Canon EOS 5D Mk II

Happy new camera!

I now own a Canon EOS 5D Mark II – the Leeds Headrow Jessops had one in, and after a lunchtime jaunt (where I’d convinced myself it was a stocking error and they didn’t really have one) I happily bounced back to the office with a bagful of toys (body-only, since I have glass for man and dog, but I did add on some screen protectors and an 8GB Sandisk Ultra CF).

Good timing too – I spent the evening at The Hop shooting the Open Mic Night. It’s a regular night for me so I was able to compare the photos from my 30D in previous weeks: the end verdict is that the camera displays a totally different dynamic from anything I’ve used before.

The first big difference is the full-frame sensor. OK, I know this isn’t specific to the 5D itself but it’s taken vaguely 20-30mm off my lenses – the 85mm lens acts like a 50mm on the 30D; the 70-200mm acts like a 50mm… you get the idea. In short, I don’t know my glass any more: where I could pick out any lens straight away it’s now going to take some experimentation to get the optimum balance again!

Onto the ISO expansion: the high-ISO noise is pretty nonexistent. Fair enough if you run it at H2 (ISO25600) you get some grain, but I was happily shooting at ISO6400 last night: instead of riding aperture and shutter speed (my technique on the 30D) I found myself riding the ISO instead. It also meant I could take some cracking crowd shots, and stop making up for the poor light with low shutter speed. Brill.

Finally, the video – 1080p HD video to be precise. Now I’ve not worked out a way of resizing/transcoding that yet given a 5-minute performance yields a 650MB file, but it looked good; actually my big problem is that I can’t hold the sodding camera steady, a skill I suppose I’d better learn if I want to do video alongside still photos.

It chucks out 8MB JPEGs. Consequently my 8GB card was almost full when I left the venue. The end result of the Hop shoot is here.

Minor annoyance: Canon have rejigged the buttons on the top of the body. I suspect this will get really tedious when I’m swapping between the 30D and 5D at paid-gigs. However there are quite a few gigs coming up including an all-dayer at The Hop on Sunday (the “Oxjam” thing) so I’m sure it’ll get some hammer.

More when I’ve got used to it!