There are a ton of articles available online covering the traditional reviews like image quality, model comparisons, etc. Rather than follow that path, I thought I would do something a little different.

This weekend, I had the opportunity to put the new Canon 5D Mark IV to work with some adorable subjects. I wanted to shoot with the setting sun in frame to test how well the camera handled the more difficult focus, and as a result how sharp the files would be.

This was the first session I did with the new camera outside of snapping a few photos around the office after taking it out of the box. For this session, I was shooting with the Canon 70-200mm 2.8L lens on the Mark IV. I also used a Profoto B2 with an umbrella and diffuser to avoid only getting silhouettes of the puppies.

Sharpness / Focus With The Sun In Frame

The out of camera shots are a little soft which is not terrible given the sun is heavily in the frame. Tied to that, autofocusing was hit an miss as well as the camera struggled to read the scene. If I was working in a more controlled situation (basically not fast moving puppies) I would have likely setup a tripod and used Live View to manual focus instead. But I was able to get a good handful of shots despite the autofocus challenge.

Sample 5D Mark IV Photo Download

Feel free to grab a copy of one of the frames to explore yourself. The CR2 and JPG files are available here:

The photo is the property of J Taylor Design, of course. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Comfortable Upgrade From 5D Mark III

The Mark IV will definitely be comfortable to use for those familiar with the 5D series. And after 4 years using the Mark III, the upgrades included with the Mark IV are welcome. 4k video, the frame rate options for 1080, Wi-Fi, larger file size and more certainly have me excited about the potential here. Though surprisingly I may be most excited about the new function button.