This is Metrophoto's official sort-of review of the new EOS DSLR camera from Canon, the 5D Mark 2 (Mark II). Why sort-of? Well, let's say it's not really a comprehensive review or even the usual review that people expect, it's more of our reaction - what we think of the camera after using it for an all-day engagement session shoot last weekend. We are actually more excited to just show you the photos (arent they the true measure of the camera's greatness? hahaha, you're right, it's not. :P but a great indicator nonetheless) than having you read this write-up :P If you want to skip all the paragraphs below, you can opt to just watch the following video... must warn you that I do talk fast :)
Canon 5D MK II Review from Metrophoto on Vimeo.
Metrophoto was very blessed to get the chance to use and review the Canon 5D Mark 2 in just only a few weeks after its announcemet. Thanks to John Chua and JayR Romero, we are the very first wedding photographers here in the Philippines (probably just second in the world after Steve and Jen Bebb's review) to be able to get a hand on the only existing 5D Mark II in the country. :) Isn't that just pure awesomeness? :D We had the camera the entire Saturday for our very magnificent engagement session with Migs and Denise where we shot on the sailboat in the murky waters of Manila Bay and then continued on to Nasugbu in Batangas where rain caught up on us and ruined (well, more of enchanted) our supposed-to-be sunset setting. More on the shoot later. :)
Simple Review
While there have been so many reviews of the camera already on all the aspects about it including its breathtaking video capture ability (vince laforet covered that magnificently), we wanted to test it on certain aspects that are important to our style of photography. We're no technical experts and definitely we're not photography geniuses, we're just a bunch of creative destination wedding photographers, looking for the best tool for us to continue taking wedding photography to different places and levels. The attributes that I didn't see in the reviews or that I personally wanted to analyze myself are pixel-level resolution, dynamic range, and weather-sealing plus of course the high ISO sensitivities. We wanted to know if the New Canon 5D has enough new capabilities to make us upgrade from our current old 5D cameras and make us not feel envious of our courterparts who use Nikon cameras. :)
Being Ambitious
We knew that it was almost great timing to use the new Canon 5D MK II in this e-session with Migs and Denise. We were pretty ambitious with what we wanted to do for this shoot. We're set to use two boats, a big one for the on-the-boat and middle-of-the-sea shots and one smaller one that we would park at the beach for our lost-in-an-island shots. Don't look for the latter one, it did not happen as instead of the sunset at the beach, the storm caught-up on us and we were stranded in the speed boat with nowhere to park. Scary really especially since it's dark and only our cellphones and the frequent lightnings are our source of light. But wait, lightnings... should be good for photos right? no, they are awesome on photos and more awesome for an e-session. Totally beats any sunset shot. ;)
Manual exposure at 16.0mm, f/5.6, 1/8sec, ISO 6400 (unedited - cropped only for the web and added watermark)
Here is a shot that I think is hard to produce with any other ordinary camera. Shot this hand-held while it was drizzling along the shore. I have an assistant point an off-camera flash at the boat while we wait for the lightning to strike. Top quality high-ISO image and improved weather sealing baby! :)
Let's shoot at the ends of the world
So you try to visualize the condition in your mind, dark and wet. How about some good weather-sealing and good-quality ultra high ISO sensitivities? You may say wonderful, I'm saying perfect! Conditions like this is not unusual for us. We have shot e-sessions in and on the Niagara Falls, inside a movie theater, inside the Manila Ocean Park (no flash allowed), the freezing beaches of southampton and inside the caves of Sagada. These locations are very dark and some extremely wet, but they have not discouraged us to shoot an e-session there even with our existing equipment. Seeing how the new Canon 5D MK2 worked in a similar scenario with less risk, more ease, and better quality photographs just takes our breaths away. Imagine the possibilities.
King of details
We were so amazed with the camera that we forgot we are shooting in JPEG format. WTH? I haven't shot in JPEG since i learned how to meter properly! Ok, that may just be recently but seriously, having to shoot in JPEG format was a concern for all of us because of our shooting and post-production styles. This was where we saw the benefits of the 21MP resolution of the new camera. Many know that this is more than what most wedding photographers will ever need but we are a bunch who like to play around with our photos in post-production. We were very impressed that even in JPEG format, we were able to do a lot with the photos in photoshop. The dynamic range available in the photos is wide enough that even those we captured, which were underexposed, we were able to recover and turn into gallery-grade photographs. Most of our photos are also captured using a 16-35mm lens on a full frame sensor, and sometimes things get very wide that the subject tend to get very small in the whole composition. For such photographs, we saw again the greatness of the high-resolution characteristic of the 5D Mark 2, details like facial features and textures are very much available when you zoom in the photos (again these are JPEG files already, yeah I obviously dislike that format). This provides a lot of opportunities for us to be more creative when it comes to post production cropping... not that we do that all the time but at least now we can :)
Here is the samples of an underexposed shot in JPEG format and what we were able to recover in post production. 
Limitless creativity
As contemporary destination wedding photographers (just thought of that now :P), what we can say is it's time for us to rejoice! Although we would have liked to experience the using the camera in an actual wedding (I don't think I'll be carrying a lot of flashguns anymore). This new camera will take us places where we deemed not possible to shoot at before and allow us to create concepts that we thought are too crazy to do before. Put in its amazing video recording capability and the new Canon 5D Mark 2 just opened the floodgates to all our creativity to flow. It's a definite upgrade for Metrophoto when it finally comes out to the market, we can't imagine curtailing our creativity by not acquiring this new camera. This was an experience that exceeded expectations, it opened a whole new dimension of possibilities for us and we just cannot wait.
Thanks for dropping by.
We would like to personally thank Shierdan Pamintuan (awesome wedding videographer), who tagged along with us for the shoot to check the video capabilities of the new camera (his own thoughts coming soon on his blog and we'll also link it here). He and wife Jen also shot all the videos we used for this review. :)
Thanks also to Aids Tecson and Lissa Banaag for the great work they put in editing our review video :) Checkout the super cool Underground Logic.
visit again to view Migs and Denise' complete coverage :)
