phirst photons
Being the [i’ll say it…PROUD thankful] owner of a 5D3 for 24 hours, there was one thing to do after work on Maundy Thursday…take the new camera to church. Here is the liturgy:
1) Being a male, no fair peeking at the instruction manual (i broke this rule once at the end of the night : )
2) Just JPEGs. It may be quite a while before i have software that can open the RAW files, so everything you see started as a junky jpeg and stayed that way. Eeeew! (teenage girls are welcome to correct my spelling if need be)
3) Though i did crop and/or make some other slight adjustments, there is no sharpening or noise reduction added by me—only whatever Canon uses for the in-camera default
4) All shots taken with the 16-35mm. NOT exactly the most flattering lens for humans
5) Due to item #1, yours truly was clueless as to how to activate the fancy, highly-touted zillion-point autofocus deal, and so all focusing was with single center-point autofocus only. (I did have the presence of mind on a few shots to do a “hold focus” and then recompose.)
6) No flash...available light only. White balance was just camera default.
7) Tried to keep ISO within a range between “my 7D could never do that,” and “even a new 5D3 couldn’t do that.” Try and find some noise in the images below…go ahead : )
My very first subject…no yoke. ISO 1250 (My 7D could easily do this, but from here on, forget it!)
ISO 2500. I’ve shot a few on the 7D at this setting, but they didn’t look like pictures.
ISO 5000 And speaking of serendipity...mom & dad just happened to have Ava Claire come dressed in the official Canon color test dress! Due to some incandescent lighting, we do see more yellow than needed, but where it’s mostly window light, i think color is pretty good (this from a guy who has nominal male colorblindness).
ISO 5000 "Look ma, no teeth hands."
ISO 5000
ISO 12,500
ISO 16,000
The following three images were shot with the “in-camera HDR mode,” for which i had to query the instruction manual in order to navigate through the (5D3’s more abundant) menu options. (This will likely become one of my uses for one of those “custom” camera settings one can configure.)
ISO 16,000
ISO 16,000 Note the planet Venus above and to the right of the steeple. The sky at this point looks bad, but i don't know to what extent this is from the in-camera HDR processing versus noise versus jpeg artifacting.
ISO 5,000
One can see the bright star, Sirius on the left, the constellation Orion in the left center, the star Aldebaran in Tarus in the right center, and the planet Venus on the right, with The Pleiades just below it and to the right. This is not an HDR image, just a few seconds’ single exposure at ISO 3200. Note that what appears to be a comet is low in the center of the image, to the left of the steeple. I understand there was mention of a comet earlier this year, but wasn’t aware it was still visible. (I didn’t see it until after getting home and looking at the images on the screen. It’s definitely not aircraft, as it appears in several shots.)
wishing you a Good Friday,
king