I am becoming increasingly convinced that the photographic industry has somehow managed to brainwash us all into thinking we need to continually upgrade equipment. Now I am no saint myself having recently moved up to a full frame 21Mpixel camera, but I had a clear rationale as to why this was a necessary move for me.
Digital brought convenience to photography but somewhere along the way in the switch from film, we became caught up in a megapixel marketing war. What did more megapixels give us? Bigger more detailed images. Compare this with film, which we all willingly gave up and we see that we could already produce much larger and more detailed images, even from 35mm. I recently purchased a dedicated second hand 35mm scanner and can turn out a very sharp 25“x16“ image from a 5400dpi scan. If I rent some time on an Imacon scanner I can turn out something even larger.
I also recently purchased a Sony DSC R1 camera which is at least 4 years old, is only 10Mpixel, heavy, ugly and has a fixed lens. Why did I buy this? Well a number of reasons:
- I first realised this might be a good camera when I found out Mitch Dobrowner (a photographer who I admire greatly) used this camera and was producing amazing fine art landscape prints with it.
- I wanted a camera that was fitted with one high quality lens that was 24mm at the wide angle end but would go to at least 100mm. The lens on this camera is Zeiss, has virtually zero distortion and goes from 24-135mm. I can take this on serious mountain hikes and get great images.
- The camera had to produce images that I could print well at A3. Attached to this post is one of the images shot with this camera. I have resized this and printed it at A3+ and the detail resolved by the lens is simply amazing.
So, next time you think of upgrading to a new piece of kit, make sure you are clear as to why and what you want out of the upgrade. You might just be better spending the money on learning more about your current equipment.
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