Cameras and Photography Explained

I continue to be bemused. 

"...we have received orders that far exceed expectations..."

Yep, it continues to happen. This time it was the Sony 300mm f/2.8GM lens that triggered the comment from the Japanese manufacturer, but we've seen it from Canon, Fujifilm, and Nikon, too.

I have to repeat: if it is true that orders exceeded expectations, this is a product marketing failure. A gross failure. Meanwhile, admitting "failure" in Japan is a cultural no-no, so what the heck is going on here? 

I've written for three decades now that the insular R&D and distributed subsidiary organization of the Japanese companies is a big problem. I believe that I know more about Nikon's primary customers in the US than does Nikon corporate, for instance, which is a huge problem if even remotely true. The reason I write the foregoing is simple: I deal with dozens, often hundreds, of Nikon users a day. I hear their issues/problems/desires directly. For Nikon, however, there's a funnel system that isolates the development teams. First, a customer tries contacting NikonUSA customer service. What happens in that exchange usually triggers the question to me ;~). Sometimes things get escalated from customer service to higher within NikonUSA, but ultimately, what gets sent to Japan—translated into Japanese by someone who didn't hear the original complaint—is a very small subset of what the customers are actually reporting. 

You can even see this on the Internet fora. More often than not, real issues show up in frustrated posts long before the Japanese company picks up on it. And sometimes, those posts are just ignored. 

I've written it before, but the whole camera design climate in Tokyo is paternalistic. They believe they know what we need, and they refuse to talk to us customers directly. Then when they do create something we want, they're surprised by the demand for it. 

There's little doubt in my mind that a fair amount of the collapse of the dedicated camera market is due to the distance between the designers and the users. Yes, gearheads exist that worship any increase in any number or function, and will buy anything the camera maker creates. But that's not the majority of the market, it's just a vocal subset. So the constant small iterations in hardware, particularly for the last decade or so, isn't resonating with the customers who've stopped buying new cameras. 

If you can't solve a real user problem, you don't need a new product. 

I get it. First global shutter: we win. 

As usual with significant new camera announcements, the Internet is hotly "debating" what this means for everyone, even though the camera in question is a niche product with a specific user target.

One of the things about Sony's press conference and announcements yesterday I've been pondering is "why now?" The camera, lens, and firmware updates Sony announced are not available today. You won't be able to buy them for the holiday season. The camera and lens are scheduled for "Spring 2024", which I'd take to be no sooner than April, and the firmware updates are also sometime in the future (I believe they said March). Due to their niche nature, the demand could exceed supply when the camera and lens finally do arrive. The announcements weren't even made on the actual ten year anniversary of full frame mirrorless Alpha, though the marketing side did bring the ten-year thing up several times. 

So what gives?

FUD. (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt; a marketing tactic.)

Two years ago Nikon started the eventual removal of the mechanical shutter with the Z9. Nikon's made major improvements via firmware updates to that top-end camera three times now, and introduced a less expensive but not really less capable sibling in the Z8. Nikon also has introduced quite a few telephoto lens options that will appeal to folks that are concerned about my next sentence. The 2024 Summer Olympics are coming up, as are a couple of the remaining big agency buying/replacement decisions. Canon is rumored to be getting ready to launch an R1. They, too, are launching a lot of interesting optics that Sony can't exactly match.

Meanwhile, the Sony A1 has slid out of the buzz worthy column as Nikon and Canon fully committed to mirrorless, and in talking to dealers, I'm told by most that the sales have dropped off, as well. 

I see Sony's pre-announcements as being fear-of-losing-sales driven. "We need to announce something that makes us look in front again." 

The only real new thing that they announced was a global shutter. These have been slowly trickling into the expensive video gear, and they're going to continue to trickle into the expensive still photography gear now that Sony's cracked the lid open. 

For the general photography consumer (and prosumer), a global shutter doesn't necessarily buy you things that you actually need. The fast rolling shutters of the A9 Mark II, A1, Z8, and Z9 are plenty fast enough. 

For the professional photographers trying to make a living from images, a global shutter will be useful, particularly in sports and some flash usages, perhaps for photojournalists dealing with frequency-based lighting (though the top current cameras can be adjusted for that). Moreover, that group is willing to pay for benefits that are real to them.

But again, I can't buy an A9 Mark III today. I can continue to photograph with my A1 or Z9, and guess what? 98% of the time they're all I need. So I have to wonder what Sony is worrying about by announcing this camera and the specifics so long before its actual release.

This question comes up again and again in the form “how do I make my images look like this?” or “where was this taken?” or “how do I get these colors/saturation/contrast?”

Before I answer the headline question, though, there’s another question you should ask yourself first: what’s your motivation? 

