The Story

WARNING:  what follows is not a camera review.  If you want a review that discusses lp/mm, evaluative metering, and all that technical stuff, go read the review at dpreview.com (http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos5d/).  Those guys are amazingly exhaustive. They'll tell you everything you want to know about the EOS-5d, except what it's like to actually use one for landscape photography.

About a year ago a photographer friend of mine, Alex, went completely digital.  Although I'd been doing digital printing for quite a while, to myself I thought "well, that about wraps it up for quality in HIS work.  From now on, it's blown out highlights, noisy images, and not enough resolution".  I didn't say it, but I did think it.  (Another friend had been showing me images made with a EOS-1ds, and I was impressed with them.  So I don't know why I had this thought - but I did.)

But that's not what happened.  Instead, Alex showed me print after print - glowing, luminous B&W prints with wonderful tonality.  They didn't seem lacking in resolution, and they did just fine in terms of sharpness and detail.  Even better, they possessed what I can only call 'creamy goodness' - a luscious, smooth, noiseless and grainless rendering that made the large format part of my brain sit up and take notice.

It turned out that I had a Pelican case full of Canon EOS 35mm film SLR gear - bodies and lenses, both.  In my mind, they were destined for Ebay, just as soon as I got around to Ebaying all the gear I don't use.

But when I saw Alex's prints, all of a sudden, my plans for that case full of Canon gear changed.  The bodies were still destined for Ebay, but the lenses were going to stay.  Sooner or later, I reasoned, digital bodies would offer the resolution I wanted.  By buying a body now, I could get started on the transition while I still did 'real' work with my 4x5.  My plan was to buy a digital Canon body, and use those lenses.

I started looking covetously at the Canon EOS-1ds - a couple of friends had bought them, and I'd been very impressed.  In fact, I'd helped one friend make very large prints of images from his 1ds, and I'd been awfully impressed.  But the price was still a bit high for what was, for me, still a 'proof of concept' experiment.  And it used HUGE batteries, and was awfully large and heavy, and when I handled it, it didn't make the little light in my heart light up.  It was a nice camera, but it wasn't for me.

Just about this time, Canon announced the EOS-5d - a 12.8 megapixel full frame SLR.  It appeared to be  much smaller and lighter than the EOS-1ds.  The claims were that it offered lower noise than the 1ds, and slightly better resolution. 

And so, when the camera became available, I made the pilgrimage from my hometown of Carnation, WA (pop. 1400) to the Big City (aka Seattle) and visited Glazer's Cameras, where I held their demo camera in my hands.  It only took me about three minutes of fiddling with the camera to decide that I was going to buy one.  Four days later, I had my very own EOS-5d in my hands.

At that point, I did the usual thing every photographer does with a new camera.  I took it around with me, made photographs of my dog, my friend's dog, my kids, my studio.  Some of them were even interesting.

I had no real intention of using it for the usual sorts of things one would use an SLR for - instead, I was going to use it as a 'scouting camera' for when I scout new locations - and I was also going to try to come to grips with the entire digital capture thing.

It was, I thought, a Very Good Plan.  But, as Mr. Burns pointed out, the best laid plans o' mice and men gang aft agley.

Things didn't go quite the way I planned.  Instead, I got a very nice surprise.

What follows is the story of my nice surprise.

The EOS-5d meets the Snoqualmie Valley

After all the fiddling around,  it was time to take the camera out and do some scouting.  I dug an old camera bag out from beneath the studio stairs - it took me about an hour to vacuum all the dust and dog hair off of it.  This was just an experiment, and I didn't want to invest too much emotion in this camera.  Not yet.

The camera and lenses and batteries and CF cards went into the bag, and the bag and the tripod went into the car.  The next morning, I drove down into the valley below my home, and I made a few photographs.  I still wasn't thinking of them as 'real' photographs - I was just trying things out, and if I got stuff that looked interesting, I'd go back under similar conditions and take the 4x5 and make 'real' exposures.

