Think about the photography gear you have in your possession. Now consider what it's doing for you.
For instance, let's say you own a Canon 90D or a Nikon D7500 DSLR. You have three choices today:
- Continue to use what you've got because it's fine for what you do.
- Upgrade to something (full frame, mirrorless, both).
- Retrograde to something older, such as a film SLR.
The operant questions for today is which one do you do and why?
I'll just say upfront what I've been saying for years now: most of you should probably just Continue. It costs money to do anything else, and it's highly likely that just study and practice will make your images better, and that costs only time.
During the teens, a lot of the folks that should have been just continuing with their gear actually went sideways: they sold what they had and bought something similar from a different brand. Then they discovered that they still weren't really happy with the results and did a swap again. That's the definition of money churn.
I'm going to do my usual thing and make an assertive statement: if you're going sideways, you're wasting both time and money. You're actually looking for a guilty party to blame when you could find that by just looking in the mirror. Going sideways isn't going to make you happy, it's going to waste money, and it's going to take time you should be out learning and practicing photography.
Moving sideways should be avoided. Yet it's one of the most common forms of GAS (gear acquisition syndrome).
What you want to do is move forward. After all, time moves forward; so should you.
But let's talk about reverting for a moment. That Canon 90D or Nikon D7500 user really doesn't have a DSLR they can usefully go backwards to, as those bodies are near the top of the APS-C DSLR lineage.
So perhaps the retrograde is "back to film." A Nikon F6, the last and best of breed, could be considered a modest step forward on the body side. However, it introduces costs (film and processing), uncertainty (no verifying exposure or focus), and complication (workflow becomes a problematic drop-it-off, pick-it-up, drop-it-off, pick-it-up loop, or you're going to have a chemical smell in your house when you build a darkroom). If you want to do output other than to print your images, then you'll need to find some way of digitizing them. I feel a lot of "backwards" in this choice, and for no clear benefit.
Which leaves us with the upgrade forward option.
Here's the problem: how do you know that the upgrade path you choose is really a step forward or not. I'm currently dealing with this problem with Nikon D7500/D500 owners who want to move to mirrorless. The best answer for those folk works about like this:
- D7500 to Z50II — gains the mirrorless benefits and a better focus system, does nothing for image quality, and can feel like a step backwards when you start considering battery life and lenses. Still, that's a clear path. (Canon users probably would say R7, but have similar issues.)
- D500 to Z8 — gains the mirrorless benefits, a better focus system, potential better (or larger) images, but is expensive. The battery/lens issues aren't quite as bad as with the Z50II, but depending upon expectations, can still lurk. (Canon users probably would say R5 Mark II, but again, similar issues arise.)
(Why not D7500 or D500 to Z6III? Typically it comes down to complete system size/weight, plus lack of reach at the telephoto end without replacing lenses.)
What I'm finding from a lot of these folk is that they're not thinking clear-headed about what might the best benefit they should be seeking in moving forward. The reason for that is that they're not taking a realistic and egoless look at where they are and what's keeping them from doing better. I find people demanding more pixels when they don't need them, better dynamic range when they aren't using what they've got, and so on.
So today's homework assignment is to do a critical self-assessment of your photography. What's not working? What problem do you keep having to fix? Have you improved in the last two years or are you on a plateau? If your photography is not improving, what's the primary reason for that? Can you actually describe what the "perfect" product for you would be?
That last question trips a lot of people up when they're getting help from me. Often the response is "better autofocus, better automatic exposure." If I were a betting man and could place bets on what happens next for those folks when they upgrade, my money is on "didn't happen, they still have the same complaint." That's not because the newer autofocus and metering systems aren't better, it's because the expectations of automating perfection are unrealistic.
To me, photography is personal. It's a means of expression. It's unrealistic to think that some artificial intelligence is going to correctly express yourself. Yes, automatic helpers can be useful, but only if you take full control of them and use them to produce your vision, not to simply fix some assumed technical mistake.
If you want to improve, make sure you're facing the correct direction, otherwise you may simply be moving sideways, or worse, backwards. But there's also this: if you don't know where you want to get to, you won't know when you're there.
