Back in the mid-'70s, right after I got the advance for my first book and had some rare folding money in my pocket, I knew exactly what I had to do: I raced down to Luke's Nevada Camera, in Reno, where I lived at the time. I traded in my old Minolta SRT101 35mm SLR, which I'd bought while I was in college, on a Nikon Nikkormat and a couple of lenses.
That Nikkormat was a beauty and an enormous step up from my first camera, a little Kodak Brownie Hawkeye.
Here at the right we have a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, my first camera,
obtained even before I went away to boarding school in 1957. It shoots 127 film, which was invented by Kodak in 1912 and discontinued in 1995. I still have a few photos from that camera around here somewhere. It is somewhat different from the cameras available today.
That Nikkormat had a steel frame, brass gears and worked as smooth as the silk covering your sweetie's backside. Lenses as sharp as a mother-in-law's tongue. I told myself at the time, "This is the last camera I ever will need." Innocent that I was, I really believed that.
But time refused to stand still and the advent of electronic, and then digital, photography blew those naive expectations to smithereens. So did the imagination of camera engineers, incredible advances in technology and the manufacturers' race to offer something nobody else has.
What that's led to is this: I read recently that digital cameras are a lot like cell phones, a new version of which is produced every few months, or at the least, every few years. The author of this comment held that a DSLR user should not waste money on new camera bodies but should, instead, buy the DSLR body that seems sensible, then put his/her bucks toward quality lenses.
To an extent, he's right. But my experience indicates that while most DSLR body upgrades do indeed bring but minor enhancements, every so often, major, worth-while enhancements happen.
So it is with Canon, the camera manufacturer I have used for 30 years or so. My old Canon 10D, bought in 2001 when I laid aside my last film camera (a Canon EOS1 that I still have), produced killer images that could easily be enlarged to fit onto a magazine's two-page spread (important to me at the time) and my 40D, bought in '08, was even more capable.
Now, seven years later, camera capabilities have advanced so far that it's time for another upgrade.
But one must be careful about such things. For instance, Canon now offers its 5DS, which includes a 50-megapixel sensor. Gotta have it, right? I mean, you can shoot billboard-sized images with that thing. Well, no. I don't shoot billboards. I think sensors with that kind of capacity represent overkill for most of us and at nearly 4,000 samolians, the 5DS is very expensive.
I think that camera bodies that cost half that amount - or even less than that - and sensors in the area of 20 megapixels offer the sweet spot for the vast majority of us. That's because resolution with these things is so good that you can print 11 x 14 (or larger) images and not notice pixelization. And that's even if you crop your image. Which of course I don't. I was trained to always shoot full-frame and that's become a habit. So since I never print anything larger than 8.5 x 11 inches, this works for me.
At the end of the day, cameras do not make memorable images. The photographer does. It all comes down to the ideas transmitted from the eye to the brain. If you see crap, your camera will record crap. You have to start with that and do better, be better, than that. But occasionally upgrading hardware helps a bit, I think, in that the many options available in this new generation of cameras - far more than any film camera ever had - allow the camera to do more while the you concentrate on composition, on content.
The upgrade I finally settled upon did not come cheaply. But I think this new camera body, which is loaded with features and capabilities, was worth its cost and will serve me well for a very long time. Hah! Famous last words, right?
So far, I've just sat and looked at this new bit of gear and handled it enough to become familiar with it. I'm thinking that my first expedition with it might just be to the L.A. Zoo, as long as the weather stays nice. Will be fun to see what kind of images it will produce. Stay tuned.
-JFT