That morning, I arrived in Carnation just as the overnight rain was lifting.  After visiting the coffee shop, I wandered out into the parking lot, put the camera on the tripod and made a couple of exposures.  The camera was small, and light, and it was easy to move the camera around, and I spent half an hour there, drinking my coffee and fiddling around.

It felt good, but I wasn't quite clear on what I was doing.  I picked up the camera and tripod, and with it over my shoulder, I wandered around town.  Every little while, I'd set up the camera, make a few exposures, and then move on.

The next thing I knew, that lovely tranquil post-rain early morning light was gone, and I was back at the car.  "Hey, " I thought, "that was pretty fun!" 

I stopped off on the way home to repeat the experience when I drove past my neighbor's property and saw the fog in the woods.

Finally, I got home, and I pulled the CF card out of the camera, and copied the images onto my computer, and took a look.  I was pretty pleased with what I saw.  At the coffee shop, I'd gotten this:

And on my little walkabout in town, I'd gotten this:

And finally, in my neighbor's recently thinned forest, I got this:

But what about the prints

At this point I was pretty sold.  This little camera - it's great for scouting.  It's light.  It's fast.  It's easy to use, even though it has a squinty little viewfinder that gives me a headache and it doesn't yet feel familiar under my fingers.

But then I made a couple of prints from those images.  I didn't have very great expectations (despite Alex's great results) and so I made them really small - maybe  the image size was 8x12.  They looked just spiffy, and prompted the obvious question of "Just how large could we print these?"

So I made a 10x15.  It looked great.  I made a 15x22 - and it still looked great, even though I was uprezzing the image.  At 15x22, I felt that I was on the edge - that compared side by side, an image from scanned 4x5 film was going to show higher resolution.  But that noiseless quality I'd so admired in Alex's prints was there, in abundance, and it made up for any shortfall in resolution.

Finally, I made a  22x33 print of the image of my neighbor's forest - and it looked soft.  I thought I'd hit the limit, but on closer inspection, I realized the image was soft because the camera had moved.  It was a fairly long exposure, and I must have shifted my weight with the shutter open, and the soft and wet ground transmitted my movement to the tripod.

Another image, the one of the Shell station in town - that was made with the tripod on the asphalt, and at 22x33, it looked plenty crisp.  Still perfectly grainless, still with that creamy goodness - but by now I could, with very careful inspection, see that the lack of resolution was coming into play.  My conclusion was that this size, or perhaps just a bit larger (say, image size 24x36) was about the size limit where I'd be content putting the print up in a gallery.

And of course, at that point I had to sit down, because it occurred to me that a 24x36 print is just about the largest print you can mount and mat and fit into a 32x40 frame, and 32x40 is awfully large.  So large, in fact, that although I've got a 36x40 print hanging in my studio (from a 4x5 negative) it's awkward because to mat it, I'd need mat board larger than 40x60, and you can't get that.

This was a bit of a profound realization.  I'd just discovered that my little 'scouting' camera could, when handled very, very carefully, produce prints I'd mat out to 32x40 and be happy hanging in a gallery.  I'd have to be very, very careful - pick solid tripod locations, and use mirror lock up and optimum aperture and watch out for wind and all the rest of it.  But it was possible.

This flew directly in the face of what I'd learned from scanning film and printing digitally.  To get a decent print at those sizes from scanned film, I needed a lot more than the 12.8 megapixels that I was getting from the EOS-5d.  Still, there was no arguing with the prints.

The answer, of course, is that not all pixels are created equal.  The pixels from the 5d - they're essentially noiseless.  There's no grain, no noise - just creamy, smooth tonality.  In contrast, the scans from 4x5 film (done with my Microtek 1800f scanner) have noise and grain.  The conclusion was inescapable - an image from the 5d had fewer pixels, but they were higher quality pixels.  An image scanned from 4x5 TMX had more pixels - but they were lower quality pixels. 

