Daily life with some old EF glass and a new M6 Mark II

davecheng wrote:

The first thing I noticed about the M6 Mark II was its ability to focus on, and track virtually any point on the screen. I know this is nothing special, but it is my first taste of live view and modern DPAF. Most of my work was shooting professional sports with tele primes like the 400 and 600. I used the centre AF point 99 percent of the time, and relied on cropping in post to get the final composition. I kept the 1D's AF sensitivity settings at their quickest, and I was well-practiced at releasing back-button AF when something — mostly, the buttocks of referees — would temporarily cross my subject's path.

The M6 Mark II, by comparison, seems to be able to track anything, anywhere. I feel it offers a freedom in composition that is new and exciting. I can now shoot a 50/1.2 from the hip and actually expect some of the images to be in focus! Eye-detection AF is just wild.

The next big difference is image quality and noise. I think we can all agree that a lot has changed in 12 years since my last camera's 10MP sensor. I often feel like the grumpy old man in the room when I read discussions about what is considered "noisy" these days. The use of f/4 teles for indoor sports, for example, was unheard of 10 years ago.

Thanks for your comments, really interesting. The jumps you mention in features happened only between the M6 and M6 Mark II on the mirrorless side (and with the 90D on the DSLR side and comparable models - from what I've read -- so really only in the last year or two.

I thought the 70D would be 'good enough' for me... shooting video of my wife paddling a dragon boat on the river... it wasn't. I found the ISO 400 and above images far too noisy, and although the dual-pixel sensor could finally do focusing in live view over my clunky old T1i, it would focus on the wrong thing a lot and was slow, thus my upgrade to the m6...

The m6 with EVF turned to out be a wonderful solution --- trying to do video holding the 70D camera out at arms length really sucks --- gets your arms tired after just a minute or two, is unsteady and all that. I started taking a tripod with me to the river, but I chase the boats on a bike on the Tampa Riverwalk, and that was just incredibly inconvenient. Took too long to set up and break down at each stop --- I lost a lot of time and video to that.

Shooting video with the m6 like an SLR with your eye to the EVF and holding it properly braced with your face, left, and right hands, is steady enough with IS so that you don't need a tripod, and you can film for long periods of time. It was GREAT. Also i LOVE seeing the actual image with all the corrections and adjustments already made.... I keep asking myself, who would rather have an optical view over an electronic? EVF can do so much more including allow you to review photos, set the menus etc.

However the m6 would sometimes still focus on the wrong things like background or foreground items like dock pilings, signs in the water, bridge pilings when the boat was paddled under bridges. For really long shots I was using a 2x and even a 3x teleconverter with the Canon 55-250mm f 4-5.6 IS STM (an amazingly sharp EF-S lens, which I modified to work with EF teleconverters) but the M6 could not autofocus with the converters as they dropped the aperture to f11, which I was not at all surprised by. So couldn't really use the teleconverter for video.

I upgraded to the M6 Mark II after seeing a black Friday open box deal I couldn't pass up. To my astonishment, the M6 Mark II CAN autofocus quickly and reliably with the 55-250mm IS STM zoomed to 250mm WITH a 2X teleconverter, in bright sunshine it can even focus with 2X AND 3X stacked on the 250mm lens, giving a 1500mm f32 lens on a crop sensor camera! I kid you not, it's simply astonishing... it seems that if the camera can get it on the sensor with enough brightness, it can focus...

But best of all, like you've found, the m6 Mark II's subject tracking is phenomenal, to the point where I have completely forgotten there is even a need to focus during video --- the camera just finds the boat, focuses, tracks it, and isn't even deterred when the boat goes behind bridge pilings and if there are signs around (unless the boat is mostly hidden). So I totally get it when you say this opens up new possibilities, you can now pay so much more attention to the subject movement, composition etc.

So you jumped in at the right time and the right model for an upgrade...

The majority of camera reviewers seem to keep parroting the same line about the M-series lens lineup being too small and not well supported.... and that using EF glass is weird (such a large lens on a tiny body, would rather have a big body for the big lens).

I don't get that, really... The EF lenses are larger because, for example a 55-250mm f4-5.6, or an 18-135mm f3.5-5,6 IS STM HAS TO BE relatively large to get all that glass for a decent f-stop, IS circuitry etc.... and Canon does a brilliant job of choosing the materials and build quality that keeps the lenses light ---- so what if the lens is a bit larger than the body... the right way to shoot is to mostly hold the lens, and the m6 Mark II body is so well designed and proportioned that even in my big hands it feels perfect! I found the 70D just to be too honking big and heavy ---- think Canon has hit a home run with the M6 Mark II even in some ways over some of the R series cameras.

Do you use the EVF? With the EVF the M6 Mark II is a killer camera, as you can always remove it. I don't ever shoot with flash for the subjects I choose, so not being able to use the hot-shoe and EVF at the same time is a non-issue for me.