My book is finally out in the bookstores! As many of you know,  this spring I wrote a digital field guide for an exciting new Canon camera, the 5D Mark II, for Wiley Publishing. I hadn’t wanted to blog too much about the process while I was writing it because part of me wasn’t sure I could complete the book within the required timeframe but now that it’s published, I thought I’d share some details about the process.

Around October of last year, my friend Mark Fitzgerald of the Digital Darkroom called me to see if I would be interested in writing a book about the new camera (not yet out) for the company that publishes his Lightroom and Photoshop Bibles. “Absolutely” I said, having never written a book before! Mark hooked me up with his Acquisitions Editor who was overseeing the project and long series of emails and phone calls commenced. 265 emails all totaled. Wild.

It was an extrodinary learning experience. Where I had hardly ever, in all my years, looked in the camera manuals that come with new cameras more than a handful of times, my 5D Mark II manual is now, literally falling apart from over use, checking and rechecking procedures and language for accuracy.

I’ll be highlighting different aspects of the book in future blog posts but wanted to get this up today. You can find more info about the book from Amazon here, Barnes & Noble here or Borders here(Borders has the previous 5D DFG author listed :-P .) I’m now hard at work on my second DFG for the series, this one on the Canon Speedlite System due out in February 2010 and a third one (top-secret!) is in the works. Wow, it’s like a whole new career!

John Waller of Uncage The Soul Productions and I put together a project to test out the new Canon 5D Mark II, and awesome new camera that shoots 21.10 MP still images and up to 24 minutes of continuous 1080p high-definition video. I’m writing a field guide on this new camera and needed some “seat-time” with it and John was excited about the new camera’s capabilities and came up with a location to try it out on, an ice cave near Trout Lake, Washington.

It was quite the experience. Quite the caver  himself (do not, ever, use the word “spelunker”), John reminded Liam Nagy (our model) and I to keep close track of time because in a cave with no light and nothing to create the flow of time, hours seem like minutes. Surprisingly, this was absolutely true and an interesting phenomenon to experience.

We had several lights, even more Speedlites and Pocket Wizards to light everything up and headlamps to see what the hell we were doing! The camera was great, there’s lots of reviews online so I won’t bore you with statisitics, but we used almost all of the new shooting modes and were very impressed with the quality it produced. Check out the video here and a lower-res version here. Can’t wait to use this awesome tool for my upcoming assignments! Enjoy!