This is the traditional "first light" shot for my new camera, a Canon EOS 5D Mark III. Being an old astronomy buff, the concept of "first light" is meaningful in the sense that it is the first official use of the new gear. In this case, I opted to find a rather challenging shot to run the 5DM3 through its paces. This photo of St. John's Episcopal Church in Barrington fit the bill. I was shooting almost directly into the sun. The church itself was in deep shadow, and the sun created very harsh highlights on the bushes and grass. The sky itself was extremely bright in comparison to the dark church. To make it even more challenging, I placed the camera in HDR mode - a built-in function in the Mark III - using an HDR Normal setting with a +-3 EV. What this effectively means is that the camera automatically takes 3 photos, bracketing them by 3 stops in both directions. It then automatically aligns the photos - since this was hand-held - and produces a High Dynamic Range composite of the three images. The goal was to see how well it handled both the dark shadows and the extreme highlights, and I also wanted to see how well the camera aligned the hand-held images. Suffice it to say that I'm very pleased with the performance. The color of the church is spot-on accurate, and it brought out the full depth of detail in the shadows. The alignment of the three hand-held images is amazingly accurate. I used the least vibrant of the HDR options, and I'm pleased to see the very natural color tones it produced. I'll experiment with the others, of course, but this is a very pleasing first view of the camera's performance.
Post processing started with a warm tone filter in Topaz Adjust. I applied a minor sharpening technique using a desaturated detail light filter in soft light blend mode using a high pass filter at 2 pixels. I added a cooling filter to the sky and a sepia filter to everything else. Levels were adjusted to put the building back into a slight shadow. Saturation was toned down just a hair.
