New Camera Gear
A few weeks ago I splashed out a rather alarming amount of money on a new DSLR camera (Canon EOS 5D Mk IV) and a new lens (Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM), both upgrades from the previous versions of each. I certainly didn’t need new versions of either, and to some extent it was one of my fairly silly impulse purchases that I end up regretting after clicking the ‘Purchase’ button, but I’m travelling back to Europe for a few weeks in two months, and I wanted a camera with GPS built-in for geo-tagging photos, more megapixels (stitching panoramas of water doesn’t work perfectly), a use-able live-view, in addition to having better low-light performance. It will also likely guilt me into getting back into photography a bit more, which this blog post is also an attempt to do. I did semi-seriously think about jumping to mirrorless with Sony, but I do like Canon gear (they are behind technically currently though) and I have several Canon lenses, so it wasn’t an obvious win for me to make the switch.
I’m relatively happy with the new camera and lens: the new II version of the lens is noticeably shaper, although the vignetting falloff/gradient is also much more pronounced than with the old version, and the distortion’s different - although both of those can be corrected in software. The GPS geo-tagging is useful, but unfortunately I’ve found the battery life of my camera is really bad, as even with GPS totally off (there are two “Enabled” modes as well as fully “Disabled”), within a day of the camera being turned physically “Off” with the battery fully-charged in my camera bag and GPS mode set to “Disabled”, the battery’s consistently drained, and this is happening with multiple Canon batteries (including the one the camera came with), so I’m really not happy about that aspect. I think something must be wrong with my copy electronically, as a colleague has a Mark IV as well without the issue, and clearly most people online don’t seem to have the issue. At some point I’ll send it in to Canon to get it looked at and hopefully fixed, but pulling the battery out of the camera works around the long-term storage problem for the moment, and on trips abroad I’ll likely be charging batteries every night, so it’s not the end of the world.
The exposure sensitivity of the Mark IV also seems quite different to the Mark III: I’m having to stop down one or two stops to match the Mark III’s levels - I guess the light metering is more accurate or something (although I’d argue photos are getting overexposed with it compared to my Mark III with neutral exposure), but that’s not really a problem if I just keep the setting stopped down on the camera to match the results I got with the Mark III (which seem more controlled and less over-exposed).
In a further act of semi-madness, I also ordered a Samyang AF 14mm f/2.8 lens which from reviews looked like it was one of the cheapest wide-angle primes for astrophotography that still had semi-reasonable performance, as I’m very keen to try and get into astrophotography after several previous failed attempts. I’ll be giving that a go when it arrives, and when the night sky clears up and the wind dies down (need a heavier tripod!).