The ‘See In The Dark’ Canon EOS 1D Mk4..

There’s something about a brand new 1D series Canon when you first pick it up. My 1DS is still in great shape, but these days it’s got shiny edges, scruffs on the hotshoe and marks on the baseplate from endless tripods and rig shots and after a while, you take it for granted, just like your favourite pair of trainers.

Then I pick up the brand new 1D Mk4 and recall what a brand new 1D series camera body feels like. Sure, the 5D is superb and the 7D too. But pick up a 1D Mk4 and there’s something about the built quality of these things that you instantly feel. The rubber grips are brand new, not shiny and it’s got the feeling that it was machined from a solid billet of metal. Power it up and start handling it and there’s almost a slight disappointment that there’s nothing to learn with the basic operations – everything is in exactly the same place. If you’re an EOS 1D series user, the initial learning curve is flat. Note that I said initial, there’s a lot more to this thing..

My big concern was the 1.3x factor of the chip. I’m used to my full frame 1DS and I shoot a LOT of wide angles. That was probably my most pleasant surprise – the 1.3 factor didn’t really have a big effect on the style of shot I wanted from it. Sure, you lost a little all the way around, but it still looked like a wide angle and the field of view still felt pefectly good to me. I’m sure you’d see the difference with a 14mm, but for most shots, I didn’t miss the full frame sensor.

Given that I only had the camera for a week and it arrived at short notice in mid winter, there was no way to get anyone with a supercar to come and play. I’d seen the Laforet movie shot in murky light, so Plan B was to find some lousy light and stretch the ISO. Eldest son’s kayak activities to the rescue, as an evening canoe polo training session in a pool lit by dim tungsten and distant fluorescents should be the perfect thing..

Canoe polo is played by two teams and resembles a hybrid of five a side, water polo and the aggression of ice hockey all rolled into one. The experienced players take no prisoners and a hefty shove to flick someone into a roll is perfectly acceptable. They wouldn’t let him drown, you understand…. Just take him out for a few moments before he eskimo rolls back upright. The clever guys take the ball down with them..

From a photography viewpoint, there’s lots going on and it’s very easy to fool the AF as a player moves into the frame in either foreground or background. Add in the tungsten lighting and a row of strip lights across one wall and you’re asking a lot of a camera keep concentrating on the core subject, even with selectable AF and deliver a useable result. I didn’t have access to the excellent Canon Custom Function guide published recently, so considering the settings on the camera were just the plain ‘vanilla’ ones as it arrives out of the box, I was really impressed. Fast moving action with people constantly passing through the shot didn’t upset it in ways that would have my older EOS hunting and racking frustratingly back and forth. In this sport, 10 frames per second is simply superb, as you can guarantee that with arms, elbows and carbon paddles flailing around, faces get obscured and it’s surprising just how quick these guys can flick the ball around. Even at 10 fps, you’re constantly trying to predict where the play will move to next.

Shooting RAW with white balance set to auto, I went against everything you’d consider to be A Good Thing and simply racked up the ISO to 6400. On my 1DS, that would deliver an image so noisy, you’d think it had been shot on old 35mm film. Not this baby. A quick white balance tweak to remove the tungsten cast in Canon’s DPP software and ISO 6400 was delivering clean files and a shutter speed of 1/500 at f3.2 consistently. No noisy blacks, no missed shots through hunting AF, just nailed, dead on, with a success rate I’d never have believed.



Sure, you don’t nail absolutely every shot, it’s unreasonable to expect that. But failures were mainly due to driver error on my part, the usual sort of stuff when the action doesn’t go the way you think.

Canon had to get it dead right with this camera after the public flogging over the early 1D Mk3 issues and from what I’ve seen so far, it’s superb. But the weirdest thing of all is when I look at the shots taken that night, there wasn’t that much available light in the building, it’s as if this thing creates it’s own lighting….. Quite what it’s going to be like when I get to use it on my core subjects of cars transportation and aerial work is an exciting thought.

While any EOS owner can pick up this camera and get a result, there’s so much more to come. Canon recently released a guide to the custom functions that specifically allow you to customise the AF to the type of subject you’re shooting. You’d really need to take this 25 page document away with you for at least a day and set up your 1D Mk4 exactly as you’d like it. Functions like the Area Expansion setting that allow the AF points to expand to the surrounding points, allowing a fast moving subject to continue to be tracked without the AF shifting to the background.

And the amazing ISO setting of 102,400…. I’ve already thought of aerial subjects I’d love to shoot at night. Then you can think about evening drift car meetings, night races like LeMans 24 Hours….

And don’t get me started on it’s 1920x1080p HD video….
Many thanks to Tees Tigers for the poolside access and the wet feet…

Tagged as: canon 1Dmk4, eos 1d mk4, high iso canon 1d