I wish I had a local friend like that. I have hiking friends and kids parent friends, but none who are particularly into photography. Sometimes I just want to fully nerd out about it, which is why I’m on here so much I guess.
Yes, fully agree. Many of us on this forum enjoy talking about the gear, the processing and the capturing. I love it all.
I think it’s important not to GAS shame anyone because it’s a perfectly valid part of the hobby. It’s only a problem if the person can’t afford it or is still under the impression that new gear will instantly make their photos better. But I find that most enthusiasts already know that. They just enjoy trying out new gear and even just the hunt for it.
For me, it’s cyclical. I’ll go through phases of either always being out shooting, concentrating on processing my backlog, or researching gear and satisfying my GAS urges. Sometimes I’m doing all three at the same time, but generally I have quite distinct phases of “obsession”.
Ah my latest tripod goes well over my head and doesn’t have a center column. It makes a crazy difference in the stability department.
Find your composition while hand holding, when you’re close to good, plunk the tripod down, then go for another round of composition refinement. This is especially useful when using a longer lens, where tiny movements really change the composition.
One thing I can’t stand is tripods. Anchoring myself to one spot, seeing all the other options pass me by, just sounds like torture to me. I prefer capturing a bit too wide, a bit too dark, a few more frames than necessary, and leave all the fine tuning to the post processing. As such, I don’t try to get things right in camera at all, and merely focus on gathering good data. My tripod is only for technical experiments.
(Of course this is in no way meant as a criticism to anyone’s workflow. Diversity is the spice of life!)
Mica, might I ask how the Ricoh GR fits into a tripod shooter’s life?
That has always been me too. But recently I realized that I was culling too much and that I might benefit from taking things a bit slower and being more deliberate. There are also the quality benefits of course from the extra stability and lower ISOs. And that’s also something I occasionally want to maximize.
Using a tripod is a completely different style of shooting, so my goal is to get proficient at it, and then see how much I want to incorporate it into my photography.
How heavy is it, and any recommendations? I have a Manfrotto travel tripod right now, and it’s quite mediocre. I have looked at a Ulanzi Zero Y and Neewer LT32 for relatively portable ones. I know tripods are one of those things that they say you get what you pay for, but I’m not really ready to spend big bucks on a behemoth.
Wahhhh I ettr almost exclusively and try to get it right in camera. These days I even hate cropping (unless to achieve an aspect ratio) and consider that a compositional failure and something to improve on. I try to be decisive about compositions and not worry about “missed” things too much. I think I’m always missing more than I’m capturing, that’s the nature of things, so I need to make the composition count! I go back ams forth between really planned shoots where I already have compositions in mind and just going manic and capturing whatever I see in the moment. Both have yielded good results, though I sort of like the mania of working off the cuff.
I can actually hand hold the GR reliably and I do. I rarely use a tripod with the GR.
For the Z7ii and GFX, I shake too much to reliably handhold and that’s why I am mostly on a tripod. I also like refining my composition on the tripod, because I don’t like cropping.
Fascinating! The shaking makes sense, though. With that, external stability is necessary, and I suppose with that comes a more methodical workflow. Is that also where the GFX came in for you?
I suppose I internalized that what I see in the field just never was a good predictor of what I’d end up liking in post. So I optimize for capturing as much variety as possible – not by spraying and praying, I only take each composition once, but by trying out many different options.
Come to think of it, though, I have gotten much better about judging compositions in the field. Perhaps a bit more on-location refinement actually would do me good (in the rare cases where I’m not simultaneously entertaining a kid or holding a conversation).
In had my eye on the GFX for a while, because I love megapixels, and I pretty much panic bought the whole systems just before the tariffs landed (and I was right, body + 3 lenses is now ~$1800 more than what I paid for it).
The GFX with my two primes (23mm and 55mm) is better balanced than the Z7ii with the 24/50mm z lenses, so hand holding is slightly easier, but my arm gets tired after a while, it’s just heavy.
Interesting, I still try and previsualize my scene same as when I was shooting film. I am still sometimes surpsied by some stuff I thought was just OK in the field I end up really liking. I’ve been trying to loosen up my vision more and try and push myself more while capturing lately.
That’s wild! I generally take multiples of each composition and refocus each time. This savede while I was out this weekend, one was way out of focus, not sure what happened, but the other was sharp.
Always good to push yourself!
I am often alone, so I don’t have to worry about those things. I often wonder if I’d like someone else to tag along, and my newphew has come a few times recently, but I think I’m more of a lone wolf. I also realize the privilege of being able to do that.
Obviously some of the Olympus (typically the pro models) and a few of the Panasonic (like the panaleica 15mm) have aperture rings, but they are the more expensive ones.
I used to do that, too. But as reliability of the autofocus system improved, I stopped. We just came back from vacation. Of the ~800 shots I took, I only remember three or four that I culled because they were misfocused.
Caveat, my brightest lenses were the 27/2.8 on Fuji and the GR IV’s 18/2.8. Also, I only look at the overall picture to check focus (on a 4K screen), so I might have not notice small focusing errors.
