The Canon EOS 5D arrives

With so much in excess equipment sales proceeds burning a hole in my pocket, I splashed out wildly and paid the nice people at B&H in New York $20 more for Second Day shipping to the Templeton estate. This wild act of rash spending saw the Canon EOS 5D and the 24-105mm Canon lens arrive yesterday evening, where Bertie the Border Terrier and I dutifully placed it on the south patio so that we might contemplate what wonders this Pandora’s Box might disclose. Further, it was the Cocktail Hour, and nothing short of a second Japanese attack interrupts that.

This was a mixture of fun, as we enjoyed the delicious anticipation of what was inside, yet no less a period of deep apprehension. Setting aside my recent use of an Olympus Digital POS (in case you are wondering, that stands for Point Or Shoot, because with that camera’s shutter lag you cannot have both), for the last 40 plus years I have been loading cameras with film and adjusting but three variables – shutter speed, aperture and focus, and most of the time these adjustments have been manual. Often, it should be added, with incantations to the exposure God, praying that I would be within four or five stops of the right settings.

Lest the reader wonders at my sense of apprehension, then it has to be pointed out that the camera in my hands for most of those forty plus years was a Leica M2 or M3. And because I know a good thing when I see my negatives, the lenses on those Leicas always said ‘Leitz, Wetzlar’ on the front. For all of Leica’s problems, they remain the standard against which to judge to this day. And what lenses. The distortion free 21mm Asph Elmarit. The ’standard’ 35mm Asph Summicron. Any number of 50mm Summicrons. The ne plus ultra 90mm Apo Asph Summicron, perhaps the most perfect optic ever made. And finally, one of the very sharpest, the 135mm Apo Telyt, now winging its way back after a one year loan to a friend on the east coast. Throw in a couple of Telyts used on the idiotic Visoflex housing and you can see where my heart lies, optically speaking.

Before the great day arrived I had done a spot of studying and had procured a nice little Firewire card reader for the iMac; all this talk of plugging the camera into your computer strikes me as so much nonsense. Just remove the card and place it in the reader. Further, I had also learned that the swines in marketing at Macromedia/Adobe had ensured that Photoshop CS would not read RAW files from the 5D, so I had grudgingly upgraded to Photoshop CS2 which does. Unfortunately, the latest Adobe Camera RAW software is not backwards compatible with the earlier version of the application. I had also spent some time on Canon’s web site studying the interactive tutorials on the 5D and digital photography in general and found them useful and entertaining. Most importantly, they took out some of the apprehension I was suffering from the oncoming blizzard of knobs, dials and menu options.

Now Bertie’s take on this was, as usual, philosophical. “What have you got to lose?” he asked rhetorically. “Heck, the gear in that box was free, after all, and you can always sell it for little loss if it’s not for you.” By now the sun had almost set and the Martini glass, sadly drained, was now home to a lonely cocktail onion. So I gave the onion to Bert (we are dealing with a pretty sophisticated animal here) and set about the box, hoping to snap at least one picture before sunset. You know the sort of thing – “My first picture with my new toy on the day I received it”.

So we opened the boxes up, stuck the lens on the body, popped in the battery (nice that they ship it partly charged), inserted a memory card and stuck our head out the front door. Notice the strict adherence to American Attention Span with regard to the instructions.

And this is what we saw:

Canon EOS 5D. Picture 0001.

And that, dear reader, is why I live in California.

Anyway, suitably drained after this emotional experience, Bertram and I headed for the home theater to watch Hitchcock’s Frenzy, to learn better how real pictures are taken.

The EOS 5D is here, it looks like it works and there’s more to come….