Sleepless in Senja

Heading off on a photography tour is great fun, but trusting the entire trip to the performance of one camera means putting all your eggs in one basket. This was the problem I faced as I planned a trip to Senja, Norway's second largest island, which is well inside the Arctic Circle. Any camera needed to tick a variety of boxes. First, it had to offer decent resolution, big enough to make prints larger than A3. Second, the camera had to be robust – the Arctic Circle can be an unforgiving place, so this certainly wasn't the location to take smaller mirrorless cameras that burn through batteries in seconds and are allergic to wet, cold weather. Finally, and this was the big one, the camera had to perform well at capturing both video and stills, as I would also be producing a number of video projects while in Senja.

I've owned pretty much every Canon DSLR going, starting with the EOS 350D in 2005 and working my way through APS-C models such as the EOS 40D, EOS 60D, EOS 7D and EOS 7D Mark II all the way to the heavy-duty APS-H sports cameras such as the EOS-1D Mark II, onto the high-resolution DSLRs (EOS 5DS) and also the EOS 5D line-up, including the original 5D, the Mark II, and my latest buy, the Mark IV. The 5D Mark IV was launched in August 2016 and, as Canon tends to upgrade its 5D line-up every four years, this field test (or ‘fjord' test) is in essence a mid-term report for the Mark IV.

The specification of the Mark IV seemed to cover all my requirements. It's the first in the 5D