Wedding Photography Camera Choice 5DMKII
My name is Albert Palmer and I am a proud owner of the new Canon 5D MKII. My 30D recently broke down and whilst I decided to pay to fix it, it made me realise I needed a backup body.
My options for a main body were the 1Ds MKIII or the original 5D. I purposely wanted to buy a full frame sensor camera. What swung the decision for me was the low light performance and price. For any wedding photographer these are two important considerations!
For the price the 5D was a great buy – but when you look at tests comparing noise levels it is easy to see that there is a clear winner. Whilst I have had concerns about a high megapixel count v’s ISO performance I am glad of the resolution this camera offers. The amount of detail is stunning and allows plenty of leeway should you need to crop.
The large screen (in which you actually CAN tell whether an image is sharp), is a nice/non essential feature, a bit like sensor cleaning and perhaps the movie mode.
What I miss is the faster frame per second (fps) of the 30D. Granted I only NEED this on a handful of occasions and I am sure I will manage – but it would be nice and considering the price I don’t think it is too much to ask.
I am happy with the purchase and am enjoying learning to master the new resolution as well as the full frame sensor. Luckily for me I tend to add a vignette in post processing so it looks like this may save me work! Apart from the greater field of view the most noticeable other visual impact is vignetting at long focal lengths when using small apertures. This occurs mainly when shooting macro but it is easily adjustable in Lightroom.
Auto ISO is a fantastic feature which allows me to concentrate on composition and not have to worry too much about camera shake or even noise. I’m not sure whether this will work well with flash so I will have to experiment. Surprisingly ISO 3200 is very usable and if I HAD to use ISO 6400 I would. It doesn’t look as good (obviously) but with a bit of noise reduction it would be very acceptable.
If you have the money and can justify it I would recommend you buy yourself a 5D MKII. I don’t think you will be disappointed unless you need a high frame rate.
One word of warning – the camera outputs 25MB RAW files. If you don’t have the infrastructure to support this you may end up having to spend more than the price of the body. Consider faster cards with greater capacity, RAM to quickly process the files in Lightroom/Aperture and space on your computers harddrive. On a 4GB card I get 125 images…
