First Wedding With the Canon 5D Mk 2

Had a chance to use the new 5D Mk2 at a real wedding the other day and thought i would share a few thoughts with you. We decided to combine video with stills and i used the 5d mk2 and Sharon used a sony hd camcorder. The first thing i noticed was how hard it is to combine stills and video at the same time because you have to concentrate very hard with documentary/reportage wedding photography to capture the right moment. I found it almost impossible to do both things at once. We set up the 5D mk2 on a tripod at the back of the ceremony room which was quite dark. Sharon set her HD camcorder up at the front of the room to capture the vows / exchanging of the rings ect. I used the Canon 70-200 2.8 is lens and video mode on the 5D Mk2 to combine video and stills through the ceremony. I found it worked quite well as long as i manually focussed the lens and locked the exposure with the * button. I used the live view and iso 3200 / f2.8. It was then time for the signing of the register and i decided to stay at the back and capture natural images of the bride and groom. I found this a problem as the camera would only take a few images in a row before locking up and stopping the video recording. I was in the largest RAW mode and i don't think the camera / processor/ compact flash card could handle it. I had also set the white balance to auto as i always correct later on in lightroom. The problem with this is the video mode is a bit like shooting jpeg andso you can not colour correct the video easily later on. As you can tell i was not that impressed so far and decided to stop video at the end of the ceremony and let sharon use her Sony camcorder for all the footage from the ceremony on.

Click Here for another website about the pitfalls of Canon 5D Mk2 Video