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Canon 70D Field Blog, Day 2

Greetings... Chris Parsons here, reporting from Lembeh, Indonesia. It's day 2 of my testing of the Canon 70D in the Nauticam NA-70D housing, and I after the long voyage, I finally got in the water today with this cool new rig.

For this first day out with it, I set up the system for still image shooting, as follows:

  • Canon 70D
  • Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L IS USM Macro Lens
  • Nauticam NA-70D Housing
  • Nauticam 45º Enhanced Viewfinder
  • Nauticam Macro Port 94
  • 2x Inon Z-240 Strobes
  • 2x Nauticam Fiber Optic Cables
  • Nauticam Strobe Arms/Clamps including Carbon Fiber Float Arms
  • Fix NEO 2000 Focus Light
  • Inon UCL-165M67 Close-up Lens
  • Nauticam Flip Diopter Holder
Field Notes:

This camera is pretty familiar to anyone who's ever shot a recent Canon SLR. Shooting it on land is very comfortable for me, and I find the size to be just about right - somewhere between the 5D Mark III and the Rebel T5i in size.

I take a lot of this sort of thing for granted, but this camera does all of the basics really well; I shot some TTL, some Av mode, and tried out a few of different metering modes. All seemed accurate as I'd expect from this level of camera.

Focus (still mode): The focus for still image shooting is the same as it was in the Canon 7D, meaning it is no slouch in the focus department. I found that autofocus worked very well, and when it didn't because it got too dim, I switched on the focus light and was autofocusing easily. There's a dedicated button for switch the focus point area selection, and focus points/areas are easily moved with either the command dials or the 8-way controller via the nauticam multi-pad control.

Shooting speed... this camera is quite fast, firing off up to 7 frames per second. I used the popup flash to fire my strobes via fiber optic in manual mode, and was never waiting for the flash to recycle. (I turned the on-board flash power down to it's minimum setting). When shooting TTL, it is of course a bit slower to recycle, but seemed quite good compared to other cameras.

All of the photos in this post were shot today with this setup. All images shot in RAW, with basic processing only, in Lightroom 5.

I'm pretty happy with this first day of shooting stills, but am anxious to get on to shooting some video and checking out how the new 70D video focus works underwater. So, tonight I'll rig the system up for video shooting to be ready for tomorrow's diving, and with any luck I'll post a video, so be sure to check back soon to have a look at some 70D underwater video.