5. Ask what you need from your kit
For someone who is used to taking quick, candid shots in the crowd, planning a landscape project presented a whole new set of challenges and requirements. David was aware that landscape photographs in galleries tend to be printed larger than documentary photographs, and he wanted the highest resolution he could possibly get – a camera that would do the same job as a large format 4x5, without the inconvenience of carrying around a view camera.
The solution: a Canon EOS 5DS R. "The quality is superb, it's sharp as a tack," David says. "It can deal with my lack of technical expertise – I point the camera and the result I get is what I think I saw. I mean, who could ask for more? The exposures always look right," he adds.
He uses his EOS 5DS R the way he would use a 4x5; placing it on a tripod and considering the composition carefully. He usually shoots at ISO200 with an f-stop of around f/9, and prefers to back-focus using the AF ON button, a habit he has cultivated over the years as a documentary photographer.
Although the EOS 5DS R has customisable cropping options that blur out the areas outside the crop in the viewfinder, David found a simpler way to shoot for his preferred 6x8 crop: "I used the little grid lines in the viewfinder, and by convenience, the two outside lines are approximately 6x8, with a bit of leeway if I want to crop the image slightly," he says.