(Bill Gallery, on left, and the Creative team on location at Sugarbush Airport, VT)

You can read all the specs in the world, and you can do some test shooting and tryouts, but the fact is, you really don’t get to know a camera until you’re on an assignment with it.  Whether under the pressure of hostile conditions and editors’ deadlines, or the slightly different pressures of an Art Director and client hovering behind you while the models are looking for direction, the little things about a camera, both good and bad, are going to make themselves known pretty quickly on a job. 

You’ve seen some of the videos, now we get a chance to sit down and talk to Bill Gallery about his experience shooting with the 5D Mark II. 
Bill is a veteran “Corporate Reportage” photographer.  Much of his work resembles documentary photography or journalism, within the context of corporate America, some of his early work being the first Annual Reports for Apple Computer in the mid-‘80s.  He shoots fast, spontaneously, with very little in the way of artificial sets, styling or lighting.  He needs to move fast, and he needs to be flexible- both in his composition and in his equipment.  He shoots with two basic lenses- the Canon 24-70 and the 70-200.  For a taste of his work, see www.billgallerycom.

Bill’s been shooting with the Canon 5D for almost as long as it’s been available.  A longtime Canon 35mm film photographer, the full-frame sensor allowed him to continue working within his unique, and well-established style.  In addition to that, Bill likes to keep things simple- in his compositions, but especially his equipment.  His priority is what is happening within the frame of the image, and almost everything else is a distraction. 

Sitting down with Bill to get his reactions, his first, and emphatic comments were about the quality of the bigger file.  Not only was he impressed with the resolution, but “astounding” was how he described the high-ISO performance of the 5D Mark II.  Typically, Bill doesn’t like to shoot at high ISO because of the noise common in anything over 400- on these shoots he shot the 5D Mark II at 3200 and said that the “smoothness” of the file was remarkable.  He characterized the files as looking “like ISO 400-600 35mm Ektachrome…”

One of the features he particularly liked, especially as he moves quickly in and out of various lighting conditions, was the Automatic ISO setting- allowing him to avoid dropping down to a too-slow shutter speed inadvertently. 

Bill’s bottom line on the 5D Mark II?  “…I’m getting more pictures.”

It wasn’t all a glowing report, however.  Bill’s few complaints about the camera centered around the “improved” interface, even the terminology used by Canon.  Something as seemingly insignificant as labeling the IS modes as “1 and 2”, rather than “Vertical” and “Horizontal”, offering a shutoff for the viewfinder information displays (“I find that just a distraction…”), even the model designations for the Canon line he finds unnecessarily unclear. 

Bill was not impressed with the new menu layout- he feels that it is offering too many options in too cluttered an array.  “Once the camera is set up, all I really need to do is to shoot, and format the card.  Why is that function buried in the middle of the menu?”  One suggestion he had, which fell into the “Why didn’t we think of that?” category, was the ability to customize the menu item layout.  Why can’t we just display the Menu items on the 5D Mark II (or any other camera, for that matter), that we want, and use, and in the order we like them?

Bill made brief mention of some White Balance issues on a shoot he did with available light fluorescents- he said, compared to the 5D it was way off, favoring the yellow, when set to Auto White Balance (the setting he is used to using for those conditions).    He also noted that, in spite of the fact that the files were significantly bigger than the 5D files he was used to, by using his faster CF cards and a good, fast workflow solution like Photo Mechanic, he really noticed no problems handling the additional file size overhead.

In the Grand Scheme of Things, though, Bill’s review was that the camera is a resounding success, and, most importantly, not only an easy step to make from the 5D, with very little adaptation of workflow habits, but also as a big step up in overall image quality.