I have shot a few thousand frames with my Canon EOS 5D Mark II now. I’ve photographed a variety of subjects including a few days of rainy professional bicycle stage racing, several landscape subjects, and a productive evening of night photography with The Nocturnes at Mare Island Naval Shipyard. I plan to eventually write up something resembling a comprehensive report on my experience, but so far there hasn’t been time. With that in mind, here is a short piece on one new feature in this camera and my experience with it.
Among the photographic subjects that interest me is night photography, often of urban and industrial subjects, but occasionally of wild landscapes also. There are a number challenges to shooting in very dark conditions, but one of the more interesting is getting good focus in conditions where auto-focus often can’t find a target to work with and where it is too dark to manually focus. (I wrote a bit about this in a recent piece: “Hints for Night Photography.”)
During my last Mare Island shoot I discovered that Live View provides a very useful option for focusing at night. On the 5D II, the Live View mode raises the mirror and lets you look at a “live view” of your scene on the rear LCD. In very dim light the trick is to find something that might provide a manual focus target, center the rectangular LCD indicator over that “something,” zoom in to 10x magnification on this object, and then focus manually on the LCD image. I was amazed at the low light levels at which this works quite well. A vertical line in a wall, the edge of a window, a bit of cyclone fence, or a small light – any of these become decent manual focus targets using Live View.
When I started my Mare Island evening shoot, using this camera for the first time at night, I mostly did things the old fashioned way. By the end of the evening, in any very dim situation I was successfully and much more quickly getting good focus using Live View. I’m confident that night photographers are going to find that this is a very powerful and useful feature.
Great tip on the night photography option for focusing. I wish I’d seen this prior to my night trip on an airboat with some bowfishers shooting fish at night with halogens, but I stumbled into it after awhile.
One addition … I’m visually challenged (bifocals),and often the rear screen display is a real pain for me. I use the Zacuto USA magnifier snapped on the back of my Mk II and that worked wonders with the function described above for focusing at night, especially when those halogens on the boat would turn in my direction. Good stuff, I would think, even for guys who have better eyesight.
Kelly, glad to hear the tips were useful to you. It took me a while to figure out some of these as well, and somehow I think there might be some other useful techniques out there waiting to still be discovered. Dealing with this issue in night photography requires, I think, a bag of tricks ready to apply to different sorts of situations. Sometimes estimating works, sometimes you can AF on some small spot of light, occasionally Live View is the best trick, and so on.
I’m also “vision challenged” when it comes to glasses. I’ve worn glasses to correct for distance vision nearly my whole life. As I got to the point where single vision glasses were no longer the answer, I ended up lucky in that without glasses I can see very close objects pretty well – so I’m able to slide the glasses down on my nose and use Live View without a lot of trouble.
Dan