Working with landscapes and urban scenes, the Canon 5D was an obvious choice. Full frame (the same as 35mm film) means my wide angle lenses are wide angle once again. 21 mega-pixels means my wide angle lenses produce w-i-d-e images with room to spare for cropping if need be. Low light performance is just great – working at ISO800 with Image Stabilised lenses means I can get results in the legendary coal house at midnight, and still have manageable noise levels.
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.