Pixels from scanned film have grain and scanner noise, and sometimes the grain and the scanner noise interact in an unpleasant way.  Fog, for instance, just isn't as nice as you'd expect.  But the although the image of the fog in my neighbor's forest wasn't perfectly sharp - that fog looked pretty darn good.

It turns out that fog photographed with the EOS-5d looks very nice indeed.  All that creamy goodness and lack of noise I've been going on and on about - that creamy goodness is what fog is all about.

And it turns out that I love photographing in the fog.

The EOS-5d meets the Snoqualmie Valley, this time with fog

Fortunately, fog in the Snoqualmie Valley during the winter is very common.  By this word 'common', I mean "it's the rare day when there's no fog in the valley at some time during the day".

So I've been going down into the valley when it's foggy, and I've been making photographs, and (as we've come to expect) most of them are boring, boring, boring, although the fog looks pretty nice when printed.

But when we got a light dusting of snow, I threw the 5d and tripod into the car, headed out, and got some nice stuff, like this:

and this:

and this (there's a red outboard motor on the cross - at this size, it's hard to make out):

It turns out that the speed of use of the 5d means I can hit a lot more locations, and I can actually drive to different parts of the valley as the light changes, and as a result I'm no longer constantly racing to catch up with changing conditions.

In the fog, the creamy smoothness produces images that really capture the feel of the scene.

So, What's Not to Like?

Now, I've painted a pretty rosy picture of doing landscape photography with this camera.  It's true that the camera has given me a pleasant surprise, and as a result, I'm actually using it (instead of 4x5) for the landscape work I'm doing right now.

But Willman's Law tells us "There are no panaceas", and this camera is no exception.

Here are the things that I think are shortcomings of the camera, in no particular order.

• No movements

I admit it.  I'm a view camera guy, and this camera has no movements.  The format is small, which helps quite a lot - depth of field is great enough that you don't need to use movements to move the plane of focus around - just stop down and bang away, and it will all be fine.  But I do miss rise and fall - you can tilt the camera up, or down, but then you get convergence.  Yep, you can eliminate the convergence in Photoshop, and I've done it.  Maybe in time I'll adjust to this way of working, but for right now, I find myself itching for rise and fall when I'm in the field with the camera leveled.  Canon makes tilt/shift lenses, and I'll probably explore those in the future and see if they make sense.

• display layout

Face it.  I'm a landscape guy, and that means my normal method of working is that I'm making exposures with the camera firmly fixed to the top of a tripod.  When I do that, and have the camera at eye level, the result is that I can't see the top-deck display, which tells me a bunch of useful stuff.  Some of that useful stuff (aperture, shutter speed, exposure compensation) I can read by peering into the viewfinder.  Other really important stuff (like ISO speed) can only be read off the top display.  It's just stupid that this camera has a wonder-display on the back, and no way for me to make it display everything I want on the back display.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

• viewfinder

Everyone is going to think I'm crazy, because all the reviews of the 5d just rave on delightedly about how wonderful the viewfinder is in a digital SLR that's full frame (sensor size 24mmx36mm).   Well, here's one photographer who's come from the hinterlands of view camera land, who thinks that this wonderful, large, bright viewfinder just sucks.  Compared to the ground glass of a 4x5 view camera, this little viewfinder may be bright but it sure is small and squinty.  The edges of the viewfinder don't match the edges of the image.  The viewfinder is so small that although the camera has a control which the manual euphemistically labels 'depth of field preview', judging focus or depth of field in this viewfinder is nearly impossible.  Will I be able to adjust?  Probably.  But I'll never be one of those guys who frames things by looking thru the viewfinder.  I find myself setting up the camera, looking at the scene, deciding how I want it framed and composed, and then adjusting the camera with quick checks through the finder to make sure I've got it right.  I don't spend much time looking thru the viewfinder - it's just too small to see anything except the profound compositional issues.

