Paul Wilkinson Photography Blog

A really good mate of mine has just given up his (once very expensive) Canon DSLR and lenses in favour of one of the new tranche of high quality compacts with interchangeable lenses – as it happens it’s the hugely impressive Panasonic GF1 with a fixed 20mm lens. As he puts it: “Right size, lens (20mm) and speed for me. A camera I can actually carry.”

Well said.

It struck me yesterday while out in the snow, just how much kit I’m now used to carrying. True, as a pro, we need equipment that is capable of taking 150,000+ images a year, can be dropped (regularly), trodden on (equally regularly), works in the heat (for destination weddings such as Caitriona and Shaun’s), works in the freezer (if this year is anything to go by), is lightning quick and has easily interchangeable high-quality lenses. And all this in a package that is actually enjoyable to use. With gloves on.

Oh, and it needs to be able to create high quality images too.

But – and here’s my point – does this actually make for a ‘better’ picture? Some of the greatest, iconic photographs ever created were captured without the aid of a zoom lens or digital technology (either in the camera or in the lab) and yet we’ve become hooked on all of these bells and whistles – bells and whistles that the marketing people would gleefully have us renew every couple of years.

So today, just for the fun of it, we’re going to stick a very old design fixed-length 50mm lens (a Nikon 50mm 1.8 AF-D for those who are curious – an old but piercingly sharp little bit of glass) that I bought a few months ago onto the front of the camera and see what we get. I know I’m still using a top-end pro camera to actually capture the images, but given I set the thing in manual mode for nearly everything we do anyway (and I want my 50mm lens to actually be a 50mm lens – i.e. I don’t want that annoying cropping-factor you get with my other digital SLRs), life isn’t much different to when I used to have an Olympus OM-something or other 20 years ago.

And that is exactly why my mate has switched over.

And I agree with him entirely.

Though I may not be getting rid of my amazing Nikon’s any time soon

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010, 12:29 pm and is filed under Chat, For Website. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.