Lately I have taken the attitude that I will not waste my time with the microstock sites.  I take the shots that I like to take, and later on figure out if something may sell.  This works out the best for me, as I do not feel pressured to take particular shots that I would not have taken other than to sell them.  When these shots are not accepted or are accepted and do not sell, I have wasted my time.  However, if I take the shots I like in the first place, my time is never wasted.

I went through my shots and found a bit over forty that looked stock ready.  Now was the moment for the true test of the 5D Mark II – what would the editing experience be like?

The first thing I was interested to see is the dust.  On my old 5D, this was constantly a problem – especially with my macro shots using the MP-E 65.  On the new Mark II – this is improved considerably.  I have not cleaned my sensor once – even with an air blower – since buying my camera and I change lenses quite often.  Dust was almost non existent in my first 2,000 shots but has recently started to turn up.  Still, it is far less than what I had with my original 5D after even 1,000 shots.  In particular on my old 5D I had severe dust problems in the corners.  With the Mark II, dust is more evenly spread around the sensor and rarely occurs in the corners.  I will still need to clean my sensor from time to time but overall this was a big positive.

My other big concern was the resolving capacity of my lenses.  As many of you know, the microstock sites will reject an image if it is not tack sharp at 100%.  As the 5D Mark II is a 21 megapixel camera, that means getting a tack sharp image is more difficult.  The lens needs to resolve this resolution and I need to hold the camera still enough and use the proper shutterspeed to prevent blur.

The overwhelming majority of my shots used the MP-E 65, 180L macro, and the Canon 100-400.  I can say for sure that these lenses can definitely resolve 21 megapixels.  In general, I found more keepers with the 5D Mark II than I did with my 5D.  How can this be?  The answer is that I have more options with downsizing my picture than I ever did before.  This is particularly the case with the MP-E 65 above 3x.  Now when images are slightly out of focus I simply resize the picture down to around 11 megapixels and things look much better.  I did not have this flexibility with my old 5D.

Of course, I am more cautious about my shutterspeed and keeping the camera steady now.  For instance, I always use a monopod with my 100-400.

The resolution is simply amazing at times.  I was stunned at some of the detail on my fly shots and noticed some things I had never noticed before (mentioned in more detail in an upcoming post).  When I get the shot right on, which is most of the time except when I take the MP-E 65 above 3x, the details are simply stunning.  When the focus is slightly off, I have the flexibility to reduce the size of the shots.

Interestingly enough, the size of the shots produced by the Mark II can be an issue.  While most microstock sites are with the times, StockEXpert rejected one image for being too large.

Even stranger, I am still a bit confused about the results I am seeing with my 180L.  On my 5d, I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed with it.  All of my shots appeared to be slightly soft and in general I felt that my MP-E 65 outperformed it.  Therefore, when I started processing the shots I took with it I was ready to downsize them when I noticed that they were already very sharp and did not require downsizing.  The math certainly does not make sense but my 180L is now a very sharp lens.  I have not setup AF micro adjustment yet and even if I did it would not make a difference as all of my macro shots are manual focus.  I truly have no idea why this is but the results are unmistakable.  Perhaps I have just learned to use the lens better – who knows…

In terms of noise at high ISO, I was quite impressed compared to my old 5D.  With my old 5D the rule generally was ISO 100 and 200 no noise reduction was required.  At ISO 400, I needed to use Noise Ninja.  ISO 800 was iffy and usually the shot was beyond saving but one or two miracles did occur.  With the Mark II, I have no problem submitted pictures at ISO 1600 with a Noise Ninja pass.  I did not have any shots at ISO 400 or 800 so I cannot tell there, but I was awfully tempted to submit the ISO 1600 shots without noise reduction, but still did because I know the microstock sites are picky.  I also submitted one shot at ISO 3200 but I think it will most likely be rejected.  Therefore, I will not hesitate to shoot up to ISO 1600 in the future for stock pictures.  At ISO 6400, the pictures are clearly beyond saving but can still make a good 8×10 of the kids.

Overall I am very happy with the camera and feel that it will definitely allow me to be more profitable in microstock, even though I will continue to take only the shots I like.