If you’ve ever been to a big museum like the Louvre, you’ll have encountered the easels of painters who are trying to slavishly copy a painting hanging on the wall. In the art world, there’s a method of teaching that involves learning how a “master” did what they did. That’s not just about composition, but more importantly about brush strokes, layering, blending, and a whole bunch more technique-related bits. The thought is that if you can reasonably recreate an image, that implies that you understand how it was created.

If your motivation is that—you want to understand how a photo was created—my answer to the headline would be yes, that’s probably a valid approach to learning. However, a “copy” shouldn’t be your end goal, it should be an intermediary step. Understanding how something was done is different than understanding how to do something for yourself.

Galen Rowell taught me that. 

He spent a lot of time researching any place he was going to photograph, and he often brought sample photos with him on trips. He’d use those to judge where someone had actually placed their tripod and consider why they might have chosen the lens, aperture, and focus point they did. He also loved historical photos: he wanted to see what something looked like today versus the way it did when it was originally photographed. 

But that was more about historical photo education and scouting for him. The photos Galen took in those locations were unique to him: he Galenized the place. Which often meant that after seeing what someone else did, he climbed something, looked at it from another angle, or used a completely different—typically 20mm f/11—set of gear.

He also used three other things he learned from studying other photos and photographers along the way: contrast reduction via (1) graduated NDs or (2) fill flash, and (3) near/middle/far relationships. With graduated NDs he even went so far as to decide that the ones that existed all did the wrong thing, so he worked with Singh-Ray to create new ones that did what he needed done. Fill flash was another of those “I learned this…I’m going to do that” things in Galen’s training. Once he understood how everyone else was using flash for fill, he figured out how to make fill work the way he wanted it to. That certainly wasn’t the way Nikon designed the Speedlights to work. 

The near/middle/far thing came essentially from study of the Muench’s, though once again Galen adapted it differently. Indeed, the “middle” was often Galen! Why? Because the Muench version didn’t show scale. A human in the image shows scale.

Most of the time, you knew an image was Galen’s on first sight. That doesn’t happen because he was imitating someone, it happens because he studied what others did and then used that information as a foundation for what he wanted to show. 

One of the last challenges Galen hit me with was “how was I Thoming a photo?” I never got to give him a clear answer before his untimely death, though I had planned to give him my answer the next time I saw him. My understanding myself after first understanding what others were doing generated a whole new way of teaching, as well as a book I’m still trying to lock in some final details on before publishing. 

But this article’s headline is targeted at you. Your answer should be: yes, it can be productive to imitate so that you can understand how a great photographer got to his image in the first place. But that was their image, not yours. Almost certainly you would have had a different response to a place, setting, subject than the photographer you learned to imitate. So can you capture that? Can you make a photograph your own? 

When you can, that’s when you know that you’ve done what Susan Sontag once suggested: stand on the shoulders of those that came before you. 

Apple yesterday introduced new M3-based MacBook Pro and iMac 24” models. They also end-of-lifed the 13” MacBook Pro with the touchbar. 

What does all this mean for photographers looking for a new Mac?

Probably lots of discounts on amazingly good M2 models as stores unload inventories (ditto Apple Refurbished; the M2 13” is selling for less than US$1000). 

I don’t think my advice has changed from before: 16GB RAM and anything other than the base SSD are more than sufficient for most photography enthusiasts. If you batch process, go deep into AI processing, or edit video, then 32GB and a Pro or Max chip starts to become the bar you don’t want to go below. 

One thing that Apple emphasized, and which will have impacts on game playing, 3D modeling, and perhaps some fringes of photography was that the GPU design has been changed, and now supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Likewise, the nueral engine got faster, and that should directly impact AI-based image processing.

The iMac remains in its usual model colors, but the MacBook Pros now add a Space Black option (left, versus regular silver on right:

Apple did a lot of gaslighting in their 30-minute Spooky Fast presentation last night. Besides the touchbar retirement, Apple didn’t supply any real information about how M3 differs from 14/16” M2 models other than vague bits (they compared to the 13” M2, which isn’t an apples to apples comparison, pardon the pun). You can find some more direct comparisons partly buried on the Apple Web site.

In diving deep into a few things that weren’t presented in the Apple Event, I discovered why they gaslighted the direct M2 to M3 upgrade differences. For instance, on the 14” MacBook Pro model, the battery life goes up perhaps an hour at the same level of performance. And that’s with Apple’s “soft” tests (e.g. running video on the laptop screen continuously). I’ll have to get my hands on a unit to do a more performance based test, but I don’t think it was unintentional that most of Apple’s comparisons were M3 to M1. 

Also ghosted in the Event was the availability of the Max models: November, not next week. 

Yet another ghosted detail was that the new base 14” MacBook Pro drops to Thunderbolt 3, and only two USB-C/Thunderbolt ports (down from Thunderbolt 4 and three). You have to buy the Pro or Max chip models to get back to where the M1 MacBook Pro started things. 

