Category: Cameras

Switching Camera Systems

Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer recently posted an article about not switching camera systems, which was sparked by Thom Hogan’s article on the topic. Very very briefly, Thom is suggesting that all the systems have gotten so good that most of the old semi-decent reasons for switching no longer apply to most photographers.

This is not obviously stupid.

And it got me thinking about my camera system switches. Several of mine can be described at least as unsuccessful (not always for reasons I should have anticipated though).

So, let’s see.

First Camera

Around 1962 (I have negatives dating from that school year) I was given a Tower Pixie 127 camera, for my birthday or perhaps Christmas. I had little input on this, and didn’t know anything about cameras, and had no previous camera, so this is not in any sense a switch. But that’s the baseline.

First 35mm Camera

I was given my mother’s old Bolsey 35 in 1966, before we went over to Switzerland for a year. It had become surplus when my mother got a Minolta fixed-lens rangefinder camera with a light meter in 1964, before our summer trip to Uganda (my father was going there to work on a project writing mathematics textbooks for the English-speaking countries in Africa).

Again, I had little input (though I could have ignored the camera). It doesn’t tell my much about my system switching behavior.

I soon bought a little light meter for it (a Biwi Piccolo, bought in Karlshafen am Weser), and shot some Kodachrome slides with it as well as B&W negatives.

This camera eventually lead to my starting to do my own darkroom work, a couple of years later, so having a 35mm camera was important.

First SLR

This was all my choice, and did represent acquiring a new system (I didn’t lose the Bolsey; though I didn’t use it much any more). I chose a Miranda Sensorex with the 50mm f/1.4 lens. Largely, I chose this because they got the highest ratings in Consumer Reports review of SLR cameras.

Getting a serious interchangeable-lens camera was certainly the right choice for me at this point. In the next few years I acquired a Tamron 200mm f/3.5 lens and a 28mm (going both longer and wider than the usual choices at the time). I took a lot of photos with this setup, through high school and into college. This was the camera I wielded for the Norhian, my highschool yearbook, and which I was shooting when I built my own darkroom and started doing all my own B&W printing and processing.

It was not a particularly good choice. One thing I learned from this is that Consumer Reports’ reviews are not really good guides for expert users. While I wasn’t an expert user when I bought it, I was heading that direction, and various limitations became apparent (in range of lenses available, particularly).

Leica

Getting a Leica M3 was an excellent choice. Over the next 2 years I added 90mm Summicron f/2 and 35mm Summicron f/2 lenses, and used them a lot. This was one of my main cameras when working for the Carleton Alumni Publications Office (their full-time professional quit during a hiring freeze so tight that the people who were responsible for a lot of the fund-raising couldn’t replace a key employee; so they ended up using a number of student photographers a lot, including me).

The rangefinder focusing worked better than early 1970s microprism screens for focusing in dark situations, and I did a lot of shooting in the dark (late night parties and music sessions, stuff at science fiction conventions) or by flash in rooms that might be pretty dark. The lenses were faster than the wide and telephoto choices I had previously had, too, which helped. And the non-reflex viewfinder meant I could see the exact moment the flash illuminated, so I had a better idea whether I got the shot than with an SLR.

I’m not sure that I wouldn’t have been as well off getting a Nikon SLR body and f/1.4 lenses, though. I might have lost some on focusing still, but I could have extended out to the 135mm f/2 lens to get a longer reach (I owned that lens later, it’s wonderful). The pricing of Leicas was going crazy, and it became less and less of a viable option for a price-conscious user as things went forward, but I’m not sure I should have known that when I bought the M3.

Pentax Spotmatic

Shortly after getting the M3 I swapped the Miranda for a Pentax outfit, with more lenses and longer ones (out to 400mm).

I picked it specifically as an adjunct to the Leica; I’d be using it for longer or wider lenses than I could support on the Leica (well, than there were frame lines for; I could use wider lenses at least with an auxiliary viewfinder, but then focusing and framing would be separate windows).

Pentax had a wide range of lenses, and very high optical quality in general. I never bought a prime lens for it (it came with such a set I never really moved to add to it; it was a decade later that I went out as wide as 24mm for the first time). Stop-down metering wasn’t particularly a problem, by my standards at the time. This may have been a good choice, at least as a simple swap for the Miranda.

