Gear, Part I

Admittedly, I'm still getting accustomed to the whole idea of blogging, so bear with me. I suppose since we're at the beginning, I should start at the beginning: my camera history.


Like most people, my first camera was a cheap hand-me-down, a Kodak Instamatic, as a matter of fact. It took those chunky cartridge-style film rolls that had its own take-up reel, and was about as basic as it got, but I loved that thing. I shot many, many rolls of film, mostly of nothing -- when you're twelve, the things that interest you in that moment when you decide to raise the camera to your eye are not what interest you by the time the film is developed and you look at the prints. Still, there were shots I have from my school years that were actually halfway decent, mostly by virtue of the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, standing in the right way at just right distance from my subject that it took advantage of the precise focal length of my camera's lens, rather than by any intent or forethought on my part. I rarely considered how the final print would look, and I only invested in one of those disposable cube flashes once, just to see what the camera could do with night photography (with rather uninspiring results, I must admit) -- most of my photography was the result of one little corner of my brain taking over and saying, "Ooohpretty*click*"


Noticing that I seemed to enjoy snapping photos of every random thing that crossed my path, one of my sisters gave me a Pentax P3 SLR, with a 50mm 1:1.7 lens; I think she hoped that better equipment might at least make some of those random things look a little better. In high school, I took an actual photography class, and this introduced the concept of composition, that maybe if you THINK about the shot before pressing the shutter button, you might be more pleased with the results. For some projects, I borrowed my brother's 70-200mm telephoto zoom lens (which seemed, to someone like me who had gotten accustomed to little lenses with a single focal length, to be just ridiculous to lug around, but cool all the same), but mostly I concentrated on portraits and landscapes, which suited the 50mm lens just fine. I still shot a lot of film with only a few prints worth keeping, and I had yet to develop any real sense of composition or style, but I like to think I did better work as I got older and that I was refining my own aesthetics over time.


I dragged that P3 with me into my Navy years, and considering how much time it spent rattling around the cramped, cluttered and somewhat fetid environs of my rack, it's a wonder it continued to function at all, let alone well. Yet as I travelled the world and arbitrarily documented my various misadventures, it did just that, despite smashing into a hundred different hard surfaces in fifteen or twenty different countries, being subjected to temperatures ranging from around 5F (Alaska) to 110F (Bahrain) and humidity from 0-100 (and more, since it actually got submerged in water twice), never having quite all of the sand removed from its internals or the internals of the lens such that focusing on a subject made an intermittent ratcheting sound like a fishing reel with stripped gears, and actually getting smeared with a mixture of peanut butter and Sriracha hot sauce (don't ask). The trouble was, since the photographer was also getting smashed, frozen, fried, submerged and smeared right along with the camera, there was a certain lack of attention to little details like lighting and exposure, focus, depth of field, and framing, not to mention overall composition. It was costing me a lot of money to keep buying and developing film when I wasn't getting shots worth keeping, and I soon began to think about making the transition to digital -- at least with pictures that only existed on a computer screen, you could delete all the garbage shots and not be out potentially hundreds of dollars in developing fees. You could snap away with impunity and not feel that bad about it.


The first digital camera I bought was an Olympus C-300. It was a 3.0 megapixel point-and-shoot, and was... not sexy. Bigger and better digital cameras were available even at the time, but out of my price range (and to be honest, out of my skill range as well). To be honest, I paid way too much for this camera, but it turned out to be a little workhorse for quite a while, certainly good enough for the family photos I was taking.


I got more serious about my photography only very recently. Before taking a trip to southern Africa, I bought another Olympus, an SP-550UZ 7.1MP digital camera with an amazing 18x optical zoom, and I still have this camera for simple vacation photos or to document things around the house -- the files are much smaller than my professional camera, and it's much lighter so it's easier to carry around. This really opened my eyes to what was out there in the market; the greater resolution and zoom capability, coupled with better in-camera software and image stabilization meant my shaky, tentative photography produced much clearer images than I had ever shot before. This camera made it look like I knew what the hell I was doing, and perhaps for the first time in a long while, I actually enjoyed taking photos and invested a lot more energy in trying to make them more visually interesting. Of course, with all the automatic functions within the camera taking care of me, I got technically sharp and well-exposed shots, but I struggled to defeat those functions when I actually wanted to do something a little more artistic, partly because I'm kind of a big-thumbed ape when it comes to technical details and partly because I was still trying to figure out what I wanted out of any given shot and how I should go about actually getting it.


Taking better photos inspired me to... well, take better photos. After I returned from my Africa trip, I realized just how much I enjoyed photography, and that I wanted to take it further, so I bit the bullet and invested in a Canon EOS 50D digital SLR. It came in a package deal with a selection of lower-end lenses: a 50mm fixed lens, an 18-55mm telephoto, a 70-300mm telephoto, a wide angle and a macro lens, along with a handful of filters, a cheap flash I never used, a camera bag and a few odd and sundry bits and pieces. This gave me a lot more functionality than the Olympus, better resolution, and was a little easier to fiddle with to get long exposures or to under-expose when I wanted it, or to get soft focus when I wanted that. I also still have this camera, and I've gotten several years of use out of it, and it has proven to be suprisingly rugged -- I have yet to see anything fail, despite many inadvertent attempts to break it, and actually continued to perform well in environments where more expensive cameras simply gave up (a particularly heavy rain on the Olympic Peninsula comes to mind). The shots I got from the 50D were clear enough and composed well enough (especially after futher education, including a few sessions under the tutelage of Art Wolfe) that I felt confident enough to actually put my work up for sale.


For a professional photographer, the 50D has some limitations, of course (which is why Canon lists it as a "semi-professional" model). It's obviously not the highest resolution camera Canon makes, but in this case, it's really size that matters: it has a 3/4 frame CMOS, meaning the sensor is not the same size as a piece of 35mm film. So all those megapixels have to be crammed in closer to one another, and at least theoretically, that means a higher probability of signal noise in the final image. Since I'm interested in getting photos that are tack sharp and with as little noise as possible, I need to do everything I can to reduce digital errata, so I made the upgrade to a full-frame sensor and bought a Canon EOS 5D and some better glass (which one will improve my images more is a subject for further debate, but I'll take whatever does the trick and not lose sleep over it). I haven't had it long enough to report fully on its plusses and minuses, but I know a lot of professional photographers who swear by it. (We'll have the Canon vs. Nikon disussion at a later date, when we have much more time and a bit more alcohol on board)


Where will I go from here? Hard to say; technologically, I've reached a point that many professional photographers are comfortable settling at. There may at some point be a need to get a medium- or large-format camera for detailed work that I'll want to blow up to mural sized prints, but for the moment, I can't justify it (not at current market prices, particularly) and I'm pretty comfortable with what I'm using. We'll see; if somebody invents a digital camera that takes pictures in 3-D, I might have to jump on that bandwagon, but until we start doing holographic field photography, I'm happy with my 5D. I'm done buying toys for a while... until someone shows me something else that bright and shiny.