A Quick Spin With The 5D Mark III

My friend Amy Thiessen, the lovely and talented gal that she is, was playing a show Ironwood Stage in Calgary last night and I was invited along to shoot pictures. I thought it would be a great opportunity to try out Canon's new 5D Mark III so I rented one from The Camera Store for the day.

Of course, the Mark III was new to me so I spent the day setting it up how I liked and getting familiar with handling it and using some of the new features. Just to be safe though I decided to bring my Mark II along as well and shoot the two cameras side by side. After shooting both cameras for about twenty minutes and comparing the results, there was a clear winner - the 5D Mark III.

Being in a bar, the lighting wasn't great so that meant high ISO. I shot everything at ISO 6400 to have ample shutter speed for my longer lens and the Mark III hands down produced cleaner images but probably even more important than that was it's ability to acquire focus. The Mark II is OK at focusing in well lit places but not so much in dim light. The Mark III on the other hand had no trouble focusing in minimal light and producing many, many more keeper images like the one below.

I didn't have long with the new camera but it was long enough to know it had some clear advantages over the 5D Mark II. Hopefully I will have a chance to use one again in the near future.

Keep shooting.