I don’t see this as a mistake, more as the correcting of a mistake. But the more I think about it, the more I think that with 2020 hindsight (okay, I’m 2 years late) my best choice would have been to buy a used Nikkormat or Nikon F first and just stick with that, adding lenses and bodies here and there. Where’s the transtemporal mailbox?

Pocket Instamatic

Don’t worry, I didn’t get rid of any of the other gear.

The technology was hyped and interesting (they gave up on holding the film really flat, and instead calculated the lenses to focus properly on the film as the cartridges actually held it). It was my first step back into a “toy” camera, and I used it for a lot of snapshooting. The small size was convenient, but I never worked with those photos in the darkroom.

This was clearly a mistake. The idea of a “toy” camera, something smaller to keep with me more of the time, was good, but there was no need to step down this far. At that point there were very good small rangefinders like the Olympus 35RC or the Canonet QL17 with f/2.8 lenses and pretty good rangefinders, and light meters or even auto-exposure. I didn’t actually carry the Instamatic in a pocket, so these would have worked as well for carry I think, and much better for photography (and I could use the negatives in the darkroom myself).

The insane choice that keeps attracting my retrospective eye was the Minox system. Much smaller negative, and would have caused darkroom problems for me (the enlarger in my home darkroom was a Durst M35, which supported 35mm only, and had no alternative negative carrier options, so no way to handle smaller formats (or larger), and the darkrooms at college didn’t have such negative carriers in place, though they would have been available for purchase). Probably would have been a mistake, but I don’t know.

Canon AF35M

Then I graduated, and lost access to the college darkrooms, and had no darkroom access. There was a 4-year gap between roll “ddb-396” and “ddb-397”. I regret this gap rather a lot. I could have set up a good enough darkroom in my apartment (Bozo Bus Building basement) and my first house, though it would have required buying an enlarger (since I had sold mine when I got to the good darkrooms at college).

And sometime during that period (not at the beginning) my camera gear was stolen, along with some other stuff, out of my closet at home.

After a while I decided I had to get back into at least snap-shot photography, so I bought one of the new breed of auto-focus 35mm compact cameras (successors to the Olympus 35RC and friends). It was a marvelous toy camera, and I still do things with the photos from it. The idea of a toy camera was, once again, proven good!

Nikon FM

Just a few months after that, I bought a Nikon FM and Nikkor 35mm f/2 and 105mm f/2.5 lenses. The FM had a brighter focusing screen and viewfinder than many older SLRs, and you could get especially bright focusing screens for it (which I did).

My thinking included that I might need to also replace the Leica for low-light work, but I certainly needed to replace the SLR for wider, longer, zoom, and such, so I’d try a modern SLR first before committing the money for the Leica (which during those 4 years had definitely gone up a lot). And in fact I never did replace the Leica, I got more bodies and lenses for the Nikon system instead.

I have no idea why I got the 105/2.5 lens. It’s a classic portrait lens, but what I knew I loved was the 90mm, and Nikon had an 85mm that was available in either f/2 or f/1.4 (nearly 2 stops faster than the 105/2.5). I somehow didn’t know about the famous Nikon 85mm? I would definitely have been better served by the 35/1.4 and the 85/1.4; and then adding the 135/2 rather sooner than I actually did.

Despite that lens selection error, this was one of my best system choices. Nikon was “the photographer’s camera” from the 60s through the 90s at least, and staying with the same lens mount that whole time would have been better for me.

Nikon L135AF

For some reason I got this to replace the Canon AF35M. This was a clear mistake; it didn’t expose as well as the Canon. I don’t recall brand prejudice having anything to do with the choice. Apparently if I’d gotten the L35AF, it would have been much better (at least so Ken Rockwell says).

Olympus OM-4T

This was one of my most carefully considered system switches. And it turned out to be entirely unnecessary (though one of the reasons I couldn’t have anticipated in 1987).

I had been waiting for Nikon to introduce spot metering in their SLR line. Olympus came out with their multi-spot metering. I thought that I could get considerably better slides (which have high contrast and a restricted brightness range, remember) without slowing myself down too much using multi-spot metering to evaluate the scene and pick an exposure that places things in useful zones (not full zone system, since I wasn’t proposing custom development to match the lighting!).

