A field in Scotland

Well, is it just a field? Or can you imagine it with a house on it, and a new driveway, possibly some lawns and flowers. You're standing in the raspberry patch actually.

To be brutally honest it doesn't look like much all raw like this. It needs a bit of attention and perhaps the eye of faith to see any potential whatsoever. But that's what I've been doing this past week, trying to visualise what could be, and trying to persuade other people (architects, builders, planners, vendors, neighbours) that our vision is a viable one. And trying to persuade ourselves that this is the plot for us and to just go and do it!

Not much different from the life of a photograph. Most of them start of a bit like this and its only by examining the potential, playing with some ideas and some different interpretations do you get to the one that makes sense for you.

... or a place to call home?

Cross Keys, Ancoats, Manchester

But these are all very technical benefits, and almost beside the point. But these are all very technical benefits, and almost beside the point. The reason: Live View.

I never thought I would consider a feature taken from compact cameras to be the best thing about this DSLR. I’ve always sworn I would never join the ranks of those photographers holding their camera out at arms-length while they squint at the screen on the back. I mean, how do you keep things steady doing that? And here I am, doing just that.

Press the LiveView button on the 5D and the mirror pops up, the viewfinder goes blank, and your scene appears on the screen. Pressing the Info button jumps the display between a variety of useful bits of information including a live histogram if that’s your thing. I prefer the screen empty of everything except exposure adjustment, aperture and shutter speed. Frame your shot, press the focus button then press the shutter button and away you go. Just like a compact. And if mono shooting is your game, you can set the camera to shoot in mono, and the scene appears in mono on the screen. Just like a compact.

Well no, not quite.

If you set a compact camera to shoot in mono, mono is what you get. Mono jpeg files, converted in camera following whatever settings you give it. So you have to decide up front how you want your mono images to look, and hope you guessed right.

Not the Canon. For one thing, the 5D can be set to record the image in RAW format. Not that many compact cameras do that. So when you set the camera to work in mono, you see a mono scene on the screen, and the camera captures the scene in RAW with all the colour detail intact. You can see an approximation of the mono image on the screen, but you can still go back to your computer and put the image through a black and white conversion at leisure with all the benefits of working with all the detail of the RAW image file.

Fantastic – mono LiveView, full colour RAW file capture, controlled mono processing back at base.

This feature absolutely makes this camera for me. Instant feedback on the viability of a mono picture at a time when you can still do something to change it if you don’t like the look of it.

Isn’t this cheating? Absolutely, but I’m getting quicker at getting to a viable mono image that I ever was with just seeing the mono jpeg on the display screen after shooting it, and much quicker than using film and processing it in a darkroom. And I get that with all those mega-pixels, great low light performance and my wide angle lenses looking wide again.

I should have done it years ago.

Down by the Arena fighting through the crowds of well dressed people streaming by into some religious get-together I paused to look across at the railway bridge over the Irwell. Sunlight reflected off the water, nice patterns on the girders, could be interesting, oh, and a heron.

So that was that. 30 minutes making sure I got a reasonable shot of wildlife right in the middle of a bustling city centre at 8:30 on a Saturday morning. The gritty realism could go hang for the morning.