The Durham Skatepark and the 5D Mark III

I like to shoot at the Durham skatepark, espe­cially with a new cam­era with much-talked about aut­o­fo­cus, because it is a nice mix of action and envi­ron­men­tal por­trai­ture. I like the skater aes­thetic, I like the cus­tomized and weath­ered boards, I like the tat­toos, the scabs, the ban­ter. It’s a good test for aut­o­fo­cus, as things are mov­ing all around, some­times unpre­dictable. Addi­tion­ally, my three year old likes watch­ing the skaters, too, so he tol­er­ates me try­ing out new toys!

I’m not one to go out and iter­ate with a cam­era, old or new. Rather, I like to take it out for a test drive, get a feel for it, fig­ure out what famil­iar but­tons are still in famil­iar places, and what but­tons have moved. I am com­ing from the orig­i­nal 5D, so there are a lot of dif­fer­ences and changes with the 5D Mark III. Still, it feels pretty famil­iar in hand, and after about an hour of play­ing around, I had started to get things fig­ured out and dialed in.

First things first: So far, I have only been shoot­ing in best qual­ity, large JPEG with the stan­dard pic­ture con­trol. Adobe is sup­pos­edly releas­ing RAW pro­files for Light­room next week, and then I’ll go back to shoot­ing RAW. But in the mean­time, I’m not shoot­ing any­thing crit­i­cal, so shoot­ing JPEG is eas­ier, quicker, and more enjoy­able. For that rea­son, I can’t make any defin­i­tive or con­clu­sive judge­ments about absolute image qual­ity so far, but I like what I“m seeing.

I have shot at the skatepark suc­cess­fully with both my old 5D and the 1D Mark III–the 5D is always great when I need that lit­tle extra bit of wide angle field of view, and the 1DmkIII is great for every­thing else. Now, with the 5D Mark III, I effec­tively have the best of both worlds, some­thing before reserved only for the few who used a 1Ds Mark III. The aut­o­fo­cus bests even that of the 1DmkIII–I haven’t tested them side-by-side, and the 1DmkIII may still be faster, but the con­fig­ura­bil­ity of the 1Dx-sourced aut­o­fo­cus of the new 5D makes it a gen­er­ally more pow­er­ful tool.

So far, the only things that have really caught me up are the new play­back method (very dif­fer­ent than any other Canon), and the place­ment of the m-Fn but­ton. I love the multi-function but­ton and its abil­ity to quickly change  aut­o­fo­cus point modes, but I’m not used to reach­ing for it and it’s a lit­tle hard to find with your eye up to the viewfinder. I also wish there was a way to con­fig­ure the orientation-dependent AF point so that it would be the same equiv­a­lent point either hor­i­zon­tally or ver­ti­cally. Being able to set them inde­pen­dently is nice, but I’d like to be able to quickly change ori­en­ta­tions and have the AF point in essen­tially the same place. Not a big deal, and I’ll fig­ure it out, just a wish.

The list of things to love is long and I won’t weigh down this post with bor­ing list. Suf­fice to say that the sum equals more than the parts, and a lot of lit­tle things add up to cre­ate a really beau­ti­ful cam­era. And I’ll remind you again that I’m com­ing from the orig­i­nal 5D, so my mind is suf­fi­ciently blown. There was noth­ing wrong with that ground­break­ing camera–indeed, I will con­tinue to use it even now–but there are so many tweaks and help­ful fea­tures with the 5D mark III.

In the end, I think you’ll find that my images haven’t changed much, which is some­thing I address reg­u­larly on this blog. I never expect cam­eras like the 5D mark III to make my pho­tographs bet­ter. I just expect them to be more flex­i­ble, and allow me more cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties, and to spend less time fight­ing against me and more time help­ing me make the images I want to make.