I am old enough to remember the days when you purchased the camera of your choice and you then kept it, for quite a while. Back then, cameras were built to do a job and reliably stood the test of time.
The development of camera technology seemed to move at a glacial pace but this was not so important, film technology on the other hand was the be all and end all. Better, smaller, sharper finer grain and saturated color for travel and landscapes, a neutral palette for portraits, high speed film without too much grain for the more extreme, low light situations.
Film was everything, the camera, just a reliable, solidly built, light tight box that was rarely replaced until it was falling apart. Manufacturers seemed to work on roughly an eight to ten year cycle for their pro spec models.
And now? It seems there is a new, better more advanced model offering higher this, faster that entering the market every month. It is as though the manufacturers are saying "Our previous model was crap, you need this one."
So, do you really need to upgrade your kit, if indeed it is in fact an upgrade? Will switching from 24 megapixels to 45 make a huge difference to you? Is eight frames a second over six going to change your life? And is having the option of video going to make you the next Spielberg? I’m guessing not.
The biggest ‘upgrade’ of recent years is the switch to a mirrorless camera, and I have often heard on workshops the question "Do I get rid of my DSLR and buy a mirrorless?"
My first reaction is, do you need to? Just because there is a new kid on the block does not suddenly make your camera a poor, inferior, under-performing museum piece. In fact, I know several well-known and highly respected landscape professionals that have stuck to using their DSLR’s because they don’t like the electronic viewfinders offered on modern mirrorless systems. Modern and latest are not always an upgrade.
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Of course there is not only ‘upgrading’ with your current brand, but switching to another manufacturer altogether. I can understand if for some reason you were not getting on with a particular body, lenses or menu system but to change purely because another brand of camera has a few extra buttons and does something a nano-second faster, is quite frankly a ludicrous waste of money.
One of the reasons given for switching to mirrorless is size and weight which is fair enough, we all reach a stage where we get fed up with lugging tons of kit around with us but here’s a thing. What mirrorless technology has brought us is a major overhaul of lens design, with the trend that they tend to be faster, larger aperture or a greater focal length range, making the lens itself bigger and baulkier. A self defeating premise. Unless you are a grade-A pixel peeper, have you noticed a huge difference in image quality?
More pixels and bigger lenses are not going to make you a better photographer. It’s a lovely feeling to have a new camera with all the latest bells and whistles, but do you need them and to be honest, are you really going to use them to their maximum ? I would imagine that most of us make use of less than twenty percent of the capability of our camera.
The above may seem like a bit of a rant, and indeed it is. But I have been there and speak from experience.
In the film era, I went from a Nikon F2A to a Nikon F4S, about a fifteen-year technology gap. In the digital era I have gone through several iterations of digital camera (six different Nikon digital bodies), the next one always offering ‘more’. Did they make me a better photographer? I somehow doubt it. But here’s the interesting thing, by using the best I could afford I felt better within myself – more confident of successfully tackling the job in front of me.
That is possibly the best of all reasons to go and upgrade.
More pieces by Jeremy Walker:
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