Benefits of Live View on Canon 5D Mark II
I have always had problems taking sharp pictures of the Cascade mountains from our neighborhood. The autofocus always seem to miss just a bit and the viewfinder on my previous cameras was never big enough to let me effectively focus manually.
But Live View changes all that.
I just set my 70-200L f4 to manual focus, engaged live view, zoomed in to 10x, and twisted the manual focus ring to get it sharp. A quick press of the remote trigger and there you have it:
The wind was gusting and I discovered another benefit of Live View magnified at 10x: I could see how much the camera was shifting in the wind. I just had to wait for it to die down before pressing the shutter. Again, this is something I could not have done without Live View–and I had no idea that my tripod moved that much.
This is not a great picture, but it does show me what will be possible when the sky is on fire at sunrise.
I poo-poo’d Live View when I first heard about it but the more time I have spent using it, the more I think it might just be the biggest benefit of the latest DSLRs.
Yeah the first time I used live view on the D700 was in the middle of taking the product shots to sell my D80. (I sort of forgot I had it – I was only 200 or so exposures into owning it) With it zoomed right in – the difference in crispness between AF and MF was readily apparent.
Makes you wonder what kind of miracle goodies will be on cameras in another 4 years.