I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,
and not, when I came to die,
discover that I had not lived.

Canon 5D Mark II: great mind, shame about the body

Canon5DII
I haven’t been without a Canon SLR camera for well over 30 years. Sure, there were times when I wondered whether I’d backed the right horse. And, in the days before digital, it had essentially become a two-horse race: Pentax had lost their way; Yashica/Contax were simply lost; and Minolta were going their own way, which proved to be up a dead end. On the other hand, Nikon had superb lenses and the Nikon F4 was a camera that grown men drooled over. In fact, given the choice of a night with Claudia Schiffer or an F4, most photography nuts I knew at the time would have opted for the F4 on the basis that it was as close to Heaven as one could get while still surviving the night.

But Canon, bless their socks, just seemed to have the innovative edge: autofocus, in particular, was where they shone. Then image stabilization in lenses. Both significant attributes for a wildlife photographer. And, finally, when it came to digital, there they were leading the pack again. The Canon D30 was, and remains, a masterful camera. Forget that it was made of plastic, had a miniscule 3 megapixels and cost me $9000 New Zealand dollars: per pixel, I don’t think there has ever been a better camera.

Fast forward to 2009: the Canon 5D Mark II finally arrives in New Zealand.
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