I'm on my second 1D Mk3 now. The first one was proving to be too hit-and-miss with focus so I swapped it. The new one is actually an older serial number but so far, so good, so fingers crossed.

The incredible high-ISO performance proved itself again today with a shot that I made a real mess of, but was then able to rescue. I was doing this picture of a swimming lesson and, genius that I'm not, I decided to try it without flash. I had intended to shoot at 1/50s f/5.6 ISO 1600 but at some point I absent-mindedly changed the aperture to f/8. And to make matters worse, having metered for the general scene, I failed to realise that the place where I was going to do the picture was in fact a lot darker. Oh and to compound the problem even more I didn't check the LCD screen while doing the shot. So as the kids swam away afterwards and I finally checked the pictures, this is what I saw:

818q3107_original-420.jpg

Can you imagine trying to recover an ISO 1600 image that is so under-exposed?

Well thanks to the Mk3 it was an easy save. Cranked the exposure on the raw file and added a bit of fake fill light. Job done. Almost. The instructors' purple shirts did get quite grainy so I applied some selective noise reduction, but apart from that the noise was fine and this is how the picture ended up:

818q3107-420.jpg

The noise was certainly there, no doubt about that, but this ISO 1600 image from the Mk3, pushed about two stops, was comparable to a properly exposed ISO 800 image on the 1Ds or an ISO 1250 image on the 1D. Like most photo cock-ups this one was entirely down to the idiot behind the camera, but it's nice to know that the camera has got your back when you do make a mistake.

Here's a 100% crop from of the original image:

818q3107-before.jpg

And here's the same crop from the finished version. Noise reduction was applied to the purple shirt but not to the skin or water.

818q3107-after.jpg