The end of a beautiful friendship.

My Canon 5D and its collection of Canon lenses are for sale.

5D and friends.

You can see all the journal pieces I wrote on this transformational camera by clicking here.

The decision to sell was not an easy one, but I am a user, not a gear collector. In my book, it’s a crime to have equipment of this quality sitting around unused. Simply stated, when the 5D, with its full frame sensor, came out it instantly obsoleted all the 35mm and medium format film gear I owned. A short time thereafter my Leica M bodies, used by me for 35 years, my Mamiya 6, Rollei 3.5F and Rollei 6003 Pro were all gone, along with their lenses. Such was the quantum leap in image quality and versatility offered by this magnificent camera. My Canon 5D journey commenced over five years ago and as my first serious digital camera I thank Canon for its 5D, which revitalized my interest in taking pictures, while simultaneously obsoleting the sheer drudgery of film processing. I have always preferred pressing the button to time in a darkened room with smelly chemicals.

But a couple of significant changes have occurred in my life since the 5D was purchased. First, we sold our vineyard in the country and moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area. It was a fun experiment, my zinfandel grapes won a lot of prizes but the whole farming thing started to get old. Plus, we wanted our son to grow up with all the diversity and distractions offered by one of the world’s great cities. And, from a snapper’s perspective, being close to the City by the Bay meant a return to my first love, street snaps. So while landscape work was fun and my one man show of landscape snaps was a success, my heart remains on the streets, a genetic code inculcated during a youth in London. And a street snapper the 5D is not. It’s not that it’s a big camera, it’s that it’s simply not the best instrument for my way of working on the street. I tend to get really, really close to my human subjects and the 5D just is not right in that context. Yet whether it’s outdoors for infinite vistas, QTVRs with a fisheye, bugs and birds, or in the studio, I have yet to use a finer instrument.

Other things changed in my life. Testifying to the abuse of my hands over many years of tinkering with cars and engines and woodworking, I started to develop tendonitis in my wrists. Make me lift a heavy weight and it’s not a lot of fun. Further, with age, my back has started to give out and carrying heavy gear compounds my problems. Canon 5D gear is built like a tank; it is not featherweight.

I still believe that in a world where very few prints are made, there’s simply nothing like a large print to do justice to a great photograph. For those, the 5D is unbeatable. Photo exhibitions still favor mounted, framed prints, not LCD screens. The 5D is crazy sharp and grain free, at any rational enlargement size. Want prints over 36″ on the short side? The 5D Mark II is for you.

Update 4/23/2011: All my 5D gear has been sold. I hope the new owners will enjoy this superb equipment as much as I did.

Thank you, Canon, and Goodbye.

Some surprising results.

SDHC cards are, let’s face it, the happening thing. With capacities up to 32gB and multiples of that in the offing in a postage stamp-sized medium, CF cards are not going anywhere. Add the fact that one vendor even offers an SDHC card with wireless transmission capability (though it does not support RAW files at the time of writing) and there’s reason to think that the greater bulk and inferior contact mechanism of the CF card (which depends on mating fragile pins with the card as opposed to the SDHC’s far more robust broad wipers) are headed for the technology waste bin. Finally, the burgoening netbook and flash memory markets are not about to use CF cards whereas every netbook and more devices have built-in SD card slots.

So, just for fun, I procured an inexpensive CF-SDHC card adapter ($25) and a bottom-of-the-line Kingston 8gB SDHC card ($18) and tried it in the 5D.

CF-SDHC Jobo card adapter, 8gB Kingston SDHC and 2gB Sandisk CF cards

455 RAW images on one card!

Side loading of the SDHC card in the adapter

While thicker than a CF card, the adapter fits the Canon 5D fine

The comparison, for timings, was a top-of-the-line Sandisk Extreme IV. I expected write times to be much faster with the Extreme IV, and they were. Taking 10 snaps in rapid succession in RAW on the 5D, the red light (indicating write status) on the rear of the camera remained on 16 seconds with the Sandisk compared with 39 seconds for the SDHC+adapter combination after taking the last picture. So if serial shooting in vast quantities is your thing, look elsewhere – the 5D has a 17 image RAW buffer so rapid shooters will find themselves bumping up against this – and slowing snap to snap times – with slower cards.

However, when it came to importing the images into Lightroom 2 (I used a Firewire CF card reader for the Sandisk and a cheap Transcend USB reader for the Kingston), import timings were 28 seconds and 26 seconds respectively. The SDHC card was faster! By contrast placing the SDHC card in the CF adapter and using the Firewire reader took 34 seconds – slower still. So SDHC import using an SDHC USB reader beats CF in Firewire!

Why bother? Because I like to use a netbook (with its SDHC slot) on the road and the built in SDHC card reader is a joy to use – no card adapter to forget. And because fast write times mean little to me, I am quite happy to have 450+ pictures available on one card which also fits a broad gamut of other devices in the home. And, maybe one day, Eye-Fi will produce an SDHC card with wifi built-in which supports RAW files. You won’t be seeing that in the CF format any time soon.

