I am always amazed at how beautiful your images are. I love visiting your web page and seeing what you have been shooting and the lighting that you use. Thank-you for sharing.

Hey Matt, great blog! My wife and I have been 5D JPEG shooters now for three years. You really made my day saying that your 5D JPEGS are superior to the mark ii’s! And as far as high ISO goes, I find the 5D classic’s 1600 is plenty… A kiss of flash, and Bob’s your uncle. Who needs that gritty high ISO skin tone anyway! We recently did a 20 page 8.5x11 brochure (thanks to Sarah Quiara’s template) and our color guy wanted all of our files at 400 dpi and wanted to know why we didn’t shoot RAW. I told him it slows us down too much, in post, but especially in the field. No blinking red lights for us! No missed moments! The brochure came out awesome using our humble JPEGs!

That’s crazy - how’d you make that happen?  (not the image itself - but getting the B&G;there, etc)

I have always admired your cave/pond images. Love the placement of the flash and gels. Gorgeous!!!

Hey Matt, I didn’t know if you knew it, but there’s an article in USA Today today about Joe McNally and the rise in popularity with small flash units.  Anyways, they mention Flash Flavor in a list with folks like Strobist, Pixsylated, and Digital Pro Talk.  Here’s the link to the article if you want to read it.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2009-04-07-cameras-photographers-flash_N.htm

Your shadow issue is quite similar to mine when I opened 5D2’s sRaw1 in Lightroom 2.2 in the first week. Shadows were not gray but a bit like dark magenta mixed in it. I thought it was our 5D2’s problem. However, it works well in Canon’s latest DPP. I found this problem is quite common (online) if the software doesn’t have a correct camera profile. I fixed it by changing Lightroom 2.2’s 5D2 profile. After Lightroom upgraded to 2.3, the problem was totally gone.

Back to your problem… We don’t have any shadow problem with Jpeg. However, my Raw problem shows your 5D2 may be a software issue. I guess the best way is rent/borrow another 5D2 back and test it with your lenses. If I’m not mistaken, you can set your color profile in 5D2 body. Of course, I think you should talk to Canon guys and see what they can do for you.

I hope it helps,

Ray

*We think 5D2’s color production is really close to 1-series cameras which out score 5D1.

Thanks for the comments amigos :)
We too find certain happy thoughts from time to time with the 5d II.  But, I must say 20+ meg file (if you go 16 bit, I’m sure file sizes go 50 or 60 megs… editing.... bummer when we are shooting at our volume.  Really, its difficult to process that many files. 

So, we are a very rare group of JPG shooters in the land of photographers these days.  I have considered shooting a RAW TTD as a 3rd shooter, just to see what I felt about certain conditions..

5d II seems to give us problems and I can’t really get a grip on when the highlights blow… it is so sensitive that I am tending to make some mistakes.  I watch the histogram / small picture display to try to get an exact science out of whatever I’m doing...sometimes, thats not enough.

Also, I’m finding that my shadows are falling magenta / purple / blue.  Crazy shifting too.  I’m almost thinking something may be wrong with our 2 cameras because they perform like twins.  They are consecutive serial numbers....its possible.  This bluish shift is my BIGGEST PROBLEM all together.

Side by Side JPEG comparison from old 5d to new 5d II is night and day.  Old 5d wins, side by side straight out of the camera.  The 5d JPEG is king, just an amazing beautiful.

We are trying all different user defined settings like tweaking the contrast to +4 and bumping some saturation. 

Low light is the 5d II’s friend, for sure its King in that arena.  We just invested in 2 new cameras:  2 old 5d’s.  We love them that much and were that disappointed with the II’s JPEG. 

Any JPG 5d II shooters, please give a shout out…

I have a 5DMrkII and never tried the JPEGs and I dont know if I will ever try to. The only reason why I could see myself doing this would be if I had to process a huge list of images in a very short amount of time. Because lets admit it, processing 21meg RAW files is long, very long!

So far, my only problem with this camera is the AF. I lose a lot of shots because of it…

Great shot btw!

Hey.  Shooting the 5DII and am repeatedly blown away by both its amazingness and suckiness in certain areas.  Noise: unprecidented.  Resolution: amazing (if you use the right glass) Video: sweet! (more of a toy to me at this point - but may consider having a second shooter shoot video) Autofocus: gag!  In anything less than daylight it seems to hunt with the peripheral points.  But I’ll live - I guess I just have to change my autofocusing style under those circumstances. 

JPEGS?  Very tempting!  On the low setting, the noise reduction is a good starting place, and if you set the sharpening right I find I can actually get further ahead *easier* than with RAW.  But for the few times that I only find out in post processing that I could really use that extra stop of dynamic range from RAW, failure is worse than inconvenience.  Also, depending on how intensively you edit, I find the extra flexibility of 16 bit can really help.

Just my thoughts.  Give me a shout (I admire your work!!)

~
Justin

I LOVE my 5DII, just got home from a wedding an hour ago and my 40D literally went untouched.  However, I don’t shoot JPEGs, RAW only.  I’d be happy to chat if that helps anyway, brettmaxwell at gmail.