Moose came crashing through the windshield:
> D'accord. And, in the course of three marriages and a couple of serious live
> in relationships, I've never had any "CFO"
> or "SWMBO" deciding what I could or could not buy. My own reasonable level
> of common sense has always been my guide.
I'm still working within marriage #1 and no live-in relationships.
Perhaps my allowing the CFO/SWMBO take a role in determining my
spending habits has something to do with that. Of course, my own level
of "common sense" might have something to do with that too. Each of us
has certain strengths and we try to exploit them as much as possible.
Being married to a feminist has been interesting.
> There is probably another factor at work here, my stubborn insistence on
> carrying few lenses and making few lens changes
> out in the field, where the vast majority of my shots are taken. Sticking
> with the Tammy 28-300s led to nice
> improvements in macro and long tele, but sometimes seemed to have less
> salubrious effects of more ordinary subjects,
> perhaps more than I admitted to myself. But I found no better seeming
> alternatives in EF-S mount.
That is an interesting take. I'm thinking that this might be a bigger
factor that we both realize. My own experience with zooms is that I'll
use the zoom instead of changing my own position to a better place.
It's odd, but when I have fewer focal-length choices (maybe only a
prime or two), I get better images because I'm seeing in those very
selective rectangles. The approach is different. Instead of seeing the
subject and trying to fit it into a rectangle, I'm looking for
subjects that fit the rectangle.
> Ah well, I WAS exclusively Oly for 30 years.
I haven't even owned an Olympus for that long, much less been
exclusive with it. I'm just a poser compared to you.
> I really wonder what the longer term future of FF will be. It seems that
> smaller sensors are matching most FF qualities.
> If, as seems likely, digital MF comes down in price, where's the place for
> more than a quite small FF niche?
Good question. I think that the ultimate sweet spot is where Canon is
with the 1D series. The crop sensor is really very close to being
full-frame in size. It's about a one prime lens slide towards the
longer focal length. In fact, by the time I scan a typical 35mm slide
and trim off the defocused area near the mount, I'm very close to this
same crop factor.
The main difference between crop sensored cameras and FF is the
optical rendering. I'm not necessarily talking bokeh or DoF, but the
subtle differences in how the lenses render a subject in that 2-3
meter working distance. This is the bread-and-butter distance for the
typical working pro for wedding/portrait work. It's not that there is
anything wrong with the crop-sensor camera images, but we don't get
the defocus falloff and subsequent background highlight dimming that
we get with the larger formats.
As to the price decline of MF digital cameras? That really hasn't
happened much yet. It's coming down from the doctors/rentors category,
but is still far outside the bounds of reasonableness for the typical
one-lung photographer just trying to earn enough to keep the spouse
from forcing him back to an office job. When you can buy a decent MF
digital camera for $5000, I think we'll see Canon/Nikon's stranglehold
on FF sales plummet. However, I also think that it will be a result of
the ever-present product life cycle which will eventually obsolete
DSLRs.
> the radial IS may lead to more keepers.
I would have thought that this was going to be one of the killer
features of the OM-D, but hardly anybody mentions it. Even Olympus is
downplaying it to the point that I'm not sure what it really does!
> Me? Once, so far. We'll see how this reconciliation goes. ;-)
I'm watching closely. There is a slot in my 35mm camera bag just
longing for a small "DSLR".
AG
--
Ken Norton
ken@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.zone-10.com
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