A Summer of Photography with the Canon 1DX Mark II

Well, summer is over this week officially. And so is Sitecore Symposium and MVP Summit 2016 and the mad rush that goes with delivering multiple enterprise software releases and producing content for events like that.

Likewise drawing to a close is my first season with the Canon 1DX Mark II. I can unequivocally say this is the best DSLR I have ever used. It requires a firm knowledge of how to use its features, but it pretty much does everything I want. It is a worthy upgrade from the 1D Mark IV; skipping a generation seems to have been a good ROI especially as I bought the 1D Mark IV late-cycle. I’ve mostly focused at landscape and aviation action with the EF 200-400mm with 1.4x teleconverter and EF70-200mm 2.8L lenses.

To learn the camera, I focused on interesting scenes from around Lake Washington:

See more at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rdonovan/albums/72157668138083295/with/26291311203/

To get better at action photography, I decided to photograph my wife’s Washington Dulles->Seattle flight, as the approach path to Sea-Tac Runway 16 would take it right over the house:

See more at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rdonovan/albums/72157670122946550/with/28371395245/

One of the funnier moments was the Seattle Children’s Hospital’s Park-to-Park Swim, where people swim from Matthews Beach Park to Denny Park. The morning of the event I woke up to yellow buoys drifting in the lake. It seems as if they ALL got loose, creating quite a bit of chaos for the event organizers and the police. After rounding them up, the boat towing the buoys broke down…and had to be subsequently rescued by the Seattle Police.

See more at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rdonovan/albums/72157672888371252/with/29660947052/

To experiment more with optical filters and Lightroom post-processing filters, I decided to take advantage of the fact the sun sets within my field of view during early September. First, a semi-cloudy sunset: