Another "real world" test of the Canon 7D Mark II - Shooting a high school football game at night

You may have read my original blog post about the upcoming Canon 7D Mark II, which I posted a week ago, and showed sample photos taken at ever increasing ISO levels. For the first test, I did take the new camera out with a 100-400mm lens, but was in a VERY dimly lit football field. This last weekend, my daughter asked me to shoot some of her high school's football game for their yearbook. This was at her high school which has better lights. And this time I brought my Canon 70-200 2.8 lens and shot all these photos at in Aperture Priority mode at f/2.8, setting the exposure compensation to -0.7 to keep from blowing out the white uniforms, and set the ISO levels anywhere from 5000 to 16,000.

I think you will be really impressed when you see how clean and sharp these images are, even at these crazy high ISO levels. And, in case you are wondering, I did not do any noise reduction on these jpg images.

I started shooting at ISO 6400 to obtain a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the action. On this particular photo, I was at 1/1250 sec.

I was really happy to grab this fast action and still have excellent image quality.

Pointing the lens into a darker section of the field, for this photo I was only able to get a shutter speed of 1/640 sec. But, as you can tell, this was a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the action in this case.

After shooting numerous photos at ISO 6400, I decided to bring the ISO down a little to 5000. This photo is nice and clean at this high ISO. You can see the noise level in the cropped image below.

The kid next to me was shooting with a Canon T2i with a variable aperture lens. Knowing the age of that camera (which can't shoot at very high ISOs) and the limitations of the lens, I figured he didn't stand a chance to get a decent shot.

Here is a photo of one of the kids diving straight ahead for a touchdown. Because I was shooting straight ahead with the lights all to the sides, and I had the exposure comp at -0.7, the runners face was very dark. For this photo, I did use the shadow/highlights adjustment in Photoshop to bring his face out of the shadows.

After scoring a touchdown, it was time for the opposing team to kick the extra point. I moved to a 45 degree angle and shot this. I prefocused on the ball and shot this with a shutter speed of 1/800 sec.

And then, just for fun, I decided to crank up the ISO to 16,000. I think that this photo is a perfect example of why I really like this camera. Is there noise in the photo? Yes. And if you look at the crop below, you will see the digital noise in the photo. BUT, when looking at the photo above, it is a fine image and plenty good enough for the high school yearbook. Sometimes us photographers obsess over the noise levels, but I would rather have a noisy image and freeze the peak of action than get a blurry unusable photo.

Another shot taken at ISO 16,000.

This and the remaining 3 photos were all taken at ISO 8000.

I do like the crop factor of the Canon 7D Mark II, allowing me to get nice tight shots even with a 70-200mm lens.

All in all, it was a really fun night shooting photos for the school and getting a chance to test the 7D Mark II once again.

I am still amazed at how good these DSLR cameras have gotten in the last 5 years!

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If you are interested in purchasing any camera equipment, please click here to go to B&H Photo, as I get a referral from them if you enter this way. I would really appreciate that.

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