The little brown truck brought me a new toy this summer! It’s a Canon 5D Mark III camera body. I’m so excited about it, as it has much improved autofocus, even better than my 1D Mark IV. It also does in-camera HDR and in-camera multiple exposures. It’s a full-frame camera, which will be fun for some of my more “artistic” photography.

There’s a rule at our house that the first photograph taken with any new piece of camera gear must be of our cat Goldilocks. It’s a tradition we’ve had since before my first DSLR. Goldy is pretty cooperative and she makes an adorable subject. Since the 5D Mark III does multiple exposures, I figured I’d try a technique that my friend Kathy did with her cats. It’s a combined exposure of the cat’s fur and the cat’s face.

I love the LCD on the 5D Mark III! I had such fun experimenting with the multiple exposures. You can set it to do any number of exposures, with several combination options. You can also save the original captures, which is cool, because I found that I wanted to tweak these a little in Photoshop. I liked the in-camera captures very much, but the fur overshadowed the detail in the cat’s faces. So I went into Photoshop to reduce the opacity of the fur layer just over their faces.

For Mr. Squirt’s portrait, I found that leaving a little halo around his face made for a fun look.

Whiskey Loopy is not one to sit still to have his picture taken, which is a shame, because he’s very photogenic. I got Rich to distract him while I made a few images. I love the detail from the new camera!

Then I headed to the backyard to experiment with some flowers. I have some big sunflowers growing around my bird feeders right now. The cardinals love to come and sit on them. I mounted the camera on my tripod looking down on the biggest flower. Behind the flower was a nice soft green background from my grass. I made multiple exposures, rotating the camera in its collar between each one. I really liked the result! I found that I had to edit it in Photoshop a little to remove details from the leaves around the flower that only appeared in some of the captures.

Then I repeated the multiple exposure technique with a coneflower. I tried some Fractalius with this image, but found that I actually preferred the image straight from the camera.

Since I didn’t have any real birds in the yard to photograph, I had to settle for a fake hummingbird lawn ornament that’s near my powderpuff bush. I thought it’d be fun to do zooms centered on the bright red bird. I had to put on my ND filter to do 1-second exposures, since it was mid-day and very bright outside. Then I focused on the bird’s eye and zoomed away. I’m not sure that the result was exactly what I had in mind, but it was a fun experiment!

You’ll be seeing more from my new toy! I can’t wait to try out the improved autofocus system with some birds in flight. The Canon 5D Mark III is definitely a keeper! :)