STILLS PHOTOGRAPHY - ON THE MOVE?

This post is going to have a ripple of photographic geekyness flowing through it, so for the unbelievers among you, you have been warned.

I’ve been a keen photographer for much of my adult life (yes, that’s getting on for nearly 5 years, my wife has just pointed out). As with most interests, the one thing you collect as you ply your trade, is Equipment. Drawers full of the stuff. So you go out with your camera for a day looking like Quasimodo suffering from a slipped disc. Camera, lenses, tripods, filters, flashguns, film et-bloody-cetera.

Only you don’t go out with it all because, all up, it’s just too heavy and bulky. So you leave a couple of lenses behind. And which lenses do you find you need when you get snapping. You’ve got it – the ones sitting on the desk at home.

Being, supposedly, someone in the top 1% of the country’s intelligentsia, it only took me until about a year ago to realize the barking stupidity of all this. So I called for a serious, long term, fundamental strategic review with myself. And, as a result, out went three cameras, five lenses, the back-pack and a huge pile of associated photographic crap. A new regime of Camera-lite overtook the Cable household. If I can’t carry it all in one hand, it’s history.

Luckily, technology had got there at the same time when I did all this, and 1 new Nikon D300 camera, and a couple of light, versatile lenses, and a small bag I can throw over my shoulder later, my equipment portfolio has been totally transformed. And the result - I take a lot more pictures now because the camera is with me more often. And because the stuff I’ve now got is appropriate to what I want to take, the resultant pictures I take are way better than before.

A guy called Michael Reichmann, who writes a truly excellent website - The Luminous Landscape - puts it perfectly. “Most cameras are better than most photographers”. But you have to have them with you. So, once again, size is important (my dear wife also had something to say here), and at least, I’m a bit ahead of the game.

The one area where camera technology still leaves me wanting is the really pocket sized machine, the one you can ALWAYS have with you. I bought the best one I could find a couple of years ago, but I still couldn’t get on with it. It was OK, but I wanted more than OK. So that’s been sold as well.

Two photographic blogs today report developments which I think could lead to a seismic shift in The Art of Smallness. Up until now, you could have Small, but not Very Good, or you could have Large and Good. But not both. The Small and Good mix didn’t exist. But Canon have just brought out a new camera, the G10, which Michael Reichmann has just put through a few of its paces. He sat it alongside a Hassleblad H2 with a Phase One P45 Back (39 Megapixels and $40,000!) and took the same picture with both machines. He then printed both sets of images at a size of 13” x 19” and showed them to a dozen of his professional photographic colleagues, asking them to guess which camera had taken which picture. 60% of them got it right – and 50% would be the pure guess figure. So, what does that tell you? And anyway, how often do you produce a 13” x 19” print?

Now the Canon fits in my pocket, whereas I would need a manservant to carry the Hassleblad around for me. And if I had just shelled out the $40k to buy it, I then couldn’t afford the manservant. Just for comparison, the Canon’s list price is $499.99. That’s like putting a Veyron up against a Golf.

For yours truly at least, I don’t think the next move is very difficult.

On the same day, on another (extremely good) website - The Online Photographer – there is the first review of a brand new type of camera – the Micro Four Thirds. It’s a Panasonic DMC-G1 – a Digital SLR-like camera with interchangeable lenses, except it doesn’t have a mirror or an optical viewfinder. So, yes, it’s not a DSLR. But the sensor is the same size as my Nikon, and therefore should be capable of similar picture quality. And without all the gubbins they’ve got rid of, the body is about half the size and weight of the Nikon. And the size of the lenses are reduced in the same way. It uses a very high quality electronic viewfinder, and it all seems to work extremely well. The guy testing it had already seen the next iteration of this design, from Olympus, which he says is about the size of a bar of soap. And it records high quality video. And it fits in your pocket. The Times, they are A-Changing.

If you look at the camera world, it’s suffered from a massive degree of design conservatism over the last 50 years. Nikon’s top line camera in 1957 is recognizably similar to their top line model today. I know it’s now digital now, but the design hasn’t moved on a lot.

It’s about time someone stood back and went back to First principles here. Canon and Nikon, the world leaders, tend to be ultra-conservative in their thinking. They produce terrific cameras, but they don’t do ground breaking innovation. It seems to take the underdogs, who probably need to get ahead of the game to get a bigger toe in the water, if you can unravel the mixed metaphor there, to forge ahead with these developments. The issue here is that, if someone like Panasonic or Olympus gets it right, you could see major changes in the way camera development changes, and very quickly.

