Camera trade-offs

River reflection

Violets

Immature red-winged blackbird

With the increasing sophistication of cell phone cameras many people are giving up the idea of having a separate camera.  Why carry around another piece of tech when most of us have our cell phones in our pockets all the time? Although I love the fact that I always have a camera i.e. cell phone with me, there are still a few reasons for me to want a separate camera. The first one is about the size of the sensor. Cell phones and point-and-shoot cameras have tiny sensors which means that the sharpness and quality of the image is limited. For this blog I usually use photos taken with my cell phone because it is quick and seamless and I don’t need high resolution. For most of what I do I don’t need high resolution. I don’t often make prints and cell phone quality is perfectly good for viewing on any of the devices I have. One large drawback for me of the cell phone camera is my inability to see clearly what I’m shooting in the bright sunlight. I can point the phone in the right direction but if the sun is bright there’s no way I can make out exactly what I’m getting in the frame and that’s a deal breaker. It’s also a deal breaker for many of the pocket cameras that don’t have viewfinders. The screens are getting better but they aren’t there yet. Another reason to have a separate camera is for the flexibility of lenses. My previous phone did a pretty good job of zooming in without losing quality. The one I have now, while supposedly an upgrade, is abysmal so, it’s wide-angle or nothing and I’m perfectly willing to pull out the phone to get a shot if I have a telephoto lens on my main camera. It is also a good back-up when I’m out in a zodiac, bring the camera to my eye and realize that I’ve left the battery on the charger in the ship. (Not one of my more brilliant moments)

Once I decided to go with a traditional camera there was another series of trade-offs to consider. How much was I willing to spend? How much weight was I willing to carry? What kind of photography do I mostly do and what kind of lenses do I need for that? It’s a good thing I like to do research because I spent hours and days pouring over specs and reviews of different camera brands and models. I’m not wedded to any particular brand and have shot Pentax, Olympus, Minolta, and Panasonic. In addition Richard has owned Canon and Fuji equipment. I guess when it comes to equipment in general, be it cars, computers or cameras I have much the same philosophy: get something that fits your needs regardless of what the trends are and then use it until it no longer meets your needs or until it falls apart, whichever comes first.

Shy sparrow

The immediate reason I started to look for an upgrade for my 10 year old digital SLR was because I wanted to capture more wildlife and birds. To do that I wanted a stronger telephoto lens and I was able to find a second-hand one on the internet for a good price.  I was also able to find a 2X teleconverter which doubled the focal length. The problem was that I couldn’t hold the camera, telephoto and converter still enough to get decent photos without a tripod. I know tripods are great things and allow you to get all kinds of shots that aren’t possible otherwise. I don’t like them. I don’t like carrying them, setting them up or using them. There’s another trade-off. Fortunately the camera bodies now are coming out with amazing image stabilization so I started looking for cameras that had small bodies and good stabilization. I admit I was also influenced by the ability to use my long lens and the teleconverter on a new camera if I stuck to the same brand - so I did. I chose to give up really good low light performance.  I’ll be doing most of my shooting in daylight. I also chose to give up the excellent resolution that comes with a  full-frame sensor. When it came to lenses I made decisions based essentially on the same criteria along with price. I don’t think I’m worth a lens that costs thousands of dollars. Maybe someday but it’s perfectly possible to create rotten photographs with the best of equipment, so I’m choosing lenses that let in less light and are easier on my budget. I’ll do what I can with them and I think it will be quite a long time before they will not suit my photographic needs.  I went for light-weight gear, relatively slow lenses, and really great image stabilization. I’m glad I took as long as I did to clarify what was important to me. I’m loving the new set-up and each day when I go out to shoot I remind myself of the things it does well and the things it doesn’t do so well and take photos that play to its strengths. I’ll always miss shots and I’m lucky that I can enjoy the process and keep learning regardless of how many get away.

Playing with my camera

I’ve had a lot of cameras so far. As a kid, my first camera as a kid was a Kodak Instamatic that used a film cassette so you didn’t actually have to load the film onto the spool. I also remember licking the flash cubes that you plugged into the top of the camera and then discarded. It was supposed to make them work better. I bought my first Single Lens Reflex camera when I moved out and went to work. Since then I’ve had a series of film cameras and, when digital came along, I traded my film cameras for digital ones. Some have been point-and-shoot; some have been superzooms; one has been a digital SLR and my current camera is a relatively new mirrorless digital.

As the cameras and the software that drives them have become more sophisticated, I have become more confused. Cameras today will make absolutely all the decisions for me and, most times I don’t want that. To try to subdue the confusion I returned to my first understandings of photography when to have a built-in light meter was a luxury and to see a photo required a two-week wait while the film got developed. Photography, I reminded myself, is all about light.