As you might imagine, I find reports of Fuji’s “bad” autofocus wildly exaggerated. It sounds like you have a different experience. I wonder what is so different between us in that regard.
I think the autofocus on the GFX is fine, its medium format so its not blazingly fast. I haven’t seen it miss more than my Nikon, and that doesn’t miss often either. Shooting doubles is something I’ve always done. It was impressed upon me early that the most expensive thing is my time, the trip to get to the place, etc etc
It is hard to make sense of the article’s prediction that
a safe bet is more cameras with built-in lenses
because that would not require joining the micro 4/3 group, which is about the mount. If anyone wants to make a camera with a micro 4/3 sensor, they can just source a sensor and be done with it.
That said, I am curious to see what will happen. I am assuming that making camera bodies that operate with interchangeable lenses is much more challenging than just making lenses for the same mount, as there are very few entrants even for more-or-less open standards like micro 4/3 or the L mount, and all of them have decades of industry experience; the only exceptions I know of are DJI and Blackmagic.
How much industry knowledge do you really need at the end of the day? There are people building open source cameras, Pixii managed to do it, albeit with an ancient mount, but it doesn’t seem that hard given enough investment.
Maybe there is some “magic” in integrating everything, particularly with the shutter? Due to extreme timings and so on. Since most of those other cameras you mention use electronic shutters, and so do the open source cameras I’ve seen.
EDIT: Pixii is electronic shutter only as well. Maybe the magic really is in integrating the shutter mechanism with the sensor?
I don’t think there is any magic involved that a sufficiently well-funded entrant cannot replicate over time, it’s just that a camera is full of finicky systems that need to work together reliably, cramped in a small package. There are many potential issues, which need to be tested, debugged, solved. Some of them only surface after years of usage.
The “problem” is that cameras are very, very good now. Even cameras from a decade ago are excellent. Consider the OM-5ii, which you can have for around €1200 new (less if you catch a rebate etc), which has PDAF and IBIS and all sorts of computational goodies. Can someone make that cheaper? How much cheaper? Parts and R&D still cost money. For anything above €900 I would wait for years of usage to accumulate before I would even think about it buying a third-party camera from a Chinese manufacturer that previously made scameras.
Or I could imagine a simple, small micro 4/3 body without IBIS and advanced AF. I would consider that up to €300, but they would have to get at least the knobs and dials right, so that it is not a total pain to use, and make the body really, really small so that it fills the relevant nice.
Vintage lenses on micro 4/3 do have the disadvantage you mentioned
For me though it is more than compensated by the fact you are using the centre of the lens: its sweet spot avoiding vignetting etc, It took me a while to understand why Zukio lenses on a Gx80 were so sharp. The quality of these lenses and their peers was good I prefer them for manual focus. There was not the whole Prime lens concept then which seems to me sometimes a bit of a rip-off for the price nowadays. I think the big fear with them is fungus and it spreading though there are people telling you how to clean it yourself on YouTube, maybe something to outsource
My main concern about micro four thirds would be the lack of resolution and that restricts commercial use, for me though if you use them in a series that isn’t a disadvantage and they do have advantages other formats lack
Moving to the more general thread topic I like to avoid flash and so like cameras with leaf shutters and anti-flicker technology so that any available light will get a result, if anybody has advice on this it would be welcome
It is difficult to strike the balance between over and under investing in equipment and how much experimentation is needed involving buying and selling
Yeah of course, I meant it more on regular timescales with average investment. There is no unbreakable barrier for a company to get into the market, but it makes me wonder what’s the real holdup. Almost every particularly advanced item has a good chinese counterpart, but not really true for cameras.
Maybe, like you said, it’s a combination of high initial investment and a saturated market that doesn’t make that much money nowadays? What do Chinese state photographers use?
That’s exactly the issue I think. Pixii do a manual focus, niche, high-margin camera. Competing with low-margin, mass-market cameras is much more difficult.
I just watched the Petapixel review, and even with a 4500€ price tag, they seemed to have struggled getting a good FF sensor. At high ISO there is quite a lot of banding and the sensor seems “old” compared to what we have today. That is not to say that old sensors are bad, the D850 sensor is “old” and still really good. Even the X-T1 sensor is very good at most scenarios today.
I can relate - I have just recently lashed out on a new (for me) used rectangular fisheye (an oxymoron?). I have used all the previous lenses I have bought, honest! How much, however, is often more telling.
For example, on first inspection, my darktable database tells me that I have used my Samyang 10mm f/2.8 ED AS NCS CS for more than 1000 exposures. Yet 555 of these are in a single timelapse; more than 100 are darks and bias frames for 2 astrophotos. In actuality, I’ve used it on 18 distinct dates in the five and a half years I’ve had it. Now that I have the rectangular fisheye for ultra-wide focal length, I am likely to use the Samyang still less. Hmmm…
GAS is truly a disease, it seems, that infects and affects the rational decision-making parts of me.