Shooting the 100-400mm

The Canon 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L worked very well with the Canon 7D Mark II.  I had to play around with the settings a little bit, but finally settled on ISO 400 for the overcast day to give me a little flexibility to ride the shutter speed up and down depending on the conditions.

I chose ISO 400, because I wanted to keep my shutter speed at least 1/400th of a second because I knew I was going to be zooming to 400mm at times.

I started off in one-shot focus mode, but about half way through changed to AI Servo Mode.  As the students were coming across the stage, the AI Servo Mode helped keep track of the subject.  If I wasn't in AI Servo Mode, I could have never gotten this photo:

The one thing I had to get used to was the variable aperture.  At 100mm the widest aperture was f/4.5, but when I zoomed into 400mm, it was f/5.6.  I finally figured out to set the aperture to f/5.6 at both ends and that gave me a little more consistent exposure.

Overall, I am happy with the 100-400mm.  However, if the ceremony was inside, I would have had a big problem shooting at ISO 400.  I had my 20-700mm f/2.8 inside the gym for another ceremony and I had to shoot at ISO 800 wide open at f/2.8.  If I had the 100-400mm inside, I would have had to shoot at ISO 1600 or even 2000 which would have been a fair amount of grain.