Keith
The best camera is one that still works!
With the current avalanche of new cameras and the trend towards mirrorless marvels like the Xpro with its undoubted image quality you could almost be excused for thinking the end for the DSLR may be near. This has been my own thinking recently and as soon as someone produces a full frame version of one of these high end compacts we may see a real shift away from the big chunk of alloy, plastic and glass that is the current DSLR. Yes they are big, heavy and a little unwieldy … attach a decent zoom and they become even more so and carrying one around for a day can really test your endurance and resolve.
However … I have just spent a couple of days photographing a two day vintage motocross meeting for a friend with my D700 and 24-120 Nikkor and I’ve come away with a very different point of view. I cannot imagine what other camera could have done what that Nikon did over those two days and do it so incredibly easily and competently. The auto focus barely missed a shot when tracking objects moving at some speed, the metering was amazingly accurate and the thing never missed a beat. By the end of day one the camera and lens were caked in dust and as I tossed it into the Low Pro I could see it was more than ready for another day’s abuse … though I was personally flagging! Close to four hundred exposures over two days using auto focus and doing a fair amount of chimping used considerably less than a full battery charge!
Two weeks prior to this I was photographing in a dark gallery full of monitors and projection screens at ISO 3200 with a 35mm Zeiss prime, focusing manually in the gloom with the excellent finder and relying on the matrix metering once again … and of course the camera provided me with near perfectly exposed almost noise free images as it invariably does! A month or so before this I was out in a busy main road at night with a tripod in the rain, photographing a billboard and watching the water running off the camera down the tripod legs and marvelling at the camera’s durability in such conditions.
So how do you replace a photographic tool that can do all this? Seriously I’d like to know because I don’t think you can ... suddenly my little OM-D seems like such a useless toy!
Well I’m off … I promised the woman next door I’d help her drive in some tent pegs … and she seems to have lost her hammer!
However … I have just spent a couple of days photographing a two day vintage motocross meeting for a friend with my D700 and 24-120 Nikkor and I’ve come away with a very different point of view. I cannot imagine what other camera could have done what that Nikon did over those two days and do it so incredibly easily and competently. The auto focus barely missed a shot when tracking objects moving at some speed, the metering was amazingly accurate and the thing never missed a beat. By the end of day one the camera and lens were caked in dust and as I tossed it into the Low Pro I could see it was more than ready for another day’s abuse … though I was personally flagging! Close to four hundred exposures over two days using auto focus and doing a fair amount of chimping used considerably less than a full battery charge!
Two weeks prior to this I was photographing in a dark gallery full of monitors and projection screens at ISO 3200 with a 35mm Zeiss prime, focusing manually in the gloom with the excellent finder and relying on the matrix metering once again … and of course the camera provided me with near perfectly exposed almost noise free images as it invariably does! A month or so before this I was out in a busy main road at night with a tripod in the rain, photographing a billboard and watching the water running off the camera down the tripod legs and marvelling at the camera’s durability in such conditions.
So how do you replace a photographic tool that can do all this? Seriously I’d like to know because I don’t think you can ... suddenly my little OM-D seems like such a useless toy!
Well I’m off … I promised the woman next door I’d help her drive in some tent pegs … and she seems to have lost her hammer!