Well, the multi-spot metering worked fine, it really was easy to spot the high and low brightness areas and see them displayed on the bar as I shifted them around with exposure changes—but it didn’t in practice result in significantly better exposures.

I got a pair of these bodies, and lenses from 24mm to 200mm (including a second 24mm lens that had shift, to handle cathedrals and castles on a trip to England).

And then in 1994 (7 years was my longest run in any camera system to that date, to be fair) auto-focus became important, and Olympus completely missed that boat (until much later). The Olympus gear served me very well, but no better than what I’d had before would have, so the switch was not a good choice.

Nikon N90

The N90 was a rather good prosumer body, but it was expensive, first body I bought that was nudging at $1000. Used to be lenses were expensive and bodies relatively cheap, but AF ran the bodies up, and then of course digital ran the bodies through the roof since the sensor and all the electronics were there. Those things also vastly shortened the useful life of the bodies, which most of us didn’t realize immediately. (They’re not repairable without electronic parts from the manufacturer, who don’t keep them available very long. After that it’s scavenging from other dead bodies.)

I rented one, and an AF lens, for the weekend to test whether I really needed AF, and sadly discovered that oh my yes, I got a lot more interesting pictures if I could focus that fast and that accurately. (Frustrating when the camera missed, but it didn’t miss more often than I missed myself.)

I hadn’t succeeded in unloading much of my Nikon gear during that 7 years, so it was fairly easy to slip back into the Nikon world.

So then over the years I added bodies and lenses and flashes and things.

I’d say that this switch back to Nikon as a very good move for me.

Then digital came along; but I did well remaining in Nikon (no system switch); my first DSLR was a Fuji S2, which was a great choice, then a Nikon D200 (maybe should have waited for the D300).

Then a D700, which was the most amazing camera I have ever owned. They put everything I considered valuable from their top-of-the-line D3 professional camera into the D700, plus at least 2 things I valued that the D3 didn’t have (built-in flash that was a CLS controller, and sensor cleaner)…and sold them for half the price of the D3. Mind you, it was still by a factor of 2 the most expensive camera body I ever purchased. I ended up selling a fairly special lens to finance it (but the lens had been better in theory than for me in practice, anyway).

It was a photojournalist’s camera, excellent for its time in low light, excellent AF. Not especially high resolution (it used the big sensor for big pixels). Fit me perfectly.

I thought I’d committed to APS-C format, and had revised my lens collection somewhat, when the D700 hit me, so that was expensive, undoing some lens decisions.

I suppose the change to and then back out of APS-C should almost count as system changes, even if the cameras had the same lens mount.

The D700 was the camera that made my first years of Roller Derby photography practical (light doesn’t look that low, but for action that fast I needed high shutter speeds).

Olympus EPL-2

This started out to be my new toy camera. With the 20mm f/1.7 pancake it wasn’t much bigger than the Panasonic LX3, and was much better in low light.

But it grew on me, or some of the lenses did. Also the video did, and getting the OM-D EM-5 opened up HD video to me fairly seriously; I used that camera for the Cats Laughing reunion concert movie “A Long Time Gone”, as well as for a lot of the still and video work used to promote the Kickstarter and provide the packaging and such.

And then I found myself maintaining two digital camera systems to near-professional levels. On consideration this seemed financially unsustainable, and after kicking this around a lot, I decided that it was time for me to get rid of that old flappy mirror thing I’d been lugging around since 1969, and go mirrorless. I sold off the Nikon gear (I really did sell it all off this time) and and bought an OM-D EM-1 mk II and some more Olympus lenses (the 40-150/2.8 is amazing; angle-of-view of an 80-300 f/2.8, much lighter, and much cheaper).

Fairly shortly after that, Nikon came out with their mirrorless system, and Olympus went through some major restructuring that leaves the photo division in a somewhat interesting position. So…I think this switch was great for me, but the world is rather making it less pleasant.

Conclusions

So, hind-sight certainly has huge benefits over what one knows when actually having to make decisions. I don’t really feel any of my choices were stupid or poorly thought out; the ones that I would like to retroactively improve were largely due to legitimate ignorance really, either in the present or of the future.

