Canon 5D mkII and Me: A Love Story...

OK, so I have had the new Canon 5D mkII for half a day so far.  I think I am in love!!!  I haven't put it through its paces yet, but I'll have plenty of time to do that in the near future with my upcoming magazine shoots and my next major label album cover shoot later this month...  

This is by no means a very scientific test.  It is me taking some images around the house with the new Canon 5D mkII and nothing more.  If you want one of those "technical" reviews, there are plenty of them available on other websites.  Hopefully, this will give you a good idea of what the 5D mkII can do on an average day of shooting.  

The big thing I wanted to test out was its high ISO image quality.  I tried to find several scenarios where a higher ISO was needed to see if the images held up or not.  On my old 5D (the original, or mkI, I suppose), I could get useable images at 1600 ISO, but mainly you'd want to stay at or below 800 ISO if possible.  1000, 1250, and 1600 ISO were just a bit too noisy for best quality.  With the mkII's ability to shoot at up to 25600 ISO (wow!!!), I needed to see how it REALLY looked at high ISO values...

Of course the first thing I'm going to shoot with my new camera is going to be my boys!  The room was kind of dark, so I cranked up the camera to XX ISO and shot a couple frames.  Looking at the image at 100% in Photoshop, it holds up well.  The mkII's 6400 ISO looks like the grain from a roll of good quality 800 ISO film.  It has a very pleasing digital grain/noise to it in the mids and highlight areas.  I'll have to test it more in the shadows to see how it REALLY holds up.  That's where digital grain/noise can look bad.  

I decided to go out to the garden and test the camera out more.  I wanted to see how it would do with colors and details... really, I just wanted to shoot anything and everything I could find!  This camera is addictive.

I loved the way the water was dripping off this tiny tomato.  The garden was shaded at the time, and the macro extension tube means more light loss, so the Canon 5D mkII came in handy.  This image was shot at 1000 ISO, but looks more like 400 ISO.  The mkII allows you to bump the camera up to 1600 ISO and still shoot beautiful images.  Its 1600 ISO looks like the original 5D's 640 ISO... it's that good!

This is a section of the above picture at 100% and 10"x10" at 72 ppi, so you can view the detail.  

I loved the color of tiny little cherry tomatoes.  Image details were 1/320 sec, 9.0f, 3200 ISO.

This is a section of the above picture at 100% and 10"x10" at 72 ppi, so you can really see the detail available.  Can you believe this was shot at 3200 ISO?!?  Not too bad...  

I saw these ants walking across a flower, so I thought I'd see just what the Canon 5D mkII, an 85mm 1.8f lens, and an extension tube could do.  This is still cropped in from the original image quite a bit, but the huge file size of the mkII makes that less of an issue.  There was still enough of a file left to make a good print.  Besides being cropped, this image received a bit of sharpening in Photoshop to help bring out some of the details.  

Playing around, I decided to take a picture of a cactus.  I cropped this image to square in Photoshop, but no sharpening or other manipulation was done.

This image was taken at 1/100 sec, 3.2f, 6400 ISO in a somewhat dark area of the house.  I'll have to say that the 5D mkII seems to be holding its own so far!!!

The image below was taken at 12,800 ISO in a dark living room.  I could've NEVER taken this image with my old 5D camera...  The 5D mkII can do so much more with so much less light.  It is amazing!  yeah, it is a bit grainy, but what do you expect for 12,800 ISO?!?  It looks at good as other camera's 1600 ISO.

I have never been able to get this cat to sit still in a brightly lit location.  Finally, I was able to get a decent image in a softly-lit corner of a room.  Enough window light was coming in that the mkII worked fine.  This image, when blown up to 100%, looks like 1600 ISO on the original 5D.  It has some digital grain, but it's not the end of the world.  Of course, this wasn't shot at 1600 ISO... nope, it was shot at 6400 ISO on the mkII.  Yup, the Canon mkII's XX ISO looks as good as the 5D's 1600 ISO!  I cropped the image to square and added a bit of sharpening in Photoshop to bring out the fur and whiskers.

The image below was taken at the highest ISO setting possible on the camera.  If you go into custom functions, you can turn on high 1 & 2, which goes up to an insane 25,600 ISO!!!  Sure, it is super-nasty as far as grain is concerned, but it's better than getting no image at all.  The lack of light in the room when this was taken was nuts!  It was too dark to focus.  It was movie theater dark.  It was just plain dark.  But I got something which could be printed... perfect for spot/breaking news stories where an image might be taken in less-than-perfect visual conditions (like the sewer system story I recently did).  Details: 1/40 sec, 1.4f, 25,600 ISO. Canon 5D mkII and Canon 50mm 1.4f lens.