Well, it’s finally here, my new 1Ds Mark II. The two week estimate turned into three actual. But it’s here and it’s paid for and I can try out some new photos.
Here’s what came home from the store. It was a pretty heavy load. Not unexpectedly, the camera is quite a handful when you get the battery pack in, add a lens, and a flash. I think I’ll plan on getting a new head for my mono pod that’s matches the quick release plate from my tripod.
There was a lot of stuff to unpack. It took a couple of hours to get up and running. I got the battery pack recharging right away, it took a couple of hours to charge. I also copied the Image Rescue program from my Lexar memory card to my PC and installed it. Then reformatted the card in the camera. While I was waiting for the battery pack to recharge I hooked up the camera using the supplied AC adapter. Works fine. Some NiMH AA batteries for the ring flash and I was taking pictures.
I had a lot of fun playing with the lighting ratio with the ring flash. In Program mode it was point and shoot for nice pictures (but no depth of field). I even just walked around the house taking a few snaps, the ring flash is probably OK for small room shots but that’s where I noticed how heavy this setup is. In Aperture priority mode the camera fires the flash but also does a long exposure for the background. I wasn’t expecting that, but it looked nice. Finally I just manually set a 1/60 shutter speed at f32 to see how much depth of field I could get. Another thing I noticed, I’ll probably set the file sizes in camera based on the job. It was kind of fun taking 9mb JPEG files (large size highest quality). But pointless if the end product a 32kb JPEG file.
Still, the whole point of getting this camera is for big files and high quality. So my next experiment will be to start capturing some RAW files and try processing them.