Still, it’d be great to send a letter back to myself, long enough to convince myself I had real knowledge of the future. Go Nikon from the beginning. 85mm! Get a toy camera early, but not a super-limited one. Get a Braun RL-515 flash even earlier. Take more pictures of where I live and where I work, especially early computers I worked with.

Oh; and buy Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon in the IPOs.

Finally, a wide lens for Micro Four Thirds

No, nothing like the first to exist.  But the first I’ve owned (I’ve had two that include 14mm since pretty much the beginning; that’s the angle of view of a 28mm on old 35mm film—not all that wide. 12mm is fairly wide, and they’ve been common for a while, and there are one or two good 7-14mm zooms, too.

But a 7.5mm f/2 for half or less of the price of some of the good alternatives was very interesting. Too soon to really know about performance, but it’s a nice wide lens!

The Cold Pixels

Turns out physics is (more and more) setting performance limits on digital cameras. (Title is a reference to the controversial Tom Godwin story “The Cold Equations”).

I’ve been maintaining two camera systems for a while now—Nikon, and Micro Four Thirds (my bodies have all been Olympus). That developed sort-of accidentally; I got an E-PL2 to replace a Panasonic LX3 as my “point and shoot”. But of course, over time, lenses accumulated, and it started to be a significant camera for more than just snapshots. And when I upgraded to an OM-D EM-5 it was pretty good at video, too (most of my work on the Cats Laughing reunion concert at Minicon 50 was done with it). And after the body upgrade it became my main camera, except for sports action (almost all roller derby) and nasty low-light (often music in bars).

Having both systems leads to having the wrong one, or carrying both, on trips. And to ongoing expenses. And a certain level of duplicate lenses.  And to having only a single body on either side.

And, just recently, the OM-D EM-5 body has packed it in (“beyond service life” according to Olympus service). This kind of brings the question of just what the heck I should do to a head. Without spending too much money, of course.

The Nikon gear (both what I have, and the models I might buy) is an old-school DSLR. Viewing is optically, through the taking lens, via a pentaprism and a moving mirror, which means I have to line my eye up with the lens to see anything (crawling on the ground or whatever as necessary), and that in low-light situations it can be hard to see.  It also means manual focus is hard, since the view can be dim and the focusing screen is not optimized for manual focus.  Auto-focus is by phase-detect sensors in the bottom of the body, fed by semi-transparent spots on the moving mirror plus pivoting sub-mirrors on the back (how does that ever work?).

The Micro Four Thirds gear is of the more modern “mirrorless” design. There’s no big mirror flapping around to make noise and cause shake. Older models including my dead one use contrast-detect auto-focus based on the data from the main image sensor; some more recent ones like the OM-D EM-1 mark II and the Sony A7R II integrate phase-detection AF sensors on the main sensor, making AF much faster (phase-detect sensors tell it which way to adjust, contrast detection does not, among other issues).

Watching the development of cameras over the last decade, I think I see that we’re past the time for silly flappy mirrors. I’m starting to feel about them a little like the way Heinlein described internal-combustion engines in The Rolling Stones:

 The prime mover for such a juggernaut might have rested in one’s lap; the rest of the mad assembly consisted of afterthoughts intended to correct the uncorrectable, to repair the original basic mistake in design—for automobiles and even the early aeroplanes were “powered” (if one may call it that) by “reciprocating engines.”

A reciprocating engine was a collection of miniature heat engines using (in a basically inefficient cycle) a small percentage of an exothermic chemical reaction, a reaction which was started and stopped every split second. Much of the heat was intentionally thrown away into a “water jacket” or “cooling system,” then wasted into the atmosphere through a heat exchanger.

What little was left caused blocks of metal to thump foolishly back-and-forth (hence the name “reciprocating”) and thence through a linkage to cause a shaft and flywheel to spin around. The flywheel (believe it if you can) had no gyroscopic function; it was used to store kinetic energy in a futile attempt to cover up the sins of reciprocation. The shaft at long last caused wheels to turn and thereby propelled this pile of junk over the countryside.

