Bit of a wordy post to give first impressions on my upgrade from 50D
to 5D mark III. I actually got a chance to wander with it and take a few photos
yesterday, so I thought I'd hold off on more US photos for now and jump to some
all new ones .. even if they are kind of experimental, to test the features and
how it likes working with my lenses.
(Photos posted full size)
For the most part, as it turns out, my lenses seem to have
breathed a sigh of relief! No longer
restricted by the apparent limitations of my trusty old 50D, the difference is
pretty amazing, my 16-35mm II definitely feels a lot more at home. Super wide is now properly super wide and
35mm just looks ... like a 35mm lens should, really looking forwards to using
it on this camera. 16mm gets quite a
bit of fisheye distortion and chromatic aberration in the corners, but
Lightroom seems to do a pretty good job of countering it using its profiled
lens corrections. (See the tree photo for a
wide open 16mm shot with high contrast edges and corner detail).
The 100-400mm has obviously lost a significant chunk of zoom
(full frame sensor vs 50D's smaller sensor with 1.6x "zoom"), but the
images look so much better and seems to have alleviated the niggles that I
believe plagued its relationship with the 50D (fringing and ugly bokeh). I'll need to use it a bunch more to confirm
though.
One un-expected bonus is that auto-focus now works with my
tele-convertor attached! I think it only
uses the live-view style contrast based (?) focussing, rather than the normal
auto-focussing system, but it seems to get somewhere close pretty quickly,
which is really handy.
Physically the body feels very similar in size, almost exactly the
same as the 50D, maybe a touch heavier, but the first major difference is the power switch has
strayed over to the top left, from the bottom right, which will take a while to
get used to. I'm not even sure I like
this either, as instead of being under my right thumb I now have to move my left
hand off the camera to turn on/off - irritating if I want to turn off to change
lenses in a hurry etc. The rest of the controls are fine, a few more
buttons to learn, back button focusing sorted, loving the configurable buttons,
zooming on images using the back screen is totally different and is also going
to take a while to get used to, but like some of the measures they're added to
stop settings getting knocked, with locks and more protection against eg. accidentally
scrolling the dioptre adjustment or mode dial. The depth of field preview button is in a
great position too, after five years I never did get used to finding that button smoothly on the 50D,
but sits happily straight under my ring finger on the 5D3, happy days.
The 100% viewfinder is a luxury I knew I'd love, (no going
back now!), spoilt. So clear, bright and I finally have a battery
indicator in the viewfinder! (stupid
little thing that I always wanted for weddings). All those auto focus points to choose from
too! Brilliant. I set the M-Fn button to swap focusing modes
and have been playing a bit, seems to work great, but I really need to learn
which mode to use when after relying for so long on single spot weighted
focussing. Demonstrated in the photo of
the swans, I had been trying out the zone focussing on cyclists riding past
(camera focuses on the nearest spot in whichever zone you have active), which
worked brilliantly on the cyclists, but when some swans swam through a patch of
light in the river it (correctly and very accurately)focused on the wing rather
than the eye. Doh! I ended up doing this a couple of times, with
a Blue Jay in a tree (focused on the branches) and a squirrel while crouched
(focussed on the leaves in front), so its something I really have to get used to
switching to for isolated subjects.
High ISO is .. interesting.
I haven't been blown away by its high ISO noise handling so far and it seemed a little
keen to ramp up the ISO into the thousands a bit too readily I thought, but I probably just need to get used to it
though. See the streetlight at night
photo for an example of ISO4000 image with no noise reduction. Just happy to trust that it is a lot better
the 50D was, but a little disappointed that I'll probably still have to
de-noise wedding photos taken above ISO100.
Anyway.. I have to go for now .. more to come soon (along
with some more US photos at some point!?)
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| ISO4000, 35mm, f/28, 1/30s, -2.7ev - example of high ISO noise (no noise reduction) |
 |
| ISO100, 16mm, f/6.3, 1/100s, -1ev, lens correction (Adobe Lightroom) |
 |
| ISO100, 400mm, f/5.6, 1/320s, -1.7ev Example of 100-400mm lens sharpness and bokeh/smoothness |
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| ISO320, 400mm, f/5.6, 1/320s, -0.3ev, Example of when not to use zone auto-focus (was playing with different modes and it focussed on wing instead of eye). Very nice auto-exposure, bokeh and background water though ... and auto-focus on the wing is very good too - shame about the rookie photographer! |
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