R6 Review number 2 ..... from a factory branding shoot
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I did a review a couple of weeks ago, but thought I would follow it up with some stuff I forgot to mention with a real world job
It was an interesting shoot this week. I had a commercial job to photograph a factory for their social media content.
I decided that I would just use the R6 for the whole thing. I will explain why and include my thoughts.
** I have covered peoples faces as I do not have model releases for them, so you will just have to take my word that they are sharp.
Also, I would have liked to include more examples but 90% of the photos have peoples faces in them.
ASPECT RATIO
As this was all going to be essentially raising brand awareness via Instagram and FB I was mindful of Instagram's irritating preferred crop which is basically 4x5. The R6 allows me to shoot in 4x3 which is super close to 4x5. I have a bad habit of filling the frame when I shoot, so to have the black bars on the sides of the frame for composition is super helpful . Also super helpful when you sell a lot of 8x10s in the studio.
IBIS
I know this is old news, but this is the first camera I have had it. It gave me the ability to shoot at lower shutter speeds to capture a bit of motion and also keep my ISO down.
Examples:
IBIS allowed me to slow down the shutter and get a little movement in this electro plating thing. Very useful as I could not use a tripod.
Not the most exciting photo in the world, but again allowed me to jack up my F Stop and keep the ISO under control. Pretty interesting old piece of equipment.
Auto Exposure
This is really interesting to me and is something that I never see commented on. I do not know what Canon has done, but I feel that there must be some enhanced AI in terms of calculating exposure. It is almost like it is finding the face and exposing for that. I switched at one point to my 5d4 for some particular shots where I knew I would have to do some extensive cropping for banners and was struck by how much better the R6 is at guesstimating correct exposure in auto modes. ( I spend a lot of time in aperture priority or manual with Auto ISO for this sort of work..... only because it gets me close to correct exposure quicker)
JPEG
I shot the whole thing in JPEG (with RAW to the second card for insurance) so that I would get Canon's colours. I have not quite nailed this down in Lightroom yet.... they look a little off. I am thinking of buying some 3rd party camera profiles. So what you are looking at is JPEG's straight off the camera. All I have done is tweaked exposure here and there by a 1/3 of a stop and jacked up the contrast in some of them and converted a couple to black and white.
Auto Focus
I know this has been discussed relentlessly but here is a good example of it being super useful. I had to wear a welding helmet and the auto sensor thing was not working properly, so I could not see out of it. So I framed the shot up, guessed my settings with a low shutter speed to get a little spark action , set the tracking to his helmet and just hoped for the best. I could not do this with IBIS or the AF being so good.
Shooting at 1/25 is a big deal for me because I suck at steady shooting.
Interestingly the EYE AF really struggled in this scenario with all the busy details in the frame. I had to select the guys face with touch and drag, and then it was fine. It just really struggled to find it.
Extra Dial.
I can't believe I forgot to mention this last time. To have that extra dial, so you have SS, ISO and aperture available is solid gold, and it makes you wonder why they did not do this before. Shooting in Manual with the EVF is a piece of cake with these 3 tactile controls. I am looking forward to accumulating R glass, so I can assign one more dial to Kelvin white balance.
The EYE af is solid GOLD for this sort of work. I can hold the camera out rather than having my face squished to the camera and interact with reluctant subjects and nail focus at 2.8. You will have to take my word for it that the is smiling at the camera It really makes your life a WHOLE lot easier.
Delivery of files.
The smaller files are a pleasure to work with, especially shooting JPEG. I shot a few hundred photos , culled down to about 90, and with a quick pass in Lightroom...exported and I was done. The advancements in the R6 and I assume the R5 have really sped this all up. Mainly because you can pretty much trust that they are in focus. Culling no longer means deleting your out of focus photos. I is hard to overstate how this time adds up and is the source of frustration when you have missed a great shot.
So there you go. More thoughts on the R6. Still gets 5 Stars.
I hope this helps someone.
PS: After uploading these they look different exposure wise on this site than they do on my screen.
