First Impressions of the 5D

My lens was delivered about 3 p.m. yesterday and I spent the rest of the day and most of today trying out and experimenting with all the Canon EOS 5D Mark II's functions. The stabilization works extremely well. I took several shots of a car yesterday afternoon, and I don't know whether it was nervousness with the new camera or the unaccustomed weight (it's heavy), but I was shaking badly. I know I would have blurred the pictures with my Nikon, but the Canon overcame my trembling and yielded perfect, sharp, stable images without a trace of blur. Pictures are lighter than I'm used to. The Nikon took consistently dark pictures. I used exposure compensation on the Nikon to lighten them somewhat, and then lightened them further with Photoshop after transfer to my computer, and even after all that they were still on the dark side. However, it's not a problem. The 5D also has exposure compensation so I can darken them if I wish. I'll wait to see more photos in a variety of settings before making a decision. At its maximum resolution, 21.1 megapixels, the 5D produces a file size that averages 8 megabytes! I think I'm going to settle for medium resolution, about 11 megapixels, still higher than the Nikon's maximum resolution. I'll only use the 5D's maximum size if I know in advance I'm going to have an 8x10 or larger print made.

I mastered the Speedlight flash attachment rather quickly. (NOTE: These early impressions of the Speedlite are incomplete. I later ran into problems with it. A full review appears in a November 29, 2009 posting.) After a little experimenting, I was getting consistently perfect exposures, at least around the house. I found I get the best results by setting shutter speed and aperture manually, just as I did on the Nikon. The flash has its own exposure compensation, and I set it to a minus-1/3 f-stop to slightly darken flash photos which were lighter than I preferred.

The 5D is a fairly complicated camera and not as intuitive as the Nikon. The manual is not easy to understand on some of the more complex functions. The camera can shoot a video, but setting up for it was so cumbersome and awkward I almost gave up. However, once the setup is complete, from then on you only have to press three buttons to shoot a video. Another complaint about videos is that it produces a Quicktime movie, a proprietary Apple file type. That was a bad decision. Why not MPEG?

As I mentioned before, it's a heavy camera. I've been getting wrist and hand cramps just shooting around the house and yard the past two days. I don't know how it's going to be in four or five hours of shooting at a car show.