Goodbye old mate …hello new chum

I had been putting off jumping into mirrorless because I’m quiet happy with my two (sometimes 3) DSLRs. You know those very old fashioned big clunky cameras with mirrors. Well my Canon slipped from its camera bag a couple of week back and a favourite lens separated rather than broke (its the second lens to suffer this fate but this time it is still kind of usable at a pinch.) However it was time to seriously consider getting a mirrorless!

I’ve had the Canon EOS 1100D (she’s called the Rebel T3i in the USA, but I just call her Tess) for over a decade and it has been a perfect camera for what I used it for in my business. Filming training clips and documenting various procedures involved in mining, pretty well always in harsh environments, The video was pretty damn good, well except the sound was ordinary (no external mic port) and it was difficult to get anything but jerky results handheld (no stabilisation). Yet the video could be great (on a tripod) and the still photos even better. It has just the right balance between automated features and classic settings. In my view this would make it the perfect sort of camera to give someone young as their first camera to learn on. Similar models are still available today but there should be plenty of second hand ones around also. I’ve already figured out mine can go to a friend and be well looked after. So Farewell and Bon Chance my old friend.

Even though I have a higher megapixel camera already in my Pentax K20D, I opted to stay around the same megapixel size as the Canon, because I really don’t see the need for any more. So I was happy looking at micro 4/3rds systems and once I picked up the new Olympus OMD 10 mark III I knew that’s what I wanted. It is more than capable of doing all the work the Canon performed (only better). Despite being a tiny camera, its a metal build so it feels substantial and it is full of the features only found in a lot of the top models. Better still other than a few things I could not find straight away, I just picked it up and got decent photos straight up. So its back to learning new dials and menus, hmm… that M S A P stuff, but I bet that will be fun. The dials are nice and big so I’ll manage.

Welcome to a new chum and I trust you will be happy in my hands.

PhotoFriday :: Mirrors

Remember when ... cameras had mirrors inside them?

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Mirrors

Tale of two cameras

I am often asked which is the best camera, and I usually answer “the one you already have”. Some times I might change it to “the camera you like to use”. Basically all modern digital cameras from camera phones up, well more specifically those with about 4 megapixels and higher (ie less than 4 years old) are great. Will a new camera make a difference? Yes maybe, but it probably has a lot more to do with the person behind the camera.

 

The photo above left was taken on my android phone using a camera app called HDR Camera+, which processes the HDR image in the phone, and then it was loaded via the flickr app as soon as I got  good wifi. All pretty automatic. The image on the right came from my big DLSR, it is part of a bracketed set (that didn’t work so well because the ducks where moving, and I abandonned using HDR). I had to load the RAW file into lightroom and do some tonal adjustments and a slight trim then into OnOne for some dynamic contrast adjustments and a big softy vignette (all my favourite “style” adjustments). I have presets that do these steps, however I didn’t use them it didn’t take long but it took time but I prefer to adjusted things manually. It also had to manually uploaded to flickr (flickr’s nice Uploadr is no longer available to me because I have a Free account).

 

The two photos are different, and I would put down the difference mainly to the quality of the lens (on my DLSR) and a little bit to my post processing skill. However I see these two photos as markers of where photography is heading. The smaller cameras where a lot more of the smarts about how to process the image are built into the camera, or phone. In other words a smart camera with software doing a lot of the work. Compare this with the modern DLSR it is big and clunky, they can mostly can take amazing detail photos, but the controls are largely in the hands of the photographer and his/her vision is usually also required to get the most out of post processing. While I love it in the second more traditional place (the right hand side above) I can see the future being towards smarter and probably smaller cameras (the left hand side above) and I think you can expect to see more many improvements to come there. DLSR are not dinosaurs about to become extinct, a lot of folk including me still love them but they have definitely plateaued in term of technical development, but they can capture wonderful images.

Quick Comparison

Apple IPhone 3S	HTC Wildfire	Cannon EOS 1100D	Pentax K20D

I’m trying to make a fair comparison or camera phones versus DSLR, by just taking phones at the same spot and not “retouching anything”. All photos are taken as jpegs and have not been cropped.
My objective is simple, I suspect that a decent camera phone and traditional camera  are not so much difference anymore?