Weeds Redux, XVII

Torrington, Connecticut

This flurry of posting words began with mention of the recommendations I give when someone asks me the general, “should I replace my camera?” question. Then I’ve been looking back to see how much, or how little, I’ve followed my own advice over the years. I left off at diving into professional level digital capture equipment early in 2004 with the Olympus E1, which went to work immediately producing commercial book illustrations.

Move ahead to very late 2006 and it was time for a decision that fit perfectly in the should I or shouldn't I questions I proposed at the beginning. The E1 was doing fine, producing, as its designers intended, files that were at least as good as you’d expect from the best 35mm transparency film (but with much better dynamic range) when reproduced up to full-page magazine size, or a little larger. However I’d also discovered that I loved color digital capture and the small prints I could make from the files, so began to do personal photography with the E1. My assignment work had been 90% or more color since the late 70s, but I was always disappointed in what could be done with color prints in the darkroom and so did very little personal work in color. Seeing what I could do with digital capture was like letting loose forty years of pent-up desire to do personal work in color.

There were even clients for this personal work, but that brought up a problem. There were several buyers for pictures I was making. Mostly they wanted them as fine art for the walls of some fancy country inns. They wanted the prints to be a lot bigger than a magazine cover, bigger than I thought the E1's five megapixel files could be up-interpolated without falling apart. That’s a subjective judgment of course: I know some people whose tolerance for up-interpolation is even less than mine, while a lot of people see nothing wrong with prints that have crossed my “fallen apart” threshold. But I really needed to double the pixel count of my captures, and Olympus was getting farther and farther behind on their release of an E1 replacement camera. A second problem was that, as good as their zoom lenses were, I really, really, prefer to work with short and normal length prime lenses, and Olympus didn’t even have any on their planned “roadmap” of future products.

So, there was my old friend Pentax, sitting there looking at me. The K10D had the 10 MP sensor that would let me make substantially bigger prints, while the lens line had high-end compact fixed focal length short and normal lenses, with more in the roadmap. The stuff was even reasonably priced, so it was an obvious choice. This was likely to make a significant improvement in the pictures I was making (and directly affect income by selling more prints or the same number of prints in bigger, pricier sizes—I don’t ever recall amortizing an equipment purchase so quickly). The switch to prime lenses isn’t quite as clear cut, but when you react as strongly as I do against using zooms, it was also to be assumed that the switch would have a direct improvement on the quality of the pictures I’d be making.

After a while I upgraded from K10D to K20D, much as, over a much longer period of time with the slow obsolescence of the pre-digital age, I’d gone from Nikon F2 to F3 to F4. When the K7 came out I decided the other way and passed on it (I never upgraded my film Nikon cameras past the F4 either, as it happens). So for this phase of things I did pretty well at following my own advice. Just one more step—well, one two-part step—to go from here to bring things up to the present, with last week’s camera purchase.