Mobile Sign

On the way back from Boston yesterday (more on that later), we stopped at a gas station, and man that sign way high.

Canon 5D Mark II – My thoughts

Yesterday Canon finally announced their replacement for the now 3 year old (that’s 108 digital camera years) 5D SLR. In a few ways, I miss using my 5D.  It’s small, light, and has excellent image quality. So as someone who shot over 120,000 frames with a 5D and used it as my main body until very recently, I’ve been eagerly awaiting this news and have some thoughts I thought I’d share with you.

First off, the good stuff.  21MP is super, though at less than 3 grand I’m a little pissed I just bought a 1DsIII. Higher ISO speeds and better high-ISO performance, looks pretty good so far, though I’m a detail guy and find the noise reduction necessary at these levels tends to mush detail a little too much for my liking. High-res screen, super and I wish I had it on my flagship 1D.  1080P video mode, honestly couldn’t care less as I don’t shoot video, though I guess this would be useful to photo-journalists.

Now for the bad.  Same or very similar AF system to the old 5D, hmm.. well I rarely use anything but the center focus point and almost all of my subjects are still, that said, I kind of wanted a pro AF system in a smaller package or at least a really substantial upgrade.  The new viewfinder is slightly larger at 98%, thought we’ll see if the 5DII’s is actually an improvement on what was a very good but not incredible finder on the original. I’ve become a little addicted to the 100% finder on the 1D.

But the main thing that’s stopping me from pre-ordering one right now is the shutter.  Supposedly it’s the same as the old camera.  While 3 or 4 frames per second is fine for me as I never shoot in anything other than single frames, the blackout time on the 5D can simply be described as glacial.  Seriously, it’s like 150ms or something.  I think my 40 year old Hasselblad is faster.  We’ll see I guess, maybe it’s better than I think or maybe I can get over it.

Oh, and I’m not sure why everyone is always complaining about the lack of environmental sealing in these non-pro bodies.  I’ve used my Canon cameras in mild rain tons of times and had no problem.  You’d think that everyone on DP Review was shooting on a sandy beach during a huricane the way they talk.

Carl

From 5D to 1DsMkIII: The double-edged sword and mini-review

I’ve now spend a couple of weeks shooting with my new 1Ds and thought it was about time that I gave some insight into the transition from my 5D to the 1Ds3. I’ve mostly shot with primes (28, 50, and 100mm) though the 24-70 zoom has also done very well. At least with the primes I don’t feel like the lenses are limiting the sensor at all, especially when they’re stopped down a bit.

Let’s get some of the obvious stuff out of the way first. The 1Ds is bigger and heavier
than the 5D, and by a decent margin. It’s not heavy like a Mamiya RZ67, but it’s not
the camera I’d want to carry around all day with a heavy L zoom while sightseeing in
Paris. The files it produces are obviously much bigger as well, so hard disk space gets eaten up twice as fast. I’ve started being a little more stingy with my RAW files,
keeping only the ones I know I’ll actually use, versus another 50% more that I used to
think I’d get around to processing but rarely if ever did.

As for the RAW files, they’re great. Resolution, with a good lens and technique, is
stunning as I’ve noted a couple weeks ago with the boring and ugly leaf example. There is an
improvement in the malleability of the RAW data, but honestly, not as much as I thought
there would be, at least on the highlight end of the spectrum. There is however room to
pull up shadows without much noise, especially at low ISO. As with most digital
systems, under-exposing is generally a better idea as the clipped highlights kill ya.
That said, the highlight to white transitions are much less jarring, with plenty of
data to pull back with the highlight slider in Lightroom. I’m caulking this up to the 14bit files.

While there is more detail overall, I think the greatest use of the glut of information
is to give the image noticably more texture, at least to to my eyes. They feel less
‘digital’ (that being the negative plastic look that people complain about) that the
files from my 5D and I’ve also noticed the images need less post production overall, seeming to have more character right out of the camera.

Noise levels are very good, I’d say about the same as my 5D, which was pretty good as well. I’m not a sports shooter so I don’t need 1/500th of a second at iso 12000, but I
regularly shoot at 800 and 1600 and have no problems to speak of. Plus remember that
with that many pixels, you can theoretically use extra noise reduction then down sample
and sharpen and end up with a 12MP image that’s really low noise. I have had no need to
do this though, so it’s just conjecture. ISO 100 shots do seem to have a little more randomness to patches of color (a blue sky for example). You could call this noise I guess, but I think it’s a good thing because it’s very subtle and makes the images feel much more like really good film scans. It’s much like dither in a digital audio recording if you have any experience with that.

The shutter is fast and tight, mirror blackout minimal. None of that gets in your way.
And the viewfinder is butter and probably my favorite part of the new camera and the
hardest thing to go backward on. It’s big enough to actually manually focus with. Even the 5D finder feels small in comparison, I can’t imagine what the step back to a rebel would be like.
After using the 1Ds for a couple weeks I wanted to test some tethered shooting
scenarios using Capture One and so picked up the 5D body for the first time when I hit a snag. And wow,
in comparison, the 5D feels really tiny and something akin to a toy. Not that it is or
doesn’t take great photographs, that’s just the visceral first reaction. I also like the idea that there are no dummie modes or anything on the camera. That you’re average person would have no idea what any of the buttons do (I’ll admit to being a bit of an elitist in that way)

If they could fit the 1Ds sensor and viewfinder in a 5D size body, that would probably
be my ideal camera. But that’s not really an option, so I’ll take the trade-off. As of right now, I’m much less likely to pick up my Hasselblad if I want to take high-end images, the files I get out of the new camera are more than a match for medium format scans to my eye. Much more so than the 5D.

If anyone has any specific questions, I’d be more than happy to answer.

Street Experiment

Robert Thomson

Another, for those who happen to read BusinessWeek, this week’s issue has a portrait I took of Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson on page 104.

Here it is on the page, and then below, is the uncropped version as I intended it.

Nicky

Charley Maxwell

For those who happen to read BusinessWeek, this week’s issue has a portrait I took of a man named Charles Maxwell on page 75.

Here it is on the page, and then below, is the uncropped version as I intended it.

Another Self-Portrait by Windowlight

Another shot at Carolyn

So as many of you have noticed, I’ve taken a number of pictures of my friend Carolyn over the past couple months. And it’s been a strange challenge.  She’s definitely one of those people that I find beautiful in person, and I think I’ve gotten nice photos of her, but I don’t feel like I’ve really captured it right.  And frankly, it’s driving me a little nuts.  That said, I think I’m getting closer.  Here’s another one, profile this time.