Canon PowerShot G7X: Initial Thoughts

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Canon Powershot G7X
I've been using my Canon G7X for about a month now.  Obviously given my interest in bird photography, I didn't buy it to be my primary camera. However, I always like to take a second camera with me for photos of landscapes, flowers and other non-birds in nature. Bringing a second DSLR or changing lenses is not really an option, so this camera seemed to fit the bill. So far I have been very impressed with it.  I haven't done any formal tests, but it seems like noise levels are not appreciably different from my Canon 7D, and the lens is nice and sharp, even at 1:1 on my computer.  All my landscape shots have been shot hand held. Here are a few that I like best.

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Mead Gardens
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Mead Gardens
Miami, FL
Sunrise Over Miami
Miami, FL
Ocean View
For macro and flower photography, the Canon G7X has done quite well so far. With a smaller sensor, this camera will not give you the kind of blurry backgrounds you'd expect to get out of a DSLR, but it's a gigantic improvement over the tiny sensor point and shoots like my previous camera (the Canon PowerShot S100HS).  I'm including three shots here, each cropped progressively more.  The Petunia is nearly full frame, while the Green Treefrog is a pretty tight crop.

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Petunia
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Orchard Spider
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Green Treefrog
To take the spider photo, I had to switch to manual focus since the spider just doesn't have enough bulk for Canon's auto-focus to find it. Unfortunately, there has been a significant amount of criticism about the manual focus on this camera. There are two ways to manual focus: using the front "clicky" wheel or a rear dial (you can actually set it to use both if you want).  Some complain that the "clicky" wheel in the front is frustrating and takes too long.  Others also complain that the rear dial is cumbersome and also takes too long. However, I've found you can press the top or bottom of the rear dial to adjust the manual focus very quickly, and then you can rotate it to fine tune your focus.  For the spider photo, I set the focus to the minimum focusing distance at 100mm and then moved the camera to get the spider sharp. However, I can't imagine needing to use manual focus frequently.  For most subjects, like the Green Treefrog, the autofocus seems to work just fine. Just touch the screen to set the focus where you want. As long as your camera is not closer than its minimum focusing distance for the focal length, that should work very nicely.

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