Addendum:

At the time I wrote this the shots had not yet gone through the reviewers.  While so far they have only gone through Shutterstock, I at least have some data here.  Somewhat predictably with them, of the 42 shots I submitted only 12 were accepted.  Interestingly, the ISO 3200 image was not rejected for noise, but for poor lighting (which admittedly wasn’t so great).  The following were the rejection reasons:

5 were rejected for noise.  This is typical SS as all but one of the images were shot at ISO 100.  Another reviewer would have probably accepted them.  One of the images was shot at ISO 1600 and was dark.

6 were rejected due to focus.  Most of them were drop photos where the drop is OOF, though the icicles above were IF.

5 were rejected due to poor lighting.  All of them were shots where I had used shadow/highlight which indicates this reviewer did not like the effect.  I kind of agree, but in the past reviewers did not have issues with it.

1 shot was rejected due to ‘overuse of noise reduction software’.  This is interesting as I took the shot at ISO 100 and did not use noise reduction software.

13 were rejected due to ‘limited commercial value’.  This is a big issue with insect shots as it is entirely at the whim of the reviewer.

Overall more submissions will be necessary to see at what ISO I can submit shots.  They did not seem to have a problem with the ISO 3200 image, but perhaps the reviewer did not examine the noise after seeing the lighting issue.  The ISO 1600 image was rejected but it was dark in the first place – so more noise is likely.  Still, two images and a Shutterstock reviewer are not enough to determine the high ISO capabilities of the Mark II regarding microstock.

Focus was not a big issue so I am clearly not outresolving my lenses.  Other than that the issues were very typical with Shutterstock.  For IStockPhoto, I suspect they will agree with the lighting issues and will agree with most of the focus issues – though one or two drop shots may get through.  They will probably reject the ISO 1600 shot, but the shots at ISO 100 they will not reject for noise.  I suspect they will not reject my ‘limited commercial value’ shots, but may reject them for other reasons.

Overall I am pleased so far.  Shutterstock reviewers have become more difficult as the site grows and macro and insect shots are notoriously difficult to get through.  Also of the 42 shots submitted, 30 had no technical problems (I don’t buy noise at ISO 100).  In the past, I have just waited a few months and resubmitted the shots with a high acceptance rate which I may do in this case as well.

All in all I think the Mark II is working very well for microstock.

Addendum 2

I just received the results of my first 15 images from Dreamstime, which is more similar to IStockPhoto in its reviews than Shutterstock.  Of the 15 images, 12 were accepted.  Interestingly enough, the ISO 1600 image was accepted.

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This weekend we took the kids to a birthday party at a jumping house.  I had been to this identical location several months earlier with my old 5D and I was keen to see what the true difference would be.

The first thing I did was crank it up to ISO 6400.  As this was inside a large building and the lights were rather dim, the whole place was very dark.  Even at ISO 6400 I could not have taken the shot with just ambient light.  Therefore I added a 580EX II together with a Lumiquest diffuser, put the camera in AI servo, and let the camera rip once the kids started sliding.

With my old 5D, during a shoot like this I would wind up with maybe one or two decent shots.  Not the case here.  With each slide, I would take about three or four shots.  Some of those I would delete, but I would get at least one or two good shots from each attempt.

With my old 5D, I would take as many shots as I could with the hope that at least one or two would come out great.  The the Mark II, I actually stopped photographing at one point because I realized that I already had some good shots and I then started sliding myself.

I do not think that the AF is any faster than my old camera, but it does seem to have the knack to follow a subject much better.  I do not think that I have improved my skills much here as it was only a few months ago I shot in the exact same location under the same conditions.

Also, the additional .9 fps did seem to matter here, as it probably enabled me to get one more shot per slide.  ISO 6400 helped not just to get some of the ambient light, it also enabled the flash to keep up with the faster frame rate.  I did not have any shots where the flash failed to recycle quick enough – though I did have the flash hooked up the my CP-E4 just in case.  When I switched to ISO 3200, though, the flash had a harder time keeping up and I would have at least one black frame.

All in all I really like this camera so far.  With my original 5D, I had planned to upgrade to a 1Ds Mark III someday.  With the 5D Mark II, I do not feel the need to upgrade to a 1 series camera – though I’m sure Canon will release something someday that will change my mind.

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Coming from the 5D, the 40D is certainly a different camera.  I suspect that many people right now are trying to make up their mind whether to purchase a new 50D or a used 5D, so I thought I would offer my opinions on the differences (the 50D and 40D are very similar cameras).

