up in movie mode.
The 7D was popular, but I avoided it because I already had a 5D MkII. Eighteen
years later the two cameras have plummeted in value on the used market,
although the 5D MkII has depreciated slightly less on account of its larger
sensor. In the intervening years Canon has launched several generations of
replacement, plus a digital rangefinder line that has pushed the old
flip-mirror SLRs to one side. In addition 4K video is now a thing, and of
course a year after the 7D was released Apple launched the iPhone, and thus
the modern age.
There was a time when SLR cameras were aimed at the enthusiast market, but in
the 2000s digital SLRs crossed over into the mainstream, and for a while in
the 2000s they were a popular holiday accessory. This was back when the high
street still existed. I can remember seeing digital SLRs for sale in high
street shops. People nowadays don't believe me, but it happened. Smartphones
slowly killed that off, and SLRs have receded from the mainstream again. In
fact even within the enthusiast market old-fashioned flippy mirror SLRs are a
dying breed, as they are rapidly being replaced with mirrorless cameras.
Did I mention drones? Drones are a thing nowadays.
TankFest had live aerial footage from a drone, which seemed strangely apt
given the course of the war in Ukraine. The 5D MkII and 7D share batteries and
chargers, which is nice. The 5D MkII has the edge in terms of resolution, but
there's not much in it. Contemplate the following image:
Ruff in the jungle. In the jungle. In the jungle. In-the-in-the jungle. Ruff!
That had nothing to do with cameras. I'm just flashing back to my youth. I
think the heat got to me. The Prodigy's debut album has aged in a fascinating
way. The sequencing is crude, but on the other hand Liam Howlett understood
dynamics. The drum programming on "Ruff in the Jungle Bizness", for example,
is simple but clever. There's four bars of intro, and then you'd expect the
drums to come in, and they do, but they don't quite take off for another four
bars. The rest of the tune is basically a series of four-bar segments jammed
together with crude transitions, but it never gets boring because Howlett
always changes something up. He sticks in a fill or a little melody line, and
at least twice the track changes completely.
He didn't have to bother. He could have half-assed it. There were an awful lot
of generic rave and jungle tracks in the early 1990s that set up a groove but
didn't go anywhere, but The Prodigy sounded as if the whole band was on
amphetamines. Good amphetamines. I'm tempted to say "that is enough of The
Prodigy", but it is not possible to have enough of The Prodigy.
Contemplate the following image:
It's an uncropped, 21mp image taken from a Canon 5D MkII and a 300mm lens. The
thin orange line represents 18mp. As you can see, the difference isn't huge.
The thick green line represents the APS-C crop factor, which in this case is
equivalent to a 480mm lens. That's awkwardly long for Bovington.
I was curious to see whether using an 18mp 7D would give me more detail than
using a 21mp 5D MkII and just cropping the images, and the answer is yes. If
you crop a 21mp image down to APS-C resolution the end result is about 8mp,
which is 10mp less than the 7D.
Both the 5D MkII and the 7D had new-generation sensors with less shadow noise
than earlier digital SLRs. The following image, for example, is mostly a black
silhouette straight from the camera, but with dodging there is detail in the
shadows.
The 7D still struggles with blown-out highlights. The 5D MkII and 7D coincided with the Nikon D3, which had a terrific low-noise sensor. The D3 didn't have movie mode, and the sensor only had twelve megapixels of resolution, but it was possible to expose for the highlights and boost the shadows without the image becoming a noisy mess. You can do that with the 7D, but there are limits. Let's have a look at the high-ISO performance of this seventeen-year-old camera:
It bothers me that the right edge of the yellow and green boxes don't line up.
These are RAW files converted with Photoshop with the noise reduction turned
off. At the top, ISO 100. Note the tiny little black hair coming out of the
bottom-right corner of the MUTE button. It's almost invisible to the naked
eye, but it's there. Note also the little speck of dirt on the yellow-green
border, in between the U of MUTE and the P of PITCH.
At ISO 3200 (middle) and ISO 6400 (bottom) those two tiny details are still
visible, but only just. There is an emergency ISO 12800 setting, but there's
too much misery in the world already without me adding more. Scaled down from
18mp the images look fine on the internet, but the 7D is no Nikon D3.
Moving swiftly on, this is a FAMAS. I remember looking left and right in case
Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons was hovering nearby. And in a way he
was. He was hovering in my head.
For almost all of the images in this post I set the camera to ISO 400, f/4,
and used my venerable old
Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS, which is even older than the 7D. It was interesting to compare the 7D with
my old Canon 1Ds. The original 1Ds is a full-frame digital SLR from 2002. Camera-wise they're
very similar. They both have a 100% viewfinder, but the 7D has a much simpler
autofocus system, with just 19 points versus 45 in the 1Ds. The 1Ds also has
weather sealing and a hair-trigger shutter button. Nonetheless the 7D feels a
lot like a baby 1Ds, which just makes me respect the 1Ds even more. It took
Canon's non-professional line seven years to almost catch up with it.
Controls? I did mention the controls? They're almost the same as the 5D. The
only big difference is a combination button/turny thing that switches on live
view and then switches between movie mode and stills mode. As mentioned up the
page you can only select the movie options if live view is activated and set
to movie mode. Otherwise the option doesn't appear in the menu system.
There's a peripheral illumination correction option that reduces vignetting
with JPGs. The camera has a bunch of profiles loaded into its memory, but it
didn't have one for my 100mm f/2. The only way to load new profiles is via
Canon's EOS Utility 2, but annoyingly this is no longer available. For Windows
11 I had to download
an updater utility
from Canon's Hong Kong website, then apply
this registry tweak. EOS Utility 2 is still available for MacOS, but it doesn't appear to work
with Sequoia, or at least I couldn't get it to work. Sadly it didn't have
correction data for my ancient 100-300mm f/5.6L, perhaps because it's too old.
EOS Utility 2 also sets up tethered shooting, and it can be used to turn your 7D into a makeshift webcam. Fortunately Canon still hosts firmware updates for the 7D. Unlike the 5D MkII, firmware updates don't add anything to the movie mode, but they do fix a few bugs, and add an option to process RAW files into JPGs, which triggered fond memories of the old Kodak DCS cameras, which could do the same things. There is an option to apply different picture styles to the image, plus noise reduction and lens correction, but it's surprisingly slow and it appears that you can only process one image at a time, which is unfortunate. You can't select a whole folder and have the camera dump a bunch of JPGs. Perhaps that was too professional for Canon.
Still, the 7D is widely available on the used market for around £180 or so in
good condition, which is actually cheaper than the MkIII version of the Canon
1.4x Extender. A lot of them were thrashed by professional photographers, but
they were built to take punishment. The 7D suffers a lot from not really
meaning anything - the 5D MkII revolutionised video, the D3 could see in the
dark, the 7D just existed - but it feels a shame to just pack it away into the
back of a desk drawer.