My only niggle is that it would have been nice had the adapter been end- rather than side-loading as the design requires removal of the adapter from the 5D to permit removal of the card. But overall, this is a fine value and I would guess the slower write speed in the camera would be made up for by the use of faster cards, if that matters to you. For me, it’s not an issue.

Don’t be ripped off.

It’s no great secret that the sensors in earlier DSLRs can get awfully dirty, the resulting blobs of black on your image testifying to the need for lots of retouching. Just like in the film days when you received your precious emulsion back from the processing place only to find that they had a party during which they stomped on your images with hobnailed boots.

So those of us not blessed with the latest in sensor dust removal technologies (meaning 5D Mark I and like vintage camera users) have to subject their camera to a nervy-dervy sensor cleaning to get the muck off and obviate the retouching. In the Canon 5D the sensior is protected by a sheet of quartz crystal – both hard and dust attracting. Now you can play into the hands of those marketers selling you Genuine Sensor Cleaning Kits for hundreds of dollars and what do you get?

A fool and his money are easily parted.

Why, a brush with some mumbo jumbo about how it’s grease free and assembled by Chinese virgins, and a bottle of isopropyl alcohol. Enough for ten cleanings.

Well, let me introduce you to Dr.Pindelski’s $15 DIY Economy Sensor Cleaning Kit. Enough for 10,000 cleanings.

The Dr. Pindelski $15 Sensor Cleaning Kit. The moiré pattern on the sensor is caused by the point-and-shoot used to take this.

Start with a Pearstone brush for $10, add a bottle of 91% Isopropyl Alcohol (you want the most concentrated, to avoid water deposits) and some Q tips from the bathroom – the genuine soft ones, not the hard generics. Do not use Kodak Lens Cleaner – this is a very poorly thought out product and is guaranteed to leave water stains on your sensor and those will be clearly visible, and near impossible to retouch, in your images.

Go outside, take a snap of the sky at a small aperture (set the camera to manual focus if the shutter refuses to fire) and load your CF or SD card into Lightroom. Increase contrast to the maximum and all the dirt blobs and deposits will show up clearly. Remember that what you see at the top right of the picture indicates dust at the lower left of the sensor and so on, as the image on the sensor is flipped and reversed once it has passed through the lens.

Now moisten a Kleenex (use plain ones, not those infused with lotions) with the Isopropyl and dab a Q tip in the moist area of the tissue, so that the Q tip is just moist. Do not touch the cotton on the Q tip with your dirty, greasy fingers. Sensors don’t like grease – or maybe they love it too much. Set the camera to Sensor Cleaning, remove the lens and dab the area concerned based on the sky picture you just snapped.. Then, holding the camera upside down, sensor pointing to the floor, brush the sensor with a flicking action using the brush. Reinsert the card and lens and take another picture. Repeat until clean.

My last cleaning dictated no fewer than four passes, the sensor cover glass being simply filthy after a couple of days snapping at the beach.

How hard to press on that Q tip? Well, the cover glass on the sensor is very tough and it would take a Mack truck driver to damage it, but pressure is not the answer. Gentle application in the right area is the secret. You want to dab and flick, not scrub. What I studiously avoid is using a blower brush on the sensor. All that does is stir up any existing dust in the body cavity only to propel it at 100mph+ into your sensor. You don’t really want to do that, do you?

Now you can apply that $245 saved to that new lens you were dreaming about.

If all you do with your images from that wonderful DSLR is to place them on the web at some 640×480 pixels, well, you can dispense with sensor cleaning as the dust spots will not show. Your DSLR is just like the Ferrari of the guy who runs it to the supermarket to be seen and to get some milk. Feels nice. Waste of money. Probably can’t drive either.

Warning to Leica M8 users: Early versions of this faux pas of a camera came with an unprotected sensor, under the guise of superior image quality or some such rot. If you have one of those, enjoy paying Leica $500 for a sensor cleaning because I doubt I would try that on an unprotected sensor in a $6,000 body. Later M8s come with a protective glass (New! Improved! etc.) once the factory realized its error, so the above technique should be fine. You will have to do something because the chances of Leica coming out with a self-cleaning sensor are about as likely as a black man in the Oval Office. Hey, wait a minute ….

The first classic of the digital age

The Canon 5D was the first camera to bring semi-affordable full frame sensors to digital photographers and, I believe, will go down as one of the great classics of the early digital photography age, much as, say, medium format was defined by the Rolleiflex and 35mm film by the rangefinder Leica. The leap in image quality it offered from 35mm and the ability to regularly match medium format film for definition and detail with none of the pain of operation make it the greatest camera design of its time.

The new 5D Mark II is slated to arrive in the US around December and yet there is already a slew of lightly used 5D Mark I models for sale on the web. Maybe it’s the economy, but I would think the price will soften further once Mark II generates some serious upgrade volume.

Check the eCrook (aka eBay) site and you will see that completed auctions average about $1,300 for a mint condition lightly used body.

But I want the 21+ megapixel sensor in the new 5D Mark II, I hear you say, which begs the question why?

Do you propose making prints larger than 24″ x 30″? Do you want to use the movie mode? Is cleaning the dust off the sensor a real pain? Well, if you answered Yes to these, you may need the Mark II. No one else does.

Two classics – Canon 5D and Leica M3