Well, I’ve had the beast for a few weeks now, and over the last few days it’s had a proper workout, so it’s time for a quick report on how I’m getting on with it.

Since I arrived in Wales on Monday, I’ve taken 789 photographs, which is a good start on getting used to the new camera and lens. So here’s a quick run down of my impressions so far:

Carrying it

It is quite a big camera, and the 24-105mm lens is also quite large, making the whole thing quite heavy. I’ve taken to using a wrist strap which securely attaches the camera to my wrist, so that even if I lose my grip on it, it won’t fall to the floor with expensive results. I’ve actually found this more comfortable and convenient than a wrist strap, other than having to do the odd balancing act when getting things out of my pockets. And talking of balance, the camera fits nicely in my (quite large) hands and the controls are well positioned.

Using it

I generally shoot in aperture priority (Av on the Canon dial), with occasional bouts of exposure priority (Tv). I like to have the control over depth of field that mode gives me, but what I’m really liking is the automatic ISO setting. Rather than having to think about setting a suitable ISO value for the conditions, I leave it on automatic and let the Very Clever Stuff inside the 5D Mk II make the adjustments for me. This  was particularly useful at St Fagans, where I was moving from outdoors to dimly lit interiors where flash was not an option[1]. Even with ISO 3200 being set by the camera, I’ve been getting images with remarkably little noise, such as the interior of St Teilo’s Church

Image Processing

I got into the habit of shooting in RAW when I got the 30D, and I’m sticking with that at the moment. I may well try a few shoots in JPG and see what the magic stuff can do for me, but I do like the flexibility to play with my images at a lower level. Most of the pictures I’ve worked on so far haven’t needed that much work, so all my RAW habit costs me is disk space. I may well look at how I store my pictures in future. I may split my Lightroom catalog into several smaller ones, so I can keep more recent images on the computer’s internal disk and the older ones on external disks. Or something.

A big advantage of that 21MP sensor is that I can crop an image right down to show the interesting bit, and still have something of a useful size, such as this butterfly picture, which is a quite small part of the whole image:

Video

I regard the video capabilities as a bonus rather than a key feature – I’ve done a couple of test clips, but nothing serious so far.

Battery

The new battery that the 5D uses is not only more intelligent (it provides the camera with a lot more data on its capacity than previous versions), but also appears to be rather more durable. I found that after three days extensive use, including transferring the very large images over USB to my MacBook, just one of the four power bars was off. As a rough estimate, this looks like I’d be able to take over 1,000 images on one battery charge, which (if accurate) would be seriously good.

Moving on

I haven’t even looked at the Picture Styles or Custom settings – I’ll try to get my head around those soon. And if the weather permits, next weekend I’ll be at the Sunderland air show, which should give me lots of opportunities to test the 5D further.

[1] As the 5D doesn’t have a pop-up flash, I’d have had to get the flash out of my bag anyway…