In the simplest form it’s how much light falls on whatever captures it. When I had my first camera it was film.  Now it’s a sensor.  To get light to the senor you need a hole = aperture.  Bigger hole = more light; smaller hole = less light. You also have a way to open and close the hole = shutter. Leave the hole open for longer = more light; open and close the hole quickly = less light. The third variable in photography is the sensitivity of whatever captures the light in order to form an image. Fast film was grainier but required less light to create and image. Slow film was sharper but required more light to create an image. Today’s equivalent is ISO value. I’ve read what that stands for and I’m too lazy to look it up at the moment.  What I need to know is  that a high number means fast and a small number means slow. Hey, I drive a car and I understand speed limits. I can do this.

Last summer before we went on a month-long adventure cruise to the Arctic I decided I would shoot in only manual mode: I would tell the camera what aperture, shutter speed and ISO I wanted rather than letting it do the thinking.  There are times when it makes absolute sense to let the camera do the thinking but I want to really understand what decisions I’m turning over to it and choose wisely how much to let it do. I missed a lot of shots on manual as I turned dials the wrong way or forgot which dial controlled which function. What’s more, I’ll continue to miss shots but I’m sticking with manual until making decisions becomes automatic for me, not for the camera. Do I need more light? What’s the best way to get that? Is a fast shutter speed more important to catch a bird in flight or is the aperture more important to get the cat on the walk and the tree in the background in focus at the same time? Is it dusk when there’s not a lot of light or is it the middle of the day when I need to reign in the amount of light hitting the sensor? I’m not at lightning speed using the camera controls and I’ll continue to miss shots. I’m prepared to stick with it though and, in a strange way, boiling the whole thing down to three variables has given me a chance to relax about the photos I take. It’s always, always a trade-off when setting up a shot. Come to think of it, buying a camera in the first place is requires a series of trade-offs but that’s the subject of another post. Stay tuned.

There are no holidays

I remember while I was working full-time talking to my uncle about retirement. He said when you’re retired there are no holidays. At the time I thought he was nuts. As far as I could see, once you retired you had nothing but holidays. Today I understand what he was getting at. Don’t get me wrong, being retired is great and I wouldn’t go back to teaching for any amount of money. There is a weird thing that happens though. When I was teaching there were days, weeks, months that I looked forward to with unbridled excitement. The weekend for example.  At various times during my career I could hardly wait for the weekend so I could go cross-country skiing, hiking, cycling, canoeing, camping or running. It didn’t matter that I would show up Monday morning exhausted and drag my sorry butt through the rest of the week before being ready to do it all again. I do very few of those things anymore and, if I did, I could do them pretty much any day of the week.

There is a great deal of freedom to that and there is also an ordinariness that becomes pervasive. Weekends become another part of the routine and thereby, nothing special. I enjoy the traveling we are able to do now, but I don’t look forward to it the way I did when it meant a complete break with from the intensity of my work life. Part of the fun of travel when I was working was doing the detailed planning for months in advance, pouring over topo maps for cycling trips and imagining what the holiday would be like. The planning itself was a temporary escape, a mini-holiday. Today we tend to like others to do the organizing.  We show up and they take care of the rest. People often ask me where we are going or if we are going to visit a particular place. Usually I can’t answer that because having read over the itinerary, I put it on the back burner until we are a few days from leaving. I wonder if I’m getting jaded and lazy because I don’t look forward to anything with the enthusiasm I did when I was teaching.

Perhaps it’s a lack of contrast that makes the difference. I’m not usually exhausted so I don’t look forward as much to catching up on sleep. I have a lot more freedom to do what I want so I don’t look forward as much to doing what I want. I still have commitments and groceries need to be bought and laundry needs to get done but when I was working, I had to do those things in addition to meeting the demands of teaching. Now there is nothing particularly special about spending an hour or so watching YouTube videos. There are more productive things I could be doing but whether something gets done today or tomorrow is not usually a matter of consequence.

On my way home from an appointment today I stopped in at MEC.  I didn’t need anything, but I hadn’t been for a while and I thought it would be amusing to look around. What I thought about as I looked at the cycling, hiking, canoeing and camping gear was the sense of anticipation looking at gear used to bring me. It’s not about the latest piece of gear.  It’s about the exciting possibilities represented by the gear. It’s tempting to buy just one more little thing. I mostly resisted temptation. I did come home with a couple of closed-cell foam pads that we can use to sit on the front steps when we want to drink coffee and tea outside in the evening. We’ve used them twice today.  They are much more comfortable than the concrete steps and we can also use them on picnic tables when we travel in the van. Pretty tame stuff in comparison to what we used to do for fun.

I wouldn’t go back in time to when I worked full-time and along with that is the occasional nostalgic retreat to the days when there were so many exciting adventures waiting just over the horizon. Interesting how, as we age, the world around us changes and the way we see that world changes even more.