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Equipment, Technique

Canon EOS 5D Mark II: Live View and Night Photography

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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.

Annual Favorites

2008 Favorites

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(Updated on 1/14/09 to add comments to some of the photographs.)

Since it is the last day of 2008 I guess it is “now or never” if I’m to put together the obligatory “best of the year” list. I thought of doing a “Best 10” or “Best of Each Month” or similar, but I finally gave up and just tossed a whole bunch of links in here, undoubtedly forgetting to include a few other favorites. (A few have 2007 dates – they were published here for the first time in 2008.) Despite the fact that there might seem to be a slight hint of grumbling in that first paragraph – just my sense of humor at work – I look forward to this end-of-the-year ritual every year. It is really great fun going back and reminding myself of what I’ve seen and photographed, and I frequently rediscover an image that I had somehow forgotten or overlooked.

By the way, if this is the first time you have visited my my blog…

Anyway, on to the photographs…

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Equipment, Tests

Using Prints to Test Four Canon DSLRs

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Miles Hecker has posted interesting test results in his Canon EOS big guns image quality shootout:

As some of you know, I am a landscape photographer. I migrated to full frame digital SLR’s from medium format film. I used to shoot 6×4.5, 6×7 and 6×9 film with the end product being prints of 20″x30″ and larger. As such, I chose to investigate only one area of the 5Dmk2 in this exercise, overall image quality or IQ for short. For this test, I decided to construct a still life with a wide range of color, lots of detail and very controlled lighting to obtain what for me are valid results.The test would produce 100% crops for pixel peeping. The final analysis of IQ however would be made using real life obsevers and detailed sections of 16″x24″ and 20″x30″ photographic prints.

What I like about his test methodology is that it eliminates the very difficult issue of normalizing on-screen tests of cameras with different sensor sizes and photosite densities but doing something that I have felt would make the most sense, comparing large prints from the different test cameras. In this case he tested the Canon EOS 1DsM3, 5D2, 5D, and 50D. 

I won’t spoil the fun by telling you the results here, but let’s just say I’m not at all surprised at the results.

Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Yosemite Valley Tunnel View #2

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Yosemite Valley Tunnel View #2
Yosemite Valley Tunnel View . Yosemite National Park, California. April 2, 2008. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Black and white photograph of the narrow space between two buses, several people waiting by the buses, and a group getting its self-portrait at the Yosemite Valley View parking lot.

Beyond… Yosemite Valley, Bridalveil Fall, Sentinel Dome, Half Dome…

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