The Canon 1D Mk III has a couple features that make it an interesting choice for macro photography: an excellent viewfinder that really "snaps" when you have something in focus, and Live View, an LCD real-time preview, in which you can magnify the image and adjust the focus.

I went into this test hoping that Live Prefiew would present a significant advantage over manually focusing using the viewfinder. However, I encountered a problem with Live View: at the desired 10x magnification, the dispay was wobbly, so when I made a little focus adjustment, I had to wait a second or so for the vibrations to die down in order to check the outcome!

In addition, the great 1D viewfinder helped manual focusing without Live View so that, in my test, I couldn't distinguish focus with Live View and focus without it.

That being said, I figure live view to be useful when it's not so easy to use the viewfinder, like when you have the camera close to the ground. The two things that would make it really useful would be some kind of image stabilization and a fold-out LCD!!

In these images, I got close to the "Image Stabilizer" labeling on a Canon EF 70-200 f/2.8 IS lens, first with the EF 100 f/2.8 Macro lens, then with that lens with a 36mm Extension tube, and then with stacked extension tubes of 36, 24 and 12 mm to give the image maximum magnification. Since I couldn't distinguish between a Live View adjustment and a viewfinder manual focus, I won't try to present comparisons, so this is just some macro images from the 1D Mk III!

The first couple of images are to give perspective, the lens mounted on a Canon 5D, and a 100% crop showing the Image Stabilizer label that will be "of interest"! The macro shots have only the default Lightroom capture sharpening -- they haven't been tweaked to look extra sharp!