And the two giants could then be playing a game of catch up they don’t want.

We live in interesting times.

Tags:

canon,
nikon,
photography,
luminous landscape

ISN’T IT NICE WHEN THINGS JUST … WORK

Regular readers to this site will be aware that I’ve just spent a few days in New York, wandering around, eating myself silly, and taking a pile of photographs. As close to Paradise as I can get on my own.

Before I went, I decided to lash out and buy a new camera. Which in turn got me thinking about the real issues which decided me on one brand rather than another.

When I got into photography too many years ago for me to want to remember, I had read all the magazines, and reviews, and had come to the conclusion that what I really, really needed was a Canon EOS 5, a new camera which had just been launched onto the market. In the English vernacular, it was the “Bees’ Knees”. And I wanted one, badly.

I went to a Camera Fair to touch and play with one, just to confirm my conclusions, and it was with bated breath that I got to the Canon stand, and started handling, possibly even fondling one. To my huge disappointment, I was slightly underwhelmed, and reluctantly put it down.

I wandered round the rest of the show, picked up a Nikon F90, and within 10 seconds was completely converted. It was solid, sat in my hand beautifully, almost as if it had been designed just for me, and felt so right. I read the specification which said that the shutter had been designed for 180,000 exposures – that’s nearly 100 years at the rate I used to take pictures, and that convinced me. It exuded quality, and I bought one on the spot. Never have I made a better purchase.

This put me straight into the Nikon family, and it was followed by a D100 a few years later – another great camera. There I stayed for almost a decade, until the spectre of the Digital demon came over us all.

Now, it’s fair to say that Canon, for reasons I still don’t totally understand, have probably had the technical drop on Nikon in the Digital field of Professional/Serious Amateur cameras for quite a few years now, although I still stayed loyal to Nikon when their D70 came out in around 2004.

In reality, the cost of change is not just the camera, it’s the ancillary bits and pieces, the lenses and the flashguns, and just as importantly, knowing almost instinctively the way the camera works, which keeps you in the family. The Nikons I’ve owned were particularly intuitive. If you didn’t know how something worked on them, the odds were that if you took a guess at it, you would more often be right. When you want to do something in a hurry, that’s a very comforting feeling.

And Nikon were not daft – they kept as much of their operating methodology for a new camera as similar as possible to the last product, on the basis that “If it isn’t broken, don’t change it”. They maintain a lens mount which allows you to fit and use almost any lens they have produced in the last 50 years. So anyone who was versed in the Nikon style, and who picked up a brand new Nikon, could easily start taking decent pictures almost immediately.

I don’t change my camera each time the manufacturer brings out a new model, but recently, I started to look rather enviously at their newest offering, the D300, and its larger sibling, the D3. Apart from the D3 being 3 times the price of its smaller brother, it also weighed a ton, and I couldn’t convince myself that I needed such a beast. But the D300, well that was another story. As soon as I handled it, it murmured to me “Buy me, buy me, I’m the one that you want”, and I gave in immediately.

Wandering around New York, I took around 1000 pictures with it, without having had almost any time to familiarise myself properly with it. It just works. It’s blazingly fast, very intuitive, and seems to be able to do anything I want from a camera. The LCD panel on the back is quite superb, much better than on any other camera you can buy, and this means you can check the focus almost immediately rather than having to press the zoom button umpteen times as I had to do on all the other cameras I’ve owned. Simple, obvious and effective.

But the thing which unexpectedly astounded me about it, was its performance at high ASAs. On everything I’ve owned before, when you get much above 400ASA, the noise performance starts to deteriorate markedly. And if you want an image in low light, the noise is just something you have to live with. On this D300, I reckon you can get an almost noiseless image up to around 1000 ASA, which means you can take decent candids, in almost any light available.

This is something I simply hadn’t expected, and greatly expanded the envelope within which I could take pictures that pleased me. It really is a technical tour de force, and if you flick back to the title of this piece, which is the strap-line of a marvellous Honda TV car advert, you can put this lovely machine in the same category.

I probably don’t use the camera at its extremes, but I’ve sat and thought about it a lot – to try and think what I would improve on it. I read somewhere that the difference between the Canon and Nikon design philosophy was that Canons are designed by Engineers, and Nikons are designed by Photographers. This may sound a bit of a silly statement, but I can feel what it means quite clearly when I play with my new toy. It feels almost part of you.

Quite what Nikon are going to do when they set about developing the D400, I have no idea.

Tags:

nikon,
d300,
cameras,canon