To top it off, there's no viewfinder shutter, so either I make exposures with my eye to the camera, or else I cover it with my hand, so that the exposure is metered correctly.   Sure, there's a little dingus on the camera strap that came with the camera, and if I take off the rubber eyecup on the viewfinder (so that it immediately gets lost) I can fit the camera strap dingus on the viewfinder to cover it up.  The flying pigs will be having a hard time landing on the ice covered runway in Hell before I resort to using that.  Really.  Who the heck do they think uses that sort of crud?  Give us all a break, and don't design that stuff.  It's just irritating, and it makes me think the camera designer has never actually used a camera to make a photograph.

• Mirror Lockup

Sure, the EOS-5d has mirror lockup.  It's just buried deep in the custom function menus, where it takes me ages of fiddling with cold, stiff fingers to turn it on or off.  Holy cable release, Canon, take a ride on the clue bus.  Why the heck did you bury this essential function so deep as to make it nearly unusable?  Every time I turn mirror lockup on or off, I invent new words to describe the torment I deem fitting for that the person who is responsible for this.

And to think that Michael Reichmann tells me this is an improvement over previous cameras.  Wow.  That's about all I can say about that, is Wow.

• Vertical use

Unlike a view camera, which has a rotating or reversing back that allows me to change from landscape to portrait frame orientation, with an SLR, if I want a vertical composition I have to tip the camera up on its side.  That's not a big hassle but it means that I have to have the tripod head flipped over, which makes it a pain to adjust.  My solution was to buy a very nice, reasonably lightweight, very nicely made L-bracket from the fine folks at Really Right Stuff.  It's nice but an expensive solution to the problem and it makes it harder to fit and remove the cable release.

• Cable release

Coming from the view camera world, I'm used to cable releases.  Of course, the release for the 5d is electronic.  That's fine.  It's even got a better connector than the old releases for Canon film SLR's, one that doesn't require screwing anything in, so that you actually have a hope of attaching it or removing it when your fingers are cold and stiff.  (yes, my fingers are cold and stiff 100% of the time when I'm in the field.  It's a problem.)

But given that it's an electronic release, don't you think they could at least display the stuff that's displayed on the top of the camera (where I can't see it because the @#$% camera is on a tripod at eye level, remember?) on a little display on the cable release?  I mean, it would make it more expensive, but who the heck cares if it's actually useful?

• Depth of Field Preview Button

Let's indulge ourselves for a minute, and presume that we can actually make useful critical depth of field judgments in the viewfinder.

I know that, historically, depth of field preview buttons are on the front of the camera, where they can be connected directly to the mechanism that pushed on the rod or lever that actually forced the auto-aperture lens to stop down.

But we all know that here and now in the 21st century, we're past all that; the depth of field preview button is just another electronic button that sends a signal to the CPU, which in turns sends a signal to the lens, which in turn fires up a little solenoid to stop the aperture down.  And we all know we could put this button anywhere on the camera, and it would still work.

So why the heck did Canon's designers decide that the depth of field preview button needed to go on the front of the camera where it's hidden from view, and then go the extra mile and make it hard to find and press when you're wearing gloves?

It's as if they figured "Hey, with this dinky little viewfinder, it's useless anyway.  Let's hide it on the front of the camera, and position it so that no one ever activates it by accident!"

• Dust, Dust, Dust

Every time I change lenses in the field, every bit of dust, pollen, grit, etc. is drawn through the air at great speed, shoots through the throat of the lens mount and lands inside the camera.  The next time I fire the shutter, all of that crud immediately migrates directly to the sensor, where it leaves dust spots on every single image I make.

I know that I should turn off the camera when changing lenses.  I do, honest.  Most of the time.

But no matter what, I spend time spotting dust off images.  I had hoped that going digital meant freedom from hours spent spotting images.  Alas, this is not the case.

The solution, for those who suffer as I do, is a set of brushes from Visible Dust.

But There's Still Plenty to Love

Don't let the above list fool you, though.  There's a lot to love about this camera.