 

Apart from the risk of simply being completely wrong, I’m wondering if it’s too early to go all-in on mirrorless designs. The main players are Olympus and Panasonic (in the Micro Four Thirds collaboration) and Fuji. Canon and Nikon have minor lines of no particular market or technological significance (though rumor has it that Nikon is coming out with a full-frame mirrorless line next year), Leica makes a few full-frame models at Leica prices, and Sony has some very interesting full-frame models (but the lens lines for them are limited and pretty expensive).

Oh, and there are some medium-format mirrorless models now, from Leica, Hasselblad, and Fuji at least; those aren’t oriented towards sports-level action, and are getting into five figures instead of mid 4 in price, so they’re not anything I should or can think about.

Mirrorless cameras are very easy to adapt to use any old-style SLR lenses (and many others), in strictly manual mode. Because they don’t have to have space for a mirror to flip up, the back of the lens mount flange is very close to the sensor; and when making an adapter that’s one of the inescapable limits (the other is the coverage of the lens being adapted). And, with electronic viewfinders and modern technology like “focus peaking” and just magnifying the image, manual focus is vastly more usable than it was with SLRs. I do still need AF for fast-moving subjects, though, especially sports, and it’s convenient some of the rest of the time. However, my current mirrorless camera wasn’t modern enough to have focus peaking, so I don’t have more than passing direct experience with it (playing with other people’s cameras).

While I lived with film for decades, I now casually expect modern levels of low-light sensitivity out of my equipment (and I am, after all, mostly competing with people who either have it, or don’t want it).  Micro Four Thirds uses a sensor half the area of a “full-frame” sensor. The Fujis and the Canon are APS-C.  The bigger sensors will always capture more photons per pixel at any given resolution (each pixel is simply physically bigger).  And while they’ll all get better at capturing, and at processing the data they capture, they’ll all be reasonably in step on those improvements. Bigger will always win.

Here are the DXOMARK stats on some of the cameras I have or am considering:

DXOMARK numbers

My old Nikon D700 has a “sports” score (which is basically high ISO quality) of 2303. The fancy new OM-D E-M1 Mark II has a score of…1312; not that much better than half as good. And the Sony A7R II, one of the very top low-light cameras,  scores 3434. In the nearly 10 years since my D700 was released, sensors and processing haven’t  improved enough for any smaller sensor to catch up with it, but sensors the same size have moved well past it. So the latest fancy Micro Four Thirds body would be a considerable step backwards in something I care about (possibly mitigated by a lens a stop faster from 200mm to 300mm, see below).

Just to confirm the DXO methodology, here are lab test shots of some of the choices from dpreview.com:

DPReview high-ISO examples

(Note that the Nikon D750 is considerably more recent than my D700; but they didn’t have anything that old in the database, not even the D3).

That’s kind of interesting, in that the Sony doesn’t look as good as its rating would suggest.  The E-M1 Mark II does look somewhat better than the E-M5. And of course the D750 beats them all, but that’s a modern full-frame DSLR.

Going solely to any mirrorless system requires buying some high-end lenses, too; at least their 70-200mm f/2.8 equivalent. And there, Micro Four Thirds wins big; the Olympus equivalent (40-150/2.8 Pro) has equivalent angle of view of an 80-300, which is enough longer to be very nice (a stop faster anywhere beyond 200mm equivalent than anything I have now), and costs “only” $1400. The only choice for the Sony (no Sigma or Tokina models available) costs $2600.

Oh, and there are some fairly significant Olympus rebates and trade-in deals for the next couple of weeks.

Decisions, decisions!

Annoying Aspects of Modernity

My primary camera came back as “beyond service life” and hence unrepairable.  Even the guy at the camera store was surprised, he had to look up when it was released (it was announced in February of 2012).

Olympus OM-D EM-5 “beyond service life”

Meanwhile, I could easily get a Leica M3 (made around the same time I as) or a Nikon F (about 5 years newer than the Leica) repaired. Of course those two are special cases, they’re both regarded as important classics. And, being old-school completely mechanical cameras, the parts they need can be manufactured pretty easily today, without any help from the original manufacturers.

This was my only video camera and my primary still camera (though the D700 still does a much better job on roller derby and in dark bars and music circles).

