Jumping Dog [Explored]

As a dog owner and photographer, I'm never without a willing (for a reward) subject to take pictures of.  George my 2 year old Sprocker Spaniel has given great service right from when he was a pup (one of his puppy pics has been sold by Getty many times).  He's done Studio work, Outdoor work, been composited, off camera flashed and loads more besides.

His latest modelling session involved an idea I had to get him to jump straight up at the camera for a quirky shot.  It worked out quite well and I posted a couple of images onto Flickr.  For me these were work in progress, it was the first time I tried it, and as it was a dull day, high ISO was needed resulting in more noise than I wanted.

However, the citizens of Flickr did not agree and both images got "Explored" and one of the images picked up over a thousand hits in just one day, which is very good for me.

You can see that image here.

I thought I would put together a short video of how it was done, there's a couple of tricks I discovered along the way. Hope you enjoy it, George certainly did.

I would love to see other peoples attempts.

The New Canon 7D MkII

A good friend of mine has been fortunate enough to come into some money that he can direct to new photography equipment.  His current camera is a Canon 5D mkII and as he's primarily a wildlife photographer he also has a canon 300mm f2.8 lens with teleconverters.  Whats interesting (and difficult) is deciding on where to spend his cash.  He's leaned towards a 5D Mk III, and some longer glass and then veered towards a 1DX.  Naturally this dilemma has been well explored down the pub.

But it did set me thinking about what features are important to me (since that's what I'd base my purchase on) and what I'd like to see in the next Canon 7D revision as the 7D seems to be the best fit for me at the moment.

• I'm ok with the APS C sensor so I wouldn't want to see the 7D move to full frame.
  
• More Megapixels would be great, personally I'm not convinced by Canon's trend to smaller better pixels, give me around 30mb and I'd be happy.
  
• I would like to see lower noise levels at higher ISO, and higher total ISO..
  
• GPS built in would be great, now I've started using a separate GPS tagger, I've come to love the feature.
  
• A flip out screen, this would be a real boon for field macro work and other non straight shots, I love this feature on my G11 point and shoot.
  
• A couple more frames per second would be good, but the current model is not too shabby.

And that's about it really, of course one can ponder things like in camera images stabilisation, but that's unlikely.  Overall its not a big list, which goes to show what a good camera the 7D is, and how closely it meets my needs.

Fingers crossed for the 7D MkII.

What do you think? are there any features you'd like to see? Are 1DX pixels better?