So, you received a new camera for the holidays. At this point you’ve likely had time to fiddle with it, but today’s headline question is the important one: have you bonded with your new camera yet?
I’ve been preaching some form of this notion since I first started writing about cameras. Your camera is a tool. You have to learn how to use that tool. The very best practitioners don’t just learn their tool, but the tool becomes second nature to them. They know exactly what it will and won’t do and how to coax it to do what they want.
At some point users become so close to their tools that you’d be very ill-advised to try to pry them from their hands and substitute something else.
To some degree this explains those hanging onto DSLRs. Mirrorless is indeed a different experience (tool) than DSLR, and once someone owns a near-perfect DSLR such as the Nikon D850, it’s tough to convince them to start the bonding process from scratch with something else. This is one of the reasons why sticking with a brand is useful during transitions: a Canon RF camera these days definitely has the traditional Canon EOS touch, feel, and more (the early R and RP models did not do that well, though, which explains Canon’s slow start to getting full frame traction in the mirrorless world). Nikon has moved their DSLR user experience mostly unchanged to the mirrorless Z System (though they continue to fiddle with small things that have me wondering why they’re moving my cheese).
Some of the recent “complaints” about the Sony A1 II intersect with today’s topic: the II model didn’t really change much, so why would I need to pay to upgrade to it? (That was also a common topic in the height of the DSLR era, as model iterations often didn’t change much.)
Bonding (usually) isn’t a natural thing: it takes study, time, and practice. You might resist that bonding at first because, well, your new toy tool is very different. However, if you don’t bond with it, I can pretty much guarantee that it either gets stuffed into a closet and rarely used, or you’ll be looking for a new camera soon.