I once wrote glowingly about how 4x5 sheet film in packets allowed me to hike in to a beach one morning with 70 odd sheets of film in my backpack, and then hike out later with all of it exposed.  Digital capture takes this to a whole new level.  I can walk into the landscape with the 5d and a pocket full of CF cards and batteries, and have the storage to make a thousand exposures before I run out.  Even if you grant that I'll do a lot of bracketing, and experimenting with a lot of minor differences in camera position, etc. that's just a stupefying number.  My brain would have fused into a pile of smoking slag long before I filled up those cards with 1000 exposures.

Working with long lenses on a view camera is a pain.  With the bellows extended, the camera turns into a kite.  It's hard to reach the lens to make adjustments.  And there's a practical limit to how long the lenses can be, really, and it's not very long.  The longest lens I own for my 4x5 is a 450mm Fuji-C.  That's about the equivalent of a 135mm lens on the EOS-5d.  In my bag, I have lenses for the EOS-5d that give me a focal length of 280mm, the equivalent of 950mm lens on my 4x5.  Wow, that's long.  Not only that, but it isn't even really hard to control the camera when that lens is on it.

Those are things that the 5d shares with every digital camera.

But the big wins, for me, are specific to the EOS-5d.

• sensor

To my mind, a great deal of what makes the EOS-5d such a great camera is a result of the sensor.  Unlike film cameras, where we can claim that the camera is just a tube between the film and lens that serves to keep the dark in and the light out, with a digital camera, the camera body IS the film.  And the film in the EOS-5d is excellent - great flexibility of speed, low noise, good resolution.

• speed and ease of use

David Clarridge, a close friend with whom I've gone on many photographic trips, uses a Pentax 6x7.  I've long envied the way the Pentax gives him the ability to set up quickly, make an exposure, and rapidly move on.  I'm pretty quick with the 4x5, but I'm not as fast as David is with the Pentax.  The EOS-5d, with it's sensible control layout and great handling, gives me the same speed and flexibility that David gets from his Pentax.  In rapidly changing conditions (e.g. blowing fog, or fading light) this can make the difference between getting one exposure, and getting six.

• size and weight of complete kit

Here's where the rubber meets the road as far as I'm concerned.  I can put the 28-70mm f/2.8L lens on the EOS-5d, put the camera on the tripod, put the case with CF cards in my pocket, spare battery in another pocket, and walk out into the landscape ready to go.  No light meter to carry, no pack full of film and lenses and readyload holder and labels, no loupe around my neck.  It's liberating.  It takes a little bit of adjusting to take it all seriously, but after that adjustment, it feels incredibly frictionless.

• achievable print size

I've been stunned by the quality of the prints I've gotten from images with the EOS-5d.  They've vastly exceeded my expectations.  No, they don't have the resolution that I can get from a well executed 4x5 negative, but the beat the stuffing out of the 4x5 on noise and grain, and that goes a long way toward making up the difference for prints 24"x36" or smaller.  It's a different tradeoff, agreed - much like the tradeoff in using a 6x7 camera versus 4x5.

Sure, I lust after a Mamiya ZD, or a Phase One P45 back on a medium format camera, the same as everyone else. 

But for what I'm doing now - the photographs I want to make today - the EOS-5d is enough.  It's important to remember that the photographs you make with the less than perfect camera you have in your hands today are better than the photographs you didn't make because you didn't own the camera of your dreams.

And, in the End

In the end, there's sometimes a sort of alchemical affinity between photographer and camera, where the camera seems to match the working style and thought patterns of the photographer.

It's happened to me before, with the Linhof Technikardan TK45s that's been my trusty photographic companion for so many years.  It happened with the quirky little Leica M6 - the camera I wanted to hate but in in the end loved.

And it's happened again, with the little Canon EOS-5d.  It's not the most expensive digital SLR, nor has it the highest resolution.  It's not heaviest, nor biggest, nor lightest, nor smallest.

Somehow, though, despite its faults, it seems to be a camera that came out just right.  And that's mighty nice.