Even I’ll Go Mirrorless Eventually

 

Considering several articles I have written in the last few months, one would be forgiven for thinking that I dislike the concept of the mirrorless camera (see this and this). Not so! In fact, I even own a Fujifilm XT-1 and have dabbled with and continue to occasionally shoot with a now rather banged up Sony NEX-5n. There are valid reasons why the current crop of mirrorless lens don’t actually replace the DSLRs used by so many professional photographers the world over. These photographers will eventually be forced to shift over to mirrorless, but the transition is not going to be as fast as one would think. 

It Is The Result That Counts

2018 is likely going to be remembered amongst the technical minded photographers as the year in which the machines we use to create images made a significant jump away from the traditional single reflex camera design to the burgeoning digital mirrorless design. We’ll probably be watching retrospective YouTube videos ten years from now heralding the arrival of mainstream full-frame digital cameras in 2018. In reality they aren’t actually that new though. Sony has been producing the extremely successful line of full-frame E-mount cameras since 2014. It’s just that they have suddenly been joined by not only Nikon and Canon, but also Panasonic. Almost arbitrarily the photographic world seems to have decided that the 24x36mm format sensor is where the future of ‘serious’ digital imaging lies. It seems that the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.

A Change Is as Good as a Holiday - Moving from Lightroom to Capture One

I tend to make big changes seemingly impulsively. My move to Apple was on the back of a hissy fit caused by multiple crashes of an old PC (while trying to deliver to a client who had a rather hard-to-meet timeframe). My move to digital was the result of a single conversation with an image editor who complained about seeing grain in a digital scan of Fuji Velvia. Possibly I’m not being fair to myself and these decisions are actually made after months of thinking about it, but a single event causing everything to snowball into shape. So I’ll deliberate in my mind for months and then suddenly dive head first into whatever change it happens to be at the time (the decision to move house has been similar). The move to Capture One followed this thread exactly.

The Accidental Artist

“The thing that interests me about photography and why it’s different from all the other media, is that it’s the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece” 

Chuck Close in Photo Wisdom - Master Photographers on their Art

You could say that photography has sort of exploded over the last decade. It’s estimated that 17 trillion images were created in the last year alone. People who call themselves photographers will quibble over the equipment used and moan about the proliferation of cellphone wielding snapshooters, but the reality is that we have entered an era of the ‘every-photographer’. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram make sure that there is an insatiable demand for imagery to be created. Create we do as millions of people around the globe upload countless images of their cats, to their cars, to their vacations and more. What’s more, we have become addicted to fulfilling this demand. We get a small hit of endorphin when someone, somewhere, clicks a little heart to tell the photographer that they ‘like’ the image (the ridiculousness of this is that often those clicks are automated, but the receiver still gets a high). Slowly our perceptions of self-worth become moulded by the amount of views, comments and reactions we receive from our online images. The ephemerality of it means that an image last barely moments before it is superseded by another image, and then another, and another, and another.