It’s surprising how much of the work that we all do could be done a little easier and with a little less stress if our cameras were silent. I have been shooting inside a Cathedral quite a bit over the last couple of weeks and I have been shooting in a conference much of the rest of the time. The combination of that recent experience and the news that next year’s tennis at Wimbledon will be DSLR and shutter sound free have made me decide that it’s time to give the whole mirrorless experience a proper go.

I acquired a couple of Canon EOS R6 cameras with the EF to RF mount adapters a few days before heading off to shoot the job and got to grips with them. The handling and the menus are similar enough to my EOS5D Mk IVs that learning everything wasn’t in any way difficult and having handled R5s previously I was confident that I’d get there quickly.

“Surely”, I can hear some of you say, “the R3 and R5 are better cameras”. That may be true but I didn’t need the huge files from the R5 and I didn’t want the bulk of the R3. What I did want was excellent low-light performance so the R6 made sense. Add to that the fact that the R6 is small and very light and I thought that I’d made the correct choice.

It took a few days to truly get the hang of up to twenty frames per second and the eye-tracking auto-focus but by the time I was on the job itself I was comfortable with (and a little bit in love with) the R6s. I mostly used them with EF 24-70 f4L IS and EF 70-200 f4L IS lenses but I also worked with an EF 135 f2L, an EF 300 f4L IS and my beloved EF 16-35 f4L IS and I was astonished how good my lenses were even with the adapter. Canon really pulled a masterstroke there; the mount adapters are amazing and they make using new cameras with older lenses really easy which, in turn, makes the changeover to mirrorless a lot less expensive and a lot simpler.

The job also required sending hundreds of images to a live webpage (thanks Photoshelter – you also played a blinder) and the FTP from in camera on the R6 is identical to the R5 that I blogged and made a video about a while ago. Combined with a fast 4G/5G mifi I was dropping JPEG files into the clients lap right through the whole time I was shooting. I’m going to blog about the job a bit more another day but this blog post is about my impressions of the R6.

Let me tell you what it isn’t first. It isn’t an ideal action camera and it definitely won’t replace the high megapixel count R5 or even 5D MkIV for lit commercial work. It doesn’t have voice-tagging and so falls down there and you can’t attach it to a cabled ethernet network for super reliable transmission. That’s a short list of what it isn’t. What it does well is a list best summed-up by “everything else”.

• Easy to set up.
• Phenomenal low-light performance.
• Ergonomically excellent.
• Small and light.
• Lovely viewfinder.
• Excellent wireless capabilities.

The list could go on and on. After two weeks of shooting with two of them all day, every day I was pretty much hooked and I am going to swap out to mirrorless as soon as I can. Whether that means new lenses as well I am not sure. The R 24-105 f4L IS and the R 70-200 f4L IS are on the shopping list as is the R 14-35 f4L IS and probably a 50 as well. I’d prefer an R 24-70 f4L IS but that’s just a single item on my lens wish list; there are many others.

I blogged about my dislike of electronic viewfinders a few years ago but that’s a thing of the past. This current generation of viewfinders is amazingly good and by the time I make the switch I expect to be like so many of my colleagues in wondering why I waited so long.