Storymaking with the Canon EOS R5 II – A non-specs review

There are many reviews for the Canon R5 II that will go deep into the specs of this enormously powerful camera. This review won’t be one of them. This camera review is going to centre on how Canon has created a masterpiece of storytelling that any creatively inclined person would struggle not to fall in love with.

The Story

I woke up to a rainy Saturday morning. It’s February and cold, and so despite original plans to head out in the Landrover and use the beautiful Cotswold countryside as the background for this piece, I changed my mind and decided that instead, we would bake an apple and plum crumble.

Did I have a recipe? No! Much like my current disregard for camera specs, we went forward based on vibe rather than instruction. Life’s much more fun that way.

As it turned out, the subject didn’t matter; the reality of this camera is that within 2 minutes of picking it up, I could feel the tingles of creativity start to come out of hibernation. I couldn’t help but start taking pictures straight away.

I took photos of my window sill, my cat, my vast array of flowers gone dry and dusty. And you know what happened? Every mundane item that happened to be in my kitchen at that time became a subject through the eye of the R5 Mark II, a subject that popped and had significance within the frame.

It was time to get baking.

Crumble Like Favreau

It was actually in choosing the music that my video experiments came together. At first, I had planned a cottage-core vibe for the crumble-making, but as soon as I heard that samba beat, inspiration hit, and I knew the direction this had to take.

I enlisted my own John Favreau from The Chef and got to work creating that night's pudding, all the while during the edit craving the perfect grilled cheese*!

*iykyk

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Visual Storytelling

The key video ingredients of the EOS R5 Mark II boil down to one thing: it is undeniably a hybrid camera. Forget the cheap vlogging cameras that the term “hybrid” tends to conjure up, this camera is the true meaning of the word. It is made for both photo and video storytelling, and it takes both sides of the coin very seriously.

It even has the option for taking JPEG stills whilst filming, something that I could think of a hundred different uses for, but most notably, single wedding photographers tasked with capturing every magical moment.

When it came to testing the EOS R5 II, the proof was – quite literally – in the pudding. The quality of the raw footage is phenomenal; in fact, when it came to the final edit, the vast majority of it was not colour-graded despite being shot in my kitchen with only table lamps for lighting. Canon is, of course, known for its bright colour reproduction, and I have to say I very much appreciated this in the editing suite.

The 100 frames per second of the slow motion adds a definition that I had not experienced before, and I didn’t quite appreciate until I saw it on my computer. There is a specific clip where a match is lit in slow-mo – speeds up towards the hob – then slows down again. That sped-up clip is approximately 40 seconds squeezed into about 3. When I realised I was going to have to do that, I chuckled to myself, thinking it was never going to work and I should have filmed another take. What happened instead was 100 frames per second of detail squeezed together into a shot that feels like something out of the Marvel Universe. That detail. That resolution. Chefs kiss!

Rookie Slow Motion Mistakes

Talking of slow motion, I did make some rookie mistakes. Firstly, it took a long time to work out that when the frame rate is displayed in yellow, that means the camera is set to slow motion and white is regular speed. Secondly, when I returned from the 100fps that I was automatically placed into when shooting in slow-mo, it did not put me back to the previous fps settings. The eagle-eyed among you will be able to notice which clips I made this mistake in.

I made these two errors multiple times, and despite a confidence that practice would indeed make perfect, I would have preferred to use an S&Q dial that we are seeing on a lot of other cameras these days. Perhaps this is something Canon can work into the R5 Mark III whenever that materialises.

Hybrid VCM Lenses

It has to be said that a camera is only as good as its lens. For this test, I was sent a treasure trove of Canon lenses to play with, including the newer range of VCM hybrid lenses.

Usually, I get trapped when testing kit. I will put one lens on a camera and forget to swap it out, far more excited by what’s now in front of the camera. Canon are lucky they didn’t include a 70-200 f2.8 because they are my kryptonite and, once mounted, cannot be swapped out again.

Instead, I had the following to play with:

Canon VCM lenses were the perfect choice for this exercise. They combine high-quality stills and cinematic video to find that sweet spot for content creators. Paired with the R5 II’s ability to take stills during video shooting and my intention to flit between capturing both media types throughout the process, it really was the perfect combination!

Every lens I used offered sublime low apertures with incredibly smooth bokeh and subject separation. Plus, because they were part of the same range with similar internal structures, I was able to guarantee continuity in the overall look, despite swapping out my focal length.

If you want a selection of primes that you can use for making pretty much anything an aesthetic and pleasing image you couldn’t go far wrong with these choices.

The STM lenses weren’t too bad either!

Canon R5 II take photos while videoing

Multiple Exposure Photography

One setting that utterly surprised me with how useable it was, was the option to create in-camera multiple exposures. This isn’t a new feature. It can be found in other Canon and alternative brand cameras, but I’ve never explored it because it always felt gimmicky.

On the contrary, with the R5 Mark II, it felt like yet another tool for storytelling. Perhaps it was the 45MP sensor or the incredible EVF and LCD that brought my images to life, but each unique image, created on the spot, felt like a small work of art.

It was playful.

The mechanics of the feature took a little while to get used to. First of all, the automatic setting only lets you create one multiple exposure at a time, which was, admittedly, a little frustrating. But playing within the menu, I found the ticket to keep it going for the next set-up.

I also briefly dipped into the “multiple exposure on constant shutter” mode but a sleepy cat and breezy leaves didn’t quite put that one to the test so I reverted back to my dual exposures.

One thing that I both liked and did not simultaneously was the way the final image wouldn’t necessarily overlay how I thought it was going to based on the live display. The placement would stay correct but the opacity and merging of certain parts would sometimes be more or less than I was anticipating.

I found this difficult because it wasn’t rendering exactly as I had composed it.

But in a strange way I liked that. There is something rather analogue about taking time to compose an image based on multiple aspects – lighting, composition etc – for it to not turn out exactly how you thought it was going to. As if the camera had a hand in the creativity as well, lending its opinion in what it thought might look good and I have to respect that.

A Proper Camera

The handling of this camera felt significant. It was not heavy, so to speak, but had a heft that a camera of this standard should have. We have become too used to expecting every camera to be more lightweight and more compact than the last; it is my opinion that if a camera is going to set you back four and a half grand, it should at the very least not feel like a toy.

Every button was in the right place. It was intuitive to use, and the core functions within the camera, like continuous shooting and high-speed autofocus, all worked exactly as they should (which is why I won’t be going into any more details).

There are some fancy features you can use within the R5 II, such as the eye control focus, but for a quick day-test, I didn’t have the time to get into this. And let's be honest, I wasn’t going to work that one out without heading into the instruction manual, which is a strict no-go for this review!

The Verdict

Some of you may have realised that there are no pictures of the camera itself in this review. That is because I couldn’t bring myself to use any other camera – other than a second R5 II – to photograph it. I was fully back in the colourful world of Canon that I remembered from my uni days.

It can be so easy to get bogged down in the endless key-feature-bullet-lists that sometimes I forget, the ultimate purpose of the photography industry is to facilitate creativity. The R5 Mark II does exactly that.

And if you’ve got this far, please enjoy a few outtakes from our Cheffing adventures:

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By Beatrice Debney
24 Mar 2025