First, I am not going to dwell on the well known aspects such as image quality and noise.  There are many well respected web sites out there that will go into detail for these cameras.  In general, though, I felt the 40D was a very good camera.  Knowing that its high ISO capabilities are not as strong as the 5D, I didn’t push it very much.  On a few occasions I went up to ISO 800, but generally tried to keep it as low as possible.

As the 40D is a new camera, it has a number of improvements over the 5D.  The following are my impressions of them.

Dust removal – As with all newer Canon cameras, the 40D has automatic dust removal.  I tested this by taking some shots with my MP-E 65, which is the king of all lenses when it comes to showing dust.  I did find significantly less dust than I am accustomed to, particularly in the corners.  However, the images were certainly not dust free, and I will still have some cloning work to do.  The dust removal feature does reduce the amount of cloning I need to do though.

LCD – The 40D has a much nicer LCD than my 5D.  This helped significantly when making decisions about which images to keep.  I suspect with zoom I could have a good indication of how in focus an image is, but I didn’t have time for that.  Still, images I thought were in focus on the viewfinder turned out to be out of focus when I downloaded them.  I suspect the viewfinder on the 5D Mark II will be an improvement here.

Live View – I didn’t use this feature at all, and suspect I won’t use it much on the 5D Mark II except for the taking movies.  The MP-E 65 requires eye coordination and Live View is basically useless in this aspect.  When taking pictures of the kids, I felt it was unnecessary.

Viewfinder – Displaying the ISO in the viewfinder was very helpful.

Bursts – the 40D has a much higher frames per second than the 5D. In practice, I didn’t really use this.  My preferred style is to anticipate the moment, then take the shot.  I never pushed my old 5D in terms of burst and didn’t come close to using the feature for the 40D.

Autofocus – This is very hard to quantify, but based on the results I believe the AF in the original 5D is better.  In similar settings and lighting conditions I have had more ‘keeper’ shots, despite the fact that I used the same settings.

Feel – The 5D is certainly a larger camera and ‘feels’ more professional.  Perhaps it is just my familiarity with the 5D, but it feels much better in my hands.

Crop factor – This was very welcome when taking macro shots and when using my telephoto lens.  It was of course unwelcome when using my wide angle lens.  In general though I didn’t feel that I got any shots I wouldn’t have gotten with my 5D.  The depth of field was also a bit nicer in the macro shots, as the 40D has a bit more than the 5D.  Still, my style is to generally blur the background a bit, which is more difficult when you have more DOF.

Pop up flash – I used hot shoe flashes whenever necessary, but Nelya used the pop up flash.  I offered to put one of my flashes on the camera, but she didn’t want to bother.  In my opinion, the shots show the effect of a weak uni-directional flash – all the more reason that I prefer to not have a pop up flash on my camera.

Wife’s opinion – Nelya actually used the camera for the first party as I volunteered to help with the event.  She didn’t like the camera at all – saying that it felt more like a ‘toy’ compared to my old camera.

In general I think the 40D is a great camera.  When choosing between an old 5D and the newer 50D (which is essentially the 40D with a better LCD and 50% more pixels), I would choose the 5D simply because I prefer having less DOF and I like the feel of the camera more.  For purely macro and telephoto reasons though, the 50D certainly has its advantages.

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First of all, I have never really bothered with video that much.  I tend to not enjoy watching videos of weddings, events, and vacations that others greatly enjoy.  I do enjoy videos of my kids, so we purchased a Canon HF10 some time ago.  This is a very nice video camera, though we still do not have a good decoder for the AVCHD format.

However, the Mark II offers some new perspectives on video previously unavailable to me.  For one, the quality is considerably better than the HF10.  While it is certainly missing features present in top video cameras, the raw quality of the video is on par with the best video cameras.  Therefore, I plan to use it for the following purposes.

1. Video of kids.  I’m not sure how much we’ll take with the HF10 and how much we’ll take with the Mark II.  My guess is the HF10 will still take the lion’s share of the video.  However, when I feel that the video is very important, I will likely use the Mark II.
2. Macro video.  In particular I hope to take macro stock video.  I am still working out a number of the details on how I plan to go about this, as lighting and stability are significant issues that I have not yet fully addressed.  Once I do start creating these videos, I will obviously post them here along with my technique.
3. Real estate videos.  I have gone back and forth about the need and use of video in real estate.  The truth is I have yet to see a real estate video that does a good job.  However, I have some ideas on how this may work and I plan to do use an upcoming listing of Nelya’s to test my theory out.

