I got my 6D Mark II in March 2023, and my biggest regret about that purchase is I didn't do it five years earlier. 5D Mark III (September 2012) images are almost equivalent to those from the 6D, but the 5D lacks a few features that come in handy. I would call it an incremental upgrade.

The situation was not the same when I moved from the original 1D to 1D Mark II in August 2004. The Mark II was a clear upgrade with twice the resolution and cleaner images. I was eager to get it delivered for my trip to Maine to see puffins on Machias Seal Island. It didn't arrive in time.

Despite the handicap, this remains my most financially successful photo trip ever. Twenty images were used in the book "Nothin' but Puffins: And Other Silly Observations" by John McDonald, still available on Amazon.com. My image "Little Brothers" was on the cover.

Every once in a while I go back to my favorite trips and reprocess a few images with the modern version of Photoshop. As I pulled up these 4.1Mp puffin files, I was reminded of the original 1D's deficiencies. Besides low resolution, there was a lot of noise in dark areas, which could show as banding if you tried to dive into the shadows too far. But a properly-exposed image that didn't require much cropping could be excellent. "Little Brothers" was such an image.

I was going through the original puffin images for some reason today, and decided to reprocess all of the digital files to my current standard of 1800x1200 pixels using a program much better than what I had 20 years ago. (I was still shooting some slides in 2004, and reprocessed all of those back in 2018.) And when I do this, I always add a few that were previously unpublished. Usually not 27. I didn't post a lot of closeups in the original gallery, so that is one of the themes of the new ones.

There's a chance we are going to Iceland next year, and I want to see some puffins while we are there. When I went to Iceland for the annular solar eclipse of 2003, I saw a few puffins, but nothing like what I saw on my puffin trip to the Gulf of Maine a year later. So there may be more puffin images next year.

The lens for these images was the original Canon 100-400mm zoom, which I traded in for a newer version just last year. I got rid of the original 1D soon after I got the Mark II, which I still have and use for remote triggers. The new images include a few seals in addition to the puffins. The seal image below isn't tack sharp, but I like it anyway.

Closeup

Gardening

Seal on North Rock