I had a Canon 7D Mark II for a while, and I thought this was the ideal camera for African safaris. My thinking was that with a 1.4x teleconverter on a 100-400mm hand-holdable lens, the magnification came to 896mm (400 x 1.4 x 1.6 -- the last figure is the crop factor). The reach was incredible, but the problem was that this camera body had too much noise, especially in low light situations. At 3200 ISO, the pictures were essentially unusable. I learned that using the camera at no more than 800 ISO was necessary in most situations. That's why I sold it. This shot of a lioness with her cubs was taken with a focal length of 640mm. The morning light was sufficient so I dared to go to 1250 ISO. I used a shutter of 1/500 and an aperture of f/11. In post-processing, I used Neat Image software to minimize the noise. At the higher ISO settings, even Neat couldn't repair the lost quality due to excessive noise.
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