My new love – The Canon 5D Mark III

September 27, 2012 My new love – The Canon 5D Mark III

I don’t do technical posts that often but today I fell in love with my new camera and I can’t resist writing about it! If you don’t care about technical stuff feel free to skip the tech/photo geek speak and read the bolded what this means for you section at the end of the post.

Last week I ordered a new camera. I have been shooting exclusively with cropped sensor cameras since I ventured into photography several years ago. I decided that it was time to make an investment for myself as a photographer and for my business and get a full frame camera. After doing the research all signs pointed to Canon’s latest full frame camera in the 5D line, the Mark 3. The Mark 2 changed the game when it was released several years ago and the Mark 3 is everything that Canon did right with the Mark 2, but with many upgrades, fixing the things that they fell short on with the Mark 2. I’ve only had minimal experience using a Canon 5D Mark 2 through my full time job, and that was mostly with video, not still photography. But even with my limited experience I can see how the Mark 3 is a welcome upgrade!

Let’s talk specifics!

First, the low-light performance and high ISOs on this camera are AMAZING. The following photo was taken at 6,000 ISO. I can’t even FATHOM shooting that high on my 7D, probably because it doesn’t get much higher than that. Anything above 800 ISO on my 7D is unusable. This one was taken at 6,000 and there is hardly any grain at all. This is AMAZING to me!

This photo of Sherlock was taken the night I got the camera, after dark, in our kitchen with the lights dimmed. No flash fired, nothing. Just the camera using the limited available light with the ISO bumped way up. For those of you who aren’t into photography, ISO is the same as film speed from back in the day with film cameras. This setting controls how sensitive the image sensor is to light. The higher the setting, the more light your camera can capture, but there’s more grain introduced as a result of it. It’s ideal to keep to a low ISO number and add light to avoid getting a grainy and unusable image. With the 5D Mark III it takes a lot longer to get to an unusable point with the ISO.

The focus on this baby is amazing. I had heard it but I didn’t believe it until I saw it first hand. My first “decent” lens that I ever purchased was the Canon 50mm 1.8 lens. I had stopped using it recently because I was having so many issues with it after several years of use. I used it on the new body and it seems that the focus issues have gone away! With a more accurate focusing system using cross-type focus points, my lens is now usable again and I can put off that upgrade for a while! If I use focal points on the camera that are not cross points I still have the same issues as always but I’m totally okay with focusing and recomposing with this! It’s definitely not accurate enough for detail shots but it’s definitely great for portraits again!

I took the following two photos with each camera body with the same lens (85 1.8) with the same settings, standing in the same spot. Here you can see the difference of not only the crop body vs. the full frame but also a slight difference in focus. This is my sharpest non-macro lens so it’s fairly accurate on both but there is definitely an improvement with the new body. The 5D Mark 3 locked in on perfect focus at the first attempt using the center focal point. The 7D took a few shots to get one this good.

Both of these images are shown at 100% at their various resolutions. If they were to be resized to the same size there would be more of a discrepancy in the distance from the subject although I was standing in the exact same spot. Also, note that this lens is a portrait lens so testing it on a shot of a diamond isn’t exactly fair, but when testing focus there are few tests better than focusing on something small with a lot of detail like this.

And in general the image quality is just amazing. Here are some shots I took this afternoon, all unedited.

There is a slight vignette in the camera which honestly doesn’t bother me that much since I tend to add a little bit of a vignette to my photos when I edit them anyway. In general, the photos taken with this camera are so beautiful straight out of the camera that I imagine that editing time will be cut down significantly.

So, what does this mean for you? The 5D Mark III will allow me to spend less time problem solving and more time capturing your special moments. A photographer’s job isn’t just pushing a button, there’s a lot more that goes into that! From knowing how your camera works inside and out so you can manipulate the settings quickly to get the shot you need, to taking atmosphere and lighting into consideration, to making sure each shot is in focus (you’d be surprised at how often this can be an issue even for the most experienced photographers) there’s a lot that we need to think about and that we need to do–and that’s all in addition to the creative decisions! This upgrade has given me a great piece of equipment that I can rely on to create great images so I can focus more on the creative side of things vs. the technical. It’s often said that it’s not the camera that makes the photo but the photographer, and that’s definitely true, but great gear doesn’t hurt :)

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