As a quick getaway before I had to turn my attention back to work for the final week of the year and our launch of PGATour.com, Amy, Sam and I packed up and headed to Sarasota with my new Canon 5D camera, their latest model which features full-frame imaging. More on why that’s important (to a photo geek like me anyway) after the jump. Sadly, soon after our arrival on Thursday last week we learned that Sherrie’s mom had passed away overnight, just a day after she and Marty had visited her in Tamarac on the East Coast. I think it helped everyone to be together when the news came, and most of the family will be traveling to Long Island for the funeral this Friday. Despite that bad news, the Handelmans, Sagans and Trotz families (Sam pictured above with Mason (left) and Austin) had a great time in the pool, on the green and in & around Sarasota. Click here to see a gallery of photos shot with the new gear during the trip.

So my new camera is a Canon 5D, and the first ‘pro-sumer’ camera to use a digital sensor the same size and shape as a traditional piece of 35mm film. With a great rebate from Canon available right now, Amy relented and approved this replacement for my four-year-old Canon 10D. Since it’s full-frame, this has the benefit of eliminating the multiplier factor that takes a lens and extends it’s reach by 1.6X (like on my old 10D). In effect, a 50mm lens becomes an 80mm, a 200mm becomes a 320mm, etc. While that sounds well and good, even super-wide lenses feel more like normal views.

In truth, the focal length of the lens isn’t really changed – but the field of view, that is the width of a scene the lens images is actually cropped. Maybe it’s just terminology used to move these off shelves, as I don’t think a marketer would really embrace a slogan touting ‘New and Improved – 40% cropping from your original lens!’ The full-frame also allows for a much brighter viewfinder, and really shows off the quality of better lenses like the L-glass I’ve bought over the years. The lack of the multiplier factor also means that this camera has a much shallower depth of field (1.6X less than my old 10D, in fact) that gives a much more ‘film-like’ feeling to the images. Look closely at the image at the top of this post, and you can see the effect. It was taken with the other new toy I bought, the 100mm f/2.8 Canon Macro, which despite not being a pro-series ‘L’ lens, has a beautiful image quality.
Look for more photos coming from yours truly in the coming months with the new hardware.