A word of caution: this entry has no other meaning than to show off.

Yes, that is my hand holding a brand new Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II. The bad news: it’s not mine (with the voice of Austin Powers). We were visiting Maria’s parents after a while and I finally got a chance to play a bit around with my father-in-law-candidate’s new baby.

So how does it feel? Like a brick. I’m telling ya baby, that’s a helluva pack of hardware. I never touched an EOS-1, but this is certainly heavier than an EOS-3. Of course it has the vertical hand grip built-in, but dragging an EOS-1Ds with e.g. the 70-200mm/2.8 lense for a day sure beats a gym session.

I took a few quick photos with the camera (and another few of it) and posted them to a Flickr set. Nothing spectacular, I seem to a be a bit rusty after shooting too much with the wide focal area of a digital point’n’shoot. In 1Ds with default settings (especially with the 100mm macro lense) the area is so razor sharp and narrow that I seem to have missed the target in all but a few of the photos.

My set was exported as medium jpeg’s (that’s 6MP, folks!) and even then the quality of the photos was astonishing. Can’t wait to get a hold of the 16MP RAW files after a real shooting session, which I sure hope I can get arranged later this spring.