» I’m Back….plus some Canon 1D Mark IV observations

I’m Back….plus some Canon 1D Mark IV observations

After a six month hiatus from photography, I’m back to shooting and blogging. I’ve made a few changes, most of which have been live for the past month or so:

I’ve split the blog into multiple parts: one for photography (Photo As Image, what you’re reading now) and one for game design (Point Line Square). The audiences didn’t overlap much and the sheer volume of photography posts was overwhelming anything I put up on game design.
I’ve added a visual index for all the blog posts, sortable by lens or style. Take a look, let me know what you think.
I’ve renamed the daily photo series to “before and after”.
I have a new weekly series reviewing specific lenses as used with a particular subject. The first one of those will go up this week.

The Canon 1D Mark IV

As for the latest generation of Canon’s flagship, I have a few quick observations. I’ve only had a chance to use it in one shoot so far (plus about fifty shots taken at a friend’s house the day before). A couple things stand out:

Compared to the Mark III, the auto focus fails differently. On the Mark III, in servo mode, a three shot sequence would typically produce one sharp frame, one usable frame and one soft frame. On the Mark IV, I get whole stretches of sharp or soft frames. I don’t have enough data yet to identify specific situations, but I’m sure it’s partly related to one’s use of “expanded” spot focusing.
I didn’t have time to muck with the settings too much before the fifty odd test shots I took at a friends house. I shot using spot focusing in extremely dim lighting conditions with a fast moving subject (two dogs playing). What was notable was that twice the AF system completely quit: it simply stopped trying with the image way out of focus. Re-pressing the shutter button didn’t help. I had to point the camera at a completely part of the room to get it back. The next day, at a modern dance shoot and with C.Fn III-8 set to 2 (multiple AF points), there was never a hitch through about 800 shots.
The ability to change the AF point on the fly with the multi-controller — instead of having to hit another button first — is nothing short of fantastic. This is a small, unexpected tweak to the UI that is unbelievably helpful and easy to use. If you’re shooting moving subjects, this is a must (C.Fn III-9).
I’ve seen plenty of claims about improvements in the image quality over the Mark III at comparable ISO levels. To be honest, comparing at equal resolutions (i.e. the image blown up to 100% on the screen), it looks about the same. However, the added resolution of the Mark IV gives it a boost since pixel density will in effect be greater for like-sized images in real world use (e.g. if you’re printing to 20 x 30, the Mark IV will have a better DPI and noise will show up less as a result). The gain is enough that I’m considering using the quick control dial on the back of the camera to adjust ISO instead of aperture, at least for variable lit shoots.
The high ISO settings are nice, but they’re definitely in the “functional not pretty” category. I’ve included some cleaned up shots at relatively small sizes below, but even then you can see the limits once you start shooting at 25.6k, 51.2k and 100.4k (the latter is almost unusable). I’ve only one set of samples so far, and with a subject that tends to be problematic to remove noise from due to unusual lighting conditions, so I may change my mind about H1, H2 and H3. Beyond that, 12.8k and 6400 look workable, and 3200 is pretty clean. Oh — there’s more color noise than in the Mark III.

The shots below had some exposure and tone curve, plus a quick pass with Noise Ninja and some sharpening (i.e they didn’t get the normal treatment most of my photos get). They were also cropped as appropriate.