I’ve been playing around in my head with where to take the camera collection from here, given that both sides (this Micro Four Thirds body and the lenses for it, and my Nikon D700 and those lenses) are getting old by modern standards (the D700 is even older, having been released in July of 2008; I’ve already had one autofocus system repair). This is rather financially constrained, among other things.  (Some of the Nikon lenses I’m using I bought in 1981, and they still work fine, and still could be repaired though perhaps not by Nikon themselves.)

I think it’s time to abandon flappy mirrors; they’re a silly idea in digital cameras. However, full-frame sensors do seriously better in low light than smaller ones (no smaller sensor has yet matched the specs of my 2008 D700 full-frame sensor), and DSLRs have better auto-focus for tracking and fast action than any mirrorless (except possibly maybe the hugely expensive top-of-the-line Sony A9, which doesn’t take any of my lenses). And there aren’t many full-frame mirrorless lines; there’s the Sony, and a Leica (which makes the Sony look cheap).  But the state of the art in sensors and electronics is advancing constantly; while no smaller sensor has caught up to my D700 yet, they’re close, and no doubt will catch up soon. Of course today’s full-frame sensors are five generations (or some such) better, and still well ahead, but at some point something becomes “good enough” and it’s not worth paying hugely for small improvements for most kinds of photography. Nikon is allegedly about to release their own mirrorless full-frame system, but how well it will work with old Nikon lenses is anybodies guess. For that matter how well it will work at all is still up in the air.

With financial constraints, concentrating back into one system is nearly certainly the way to go, and for cost and flexibility the Micro Four Thirds seems to be the best choice starting from where I am.

Have to think about it; I wonder what I’ll actually do—and when?

Cleaning Epson V700 Flatbed Scanner Glass

Specifically, the inside (or bottom) of the main glass. Because, as anybody who has used a scanner critically knows, the inside of those things out-gases (from the plastic) and deposits thin layers of gunk on the bottom of the glass.

You do also have to clean the top of the glass, but that’s easy; normal glass or lens cleaning techniques (so, Windex, water and ammonia, alcohol-based lens cleaner, with suitable soft cloth or paper).

Ammonia, in your own mix or in Windex, is corrosive to electronics, so be careful what you spray around where!

It’s easy to Google up posts all over about the process in general, like here.

The bottom of the glass is no harder—once you get to it.

The basic process is:

  1. Unplug everything
  2. Remove the scanning lid and set it carefully aside
  3. Remove the four plastic plugs over the screws that hold the top on
  4. Remove the screws that hold the top on (small Phillips)
  5. Lift off the top
  6. Clean the bottom of the glass, as above

The problem is those little plugs. Well, they’re not actually that big a problem, but it’s not obvious from the outside how to do this.

If your scanner is out of warranty, it doesn’t matter too much; the failure mode is gashing up the plugs and the top of the housing, which are purely cosmetic issues. If however your scanner is still in warranty, clear evidence that you’ve been inside could void your warranty.

So, here’s one of the plugs, in place:

One of 4 plugs covering the screws that hold the top on to an Epson V700 scanner

Those scratches were made by me, with a small (jeweler’s) flat-blade screwdriver, trying to find the point to pry the plug out. Ruined the screwdriver, too, by the way, but this was one of the vestigial ones from an old set and I was rather expecting that, using such a small thing as a pry-bar.

There is, it turns out, a better way! (This is my shocked face.)

Note the wide “V” on the plastic cap. With the scanner on the desk in front of you so that the top opens away from you (I think of this as the “normal” position to use a flatbed scanner in), that “V” is pointing down (meaning the wide side is away from me).

Here’s the cap off, and what a cap looks like from the bottom:

Cap off, both sides, and screw in well

Note the top cap is well and truly messed up; that’s the first one I got out, before I knew how to do it reasonably cleanly.

Now, look at the bottom cap (also oriented so the bottom of the “V” is towards us, wide end away).  See that big gap at the top?  Yeah, turns out if you pry there it’s much easier to get the pry-bar in and much easier to get the cap out, doing almost no damage.  Not none, if you’re in warranty you should still think about that. I tried the “duct tape” thing frequently cited on the web, but it did nothing at all with mine.

So: Put your narrow pry-bar in at the wide part of the “V”, and pry there.  Comes right off!

There’s something slightly weird about the front left corner, that was the hardest bit to get off and get on. I found the top went on much better if you put the left side down first.

But my glass is all much cleaner now.