La Perouse is a great spot! I guess quite a few underrate exactly how nice it is down there; great bush, good beaches, fantastic fish and chips and stunning sunsets. Well, looking at house prices in the area I should probably not want to be quoted for claiming it is underrated, but is there anywhere along the coast that you can get anything decent for less than $1000000 and a couple of kidneys?
One of my friends has given in and put his accumulated pocket money to good use and invested in a DSLR. What a sane idea - unfortunately things are not always straight forward with this particular friend in question so while doing something good, as usual a bit of madness struck and made him buy Canon - the 5D Mark II in fact. [As a Nikon shooter you have to write that sort of stuff] :-D
I had been invited to have a closer look at this full frame beast, actually I had more or less invited myself to have a look at this second generation 5D. From what I have read on the internet a very capable package - maybe not the fastest speed monster out there, but probably the best high megapixel full frame deal on offer. Nikon's D3x alternative is way(!) too expensive even for many pros and the Sony alpha900 has started looking a little long in the teeth - it probably just beats the Canon if you are exclusively into landscapes, but the lack of high ISO magic and all the other bells and whistles; live view, video capability etc. makes the new 5D Mark II a much better choice for general full frame photography.
I tried the camera with Canon's 50mm f/1.8 II and the 24-105mm f/4.0 L IS a great combo of lenses. The zoom gives a near perfect range for a walk around lens and the fast 50mm prime is good for all the exciting stuff i.e. shallow depth of field, night shots, portraits and razor sharp when stopped down a bit. I have not done any pixel peeping - many much more capable places on the internet have done heaps of that stuff - but playing around with it, you get that good feeling of handling something of quality, it feels very solid and well built without being excessively heavy and I simply love that full frame viewfinder - WOW that packs a lot of light! :-)
An evening of chatting camera gear over some high quality fish and chips, what could be a better way of spending a week day evening? :-)
By the way, all the pictures in this blog post is from the old trusted D300, when the D5 Mark II pictures hit the internet, I will try to supply a link.
4 comments:
Come to the dark side Allan, Canon is your true father.
Hello there :-) Yeah, I was fishing for a response ;-) I really like the 5D Mark II. We did some of the long exposure night shoots and you could just continue zooming on the LCD screen and it continued being sharp no matter how much we cropped - would like to see the results on the computer. What about you are you jumping to Nikon, full frame or considering more glass? You must be able to get some good prices over there? Cheers
You could do with some more glass Allan, perhaps with a canon mount as well. If you got the 24-70mm f2.8 L lens I might even keep it warm for you until you get around to upgrading to the 5D mark III in a few years time when it comes out and before you ask that is more than wide enough for me.
Jep, I would be all in for sharing lenses - you guys are aware that you can use Nikon lenses, right? http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/nikcan.htm
So we should let Simon buy some super cheap Nikon lenses in North America before the Oz $ sinks back down into the darkness :-)
Post a Comment