Sunday, June 12, 2016

Hands On The Canon 5DS R, First Thoughts.

Well, no doubt it is an excellent camera, all the hype lived up to, most of the issues not yet seen, and one no-one has talked about: how poorly the menu seems to be designed.

This is supposed to be a pro level camera, yet to a large degree it appears that Canon wanted to “Dumb Down” the skill necessary to make a good image. This camera, I own the 5DS R, has so many “auto modes” on it it took me two days to figure out how to run this monster in full manual. Now to give them their due, most of these special setting are very much for dedicated special uses. For instance there is an Auto focus setting in the menu that is spacific to accelerating/decelerating objects. You say so, my camera does that, but does it? tracking a car going 170mph around a track is NOT tracking an accelerating or decorating object, one is steady state and is very easy for software to anticipate where an object will be .75sec in the future, most decent cameras can do this. This feature is trying to extrapolate acceleration. For instance a car comes out of a corner at110mph, by the time he passes you at midfield he is pushing 200mph, the processor in the camera is focusing in microseconds from point to point trying to figure out what the constantly increasing speed will be so that it can at anytime you want hit the shutter release and the camera has anticipated the location and will pop the shutter. This is calculus in you camera.

So, it is a complex, piece of equipment, but does it do the job? Well that depends I suppose on what you are expecting it to do. I do just a little bit of just about everything. Weddings (I stay away from them as much as I can, but that is one of the places where you can make contacts, and money), Nature, Fine art, documentaries, Edgy Fine Art, Portraiture, architecture, and anything else that hits my fancy bone. I will probably even shoot one race this year for my step daughter, just to try out that anticipatory focus this wonderful monster has built into it, to see how well it works.

But . . . . When conditions are the way that they should be and this assumes that you are using at least L-glass Lenses, personally I find that with Photoshop CC2015, a “Prime” lens is no longer an absolute necessity. one caveat, then it comes to 300mm+ telephotos NOTHING beats a Prime lens. Fo anything else Canon’s L-Glass lenses do an excellent job. When I open a file in Camera RAW it is automatically posted to 12,000 x 8,000px and 300dpi. As long as the light was good CR and Noiseware get rid of all the color noise I could want leaving me with a Huge Printable image. I would not be scared to have Image Wizards print one of these images at 6 feet, landscape edge, very easily.

All I can really say for sure is that when the camera is sooting at an ISO of 400 or less, it is easy cheese to get a huge perfect image, beyond that number be prepared to work a little more for your image, but it is still quite doable.

Would I recommend this to a friend? YES, if you are willing to buy all the other equipment that is necessary to get a good image, including the post processing that is inevitable.

James Longster, © 2014

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