My new Canon 5D Mark II camera arrived this past Monday, and the 24-105 f/4L lens followed on Wednesday. Due to my work schedule, I wasn’t able to do much with it (other than a few family portraits) during the week. Today, though, we all, along with Ian, Peggy, and Erin, went over to Vasona Lake Park in Los Gatos to have some fun and take lots of photos. Ian also got some new camera gear this week (in his case, the Canon 70-200 f/2.8L IS lens), so we were both eager to experiment with our new gear.

The weather was ideal by my standards — overcast, slightly windy, and a temperature around 65. Surprisingly, Vasona was not crowded. Perhaps the rain in the morning scared everyone away? In any case, we couldn’t have asked for a better place for the kids to play and for us to walk around.

The 5DII and 24-105 performed surprisingly well. Focus was fast and accurate, exposure was dead-on about 80% of the time, and the photos were sharp with lots of detail. Because the 5DII is full-frame, I had to keep my aperture smaller than I would have on my 40D to avoid depth-of-field issues.

The only major disadvantages to the 5DII so far are all file-size related. Photos eat up space on the flash card much faster (4.6GB in less than 2 hours), take longer to copy off the card, are slower to open/edit, and take longer to upload. I could save sRAW (small RAW) instead of RAW, but then I wouldn’t capture as much detail or be able to crop as much. I’m a big believer in always setting a camera to maximum quality to ensure flexibility in future post-processing.

Here are my favorites from Vasona:

You can see the rest of my photos at http://photo.oscarc.net/gallery/8085521_prHit, and you can see Ian’s photos at http://photos.codrus.com/gallery/8085728_76J6S.