Tag Archives: eos

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.

Commentary, Equipment, Photographs: Nature

Canon EOS 5D II: Notes on Today’s Photograph

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Since today’s photograph (“Redwood Forest, Morning“) was one of the first landscape photographs I shot with my new Canon EOS 5D II, I was interested to see how the camera would perform and what print quality might look like.

This photograph was a bit trickier than may be apparent. It was overcast and early in the morning, I was in the bottom of a deep valley, the wind was blowing, and the light was constantly changing. In addition I used a 85mm lens (the excellent EF 85mm f/1.8) on a full frame DSLR, so I had to shoot at a rather small aperture for DOF reasons, necessitating a very slow shutter speed in order to work at my preferred ISO 100.

With all of those challenges, when I made the first small test print of this photograph last night I was very impressed with the level of detail in the photograph and I’m certain that it will work as a very good sized print – in fact, this particular image almost needs to displayed large.

When a new camera body is introduced there always seems to be a string of reports of poor performance. Sometimes there is some truth to the reports, but it is my opinion that many of the reports are the result of poor technique, unrealistic expectations,  obsession with “issues” that are irrelevant in actual photographs, and general mistrust of any Big Company that sells expensive camera equipment. I read these reports and think about them a bit, but I don’t assume that they are correct until I see evidence – preferably evidence that I produce myself. The first direct evidence comes from looking closely at photographs on the monitor as I work on them in ACR and then in Photoshop, but the real evidence comes when I make a print. After doing both of the above – and contrary to some rumors you may hear – there are no issues with noise in the shadows and the overall image – even with the increased number of photosites – seems excellent in every way to me.

Does my Canon EOS 5D II produce excellent image quality? Yes. Am I seeing unusual or troubling amounts of noise? No. Are banding problems in the shadows impairing my photographs? No. Do carefully made photographs using this equipment have the potential to produce excellent prints? Yes.

Am I pleased with the results from my 5DII at this point? Yes.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature

Redwood Forest, Morning

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Redwood Forest, Morning. Muir Woods National Monument, California. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.

Redwood Forest, Morning. Muir Woods National Monument, California. February 28, 2009. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Filtered morning light in the redwood forest at Muir Woods National Monument, California.

I got up early on Saturday morning, February 28 and was on the well before dawn – through San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, and on to Muir Woods. The park wasn’t open when arrived – though one can still get it – and it appeared that I was the second visitor to arrive. The sky was overcast, with occasional breaks that allowed the sun to filter through the redwoods at times – all of which amounts to pretty much ideal light for photographing the forest at Muir Woods.

This photograph is not in the public domain. It may not be used on websites, blogs, or in any other media without explicit advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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