I must say I’m loving it. The only major pain is how long the after-market ‘L’ bracket which fits round the BG-E11 took to appear. I noticed that Really Right Stuff had shipped some, even if they were on back order, so I ordered mine too, and now it has arrived to my great relief.
I’ve been getting questions on club outings about the L bracket, as the benefit isn’t immediately obvious to someone who hasn’t used one before. The quick switch from portrait to landscape, without having to re-adjust your tripod, and the way the weight stays centred are pretty conclusive, and of course the final benefit is the vendor neutrality of the Arca style fitting
A lot of thought has gone into the ergonomics on the 5D3. I initially set up my custom menu to copy that from my 5D2, and this got me going quickly. I’ve now almost completely deleted it, because everything is so quickly available on the shooting info back menu. Strangely after finding this on the 3, I discovered it had been there on the 5D2 as well (click the joystick on the back of the 2 to activate the selection, use the set button to select the setting to be adjusted). Presumably much the same is available on the 7D.
The new features I find myself using are:
- All those focus points
- built in level
- 5 and 7 step bracketing
- all those focus points
- the second memory card for jpgs to copy onto my iPad for preview, and to tag using Photosmith
- faster burst mode, particularly for panning and low light
- did I mention all those focus points?
I nearly had a failed outing, as I left in a rush, only to discover that I had withdrawn my battery tray to put the Canon batteries on to charge and not picked it up again. Fortunately I had put the AA battery tray into my camera bag, along with a box of batteries. All goes to reinforce the need to carry spare memory cards and power at all times.