So, yes, the HD video feature of the Mark II is useful in my opinion.  It is not a replacement for a full video camera, but I suspect if you understand it’s limitations it makes a great tool for those of us unable or unwilling to spend tens of thousands on a professional video camera.

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Ironically, the day I sold my camera Nelya received a big listing, so I wound up temporarily trading my macro gear for someone else’s 5D that I can use for the property.

This obviously means no new pictures for a bit, though I have some older shots I have been meaning to discuss and a pile of book reviews on my plate.

Interestingly, a number of my colleagues are jumping ship to the Nikon D3/D700 due to the better AF and high ISO handling.  Granted, these cameras have better AF right now, but I think it is a mistake to switch for a single camera.  Canon has regained most of the ground with the 5D Mark II and I suspect this is a competition where Nikon and Canon will trade places for some time.

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First though, I do think that for the majority of uses the AF on the 5D isn’t so bad.  I took the picture below recently in poor lighting and with AI servo.

A lot of people have the conception that Canon has different teams.  One team works on the 5D, another the 1D, another the 50D and so on.  When they finish with one camera, they start work on the next.  The reality is certainly not that simple.  Most large products have multiple teams.  These teams can be divided into roughly two types.

• Feature teams.  These are teams that work on a specific feature that often spans multiple products.
• Shipping teams.  These are the actual products that we think of.

In terms of size, far more individuals work on the feature teams than work on the shipping teams.  The shipping teams themselves are quite small and most of their work consists of determining what features will be included in their product and combining these different features into a complete working product.  Despite their small size, the shipping teams are extremely important.  If a particular feature has too many issues, the shipping team will boot it from their product.  The feature teams depend on shipping teams and the pay and performance of the leads of the feature teams is heavily weighted on the inclusion and success of the feature in the shipping product.  For each feature team, the products that their feature ships in are called the “ship vehicles”.

Where I’m getting in all of this is that within Canon, there likely exists an autofocus feature team.  This feature team has limited resources and, in my opinion, was faced with a standard gut wrenching decision that many feature teams constantly face.

“Should we put all of our resources into the next version of the feature, or should we put some of them into an incremental update of the existing version?”

Completely new versions of features are often expensive to develop.  Changes in infrastructure are often expensive and major portions of the feature must be redesigned.  In my opinion, the decision faced by the Canon AF feature team was how much resources to put towards a completely new type of AF and how many to put towards improving the AF in the 5D Mark II.

From a business perspective, a new AF for all cameras would be a big seller.  The 1D has had some issues with the AF and for a marketing sake a next generation AF certainly makes sense.  However, redesigning and properly testing a new AF system is very expensive, and there was no way they could get it in time for the 5D.  Since putting resources on improving the AF in the 5D would delay the ship date for the new AF, they likely made the decision to keep the old AF in the new 5D.  So far this decision seems to be working for them, as the 5D Mark II is expected to be sold out almost everywhere when it ships.

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In particular I am very disappointed with essentially the same AF as the current 5D and a paltry 3.9 fps.  The fact that the camera is 21MP isn’t very helpful.  I would have preferred a 15MP camera with a higher frame rate and even better noise handling in high ISO cases.

While the UI certainly appears to be an improvement over the current 5D, they still haven’t added the features I most desire.

1) More than 3 shots in exposure bracketing

2) One button mirror lock

Right now I find myself at a bit of a crossroads.  The better ISO handling will help my travel photos, but I’m just not sold on the upgrade.  I am also incredibly disappointed in Canon’s lens announcements.  I had really hoped to see a Canon 100-400 4-5.6 IS and I was considering a 24-70 2.8 IS if I could figure out how to fit it in my bag.

My current thoughts are one of the following.

- Save my money for a real professional camera or in other words the successor to the 1Ds Mark III.  At least this camera will be guaranteed to have top notch AF.  This is probably where the 5D Mark II disappoints me the most.  If they had significantly improved the AF, I may have jumped on it.

- Purchase a 24mm tilt shift lens for real estate photography.  Currently I have not been actively going after agents, but I am considering letting the word out more (currently I only work with my wife and other agents she knows).

- Consider again getting into photomicrography, which will cost more than the 5D Mark II any ways.

To be honest, I am currently undecided, but I do have to wonder what exactly is going on at Canon.

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