The EU got gaslit, too: the iMac still uses the current Magic Mouse and Keyboard, so it comes with a USB-C to Lightning cable. I guess new mice and keyboards are going to play chicken with the EU right up through Christmas 2024 ;~). 

I’m not done. The Apple Silicon uses shared memory internally, and the speed at which that works has changed (and is referred to as dynamic caching). If I’m reading the Tarot cards correctly, the M3 uses somewhat slower memory access generally, but the CPU/GPU cores have a mechanism in them for speeding up the access when required. Moreover, the number of performance cores versus efficiency cores seems to have changed across all models (lowering the performance core number and increasing the efficiency core number). Overall, I’m not expecting the benchmark tests of the M3 models to be tremendously improved from M2. Oh, they’ll show improvement, but it’s now taking a lot of improvement to show up in real speed to the average user. 

Which brings me back to the M2 Macs. As they come on sale, take a long look at them first before opting for an M3 model. The exception to that would be the iMac model: Apple never built an M2 version, and the M3 has a pretty clear improvement performance over the M1. Not that I wouldn’t advise you avoid the M1 iMac: if you can live with the configuration limitations (16GB RAM, 2TB SSD), it’s a perfectly fine computer with a built-in 4.5K Retina display. 

• 14” M3 MacBook Pro: base (8GB RAM, 512GB SSD) is US$1599, maxed out (128GB RAM, 8TB SSD) is US$6899.
• 16” M3 MacBook Pro: base (18GB RAM, 512GB SSD is US$2499, maxed out (128GB RAM, 8TB SSD) is US$7200.
• 24” M3 iMac: base (8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) is US$1299, maxed out (24GB RAM, 2TB SSD) is US$2699.

If you are going to opt for an M3 Mac, the enthusiast photographer configuration is probably a M3 Pro-based model somewhere in between the base and max listed above. For instance, a 14” with 36GB RAM and 1TB SSD (US$2599).

I like that Apple is rapidly pushing their silicon forward. It’s clear that they’re devoting significant resources to keeping the Apple Silicon chips at the front edge of state-of-the-art. The M3 versus fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro comparisons are mind-boggling, and many of you probably still think those last Intel-based MBPs are excellent and fast. 

This site’s exclusive advertiser already has the new Macs available for order (click on ad at bottom of page).

I see this one all the time: “I lost money when I bought my X for US$Y and it subsequently depreciated in value.”

Businesses don’t (or shouldn’t) have this same problem. The calculation for a business tends to be simple: does the value provided by an item exceed its depreciation? 

Consumers, on the other hand, seem to struggle with the fact that most things they buy depreciate in value and that they probably shouldn’t be buying things that depreciate more than the value they get out of them. 

Cameras and lenses don’t appreciate in value. Well, at least most of them don’t. There have been a few exceptions over the years. But you shouldn’t count on your choice of camera/lens being one of them. 

From first sale to closeout sale, cameras tend to drop about 25% in the price you'll pay for them. In other words, if the latest/greatest announced camera is US$2000 at introduction, by the time the last units are sold new, you should expect to find them at US$1500. Lenses have longer life cycles, so they tend to sell at list price at introduction, then get periodic ~10% off sales to occasionally clear built-up inventory (or sustain a production rate). 

What a used camera or lens will sell for has been in a bit of an adjustment with the transition from DSLR to mirrorless. A DSLR camera or lens just doesn’t have the same value it used to. And a dealer is only going to, at best, give you 50% of what you could sell it for yourself (they need a profit margin in committing funds to it and later reselling it). We have a lot of originally US$3000 DSLRs that are selling used for anywhere from US$500 to US$1500 these days, and that’s going to continue to slide downward as the seven-year manufacturer guaranteed repair cycles expire. Take 50% off those numbers if you're going to trade it in, and, well, your older camera isn't worth much, is it? (Tip: sometimes camera makers will put a bonus on a trade-in via your dealer. Ignore those bonuses at your peril.)

Most consumers I hear from are paying for state-of-the-art product and then complaining when it doesn’t hold value. A simple solution to that is to buy at the back of the trend, not at the front of it. With new cameras near end-of-life, that means a 25% discount for waiting. With new lenses, it means simply waiting until it comes on sale.

Of course there’s a gotcha in all this: what’s the value of being able to take photos with a new product today? A good case in point is the Nikon Z9 and its Auto capture capability. If that function nets you photos that you couldn’t easily get otherwise, you have to assign a value to that. That’s particularly true for us sports photographers, where we’ve long been trying to use multi camera setups with remote triggers. If we get the image that the others at an event don’t, that has a huge value for us. 

But we’re back to businesses—sports photographers in this instance—who can put a direct value on something. Consumers using Auto capture would have what? A ego burst over the poor enthusiast that’s trying to get that same image manually? 

Which brings us to the real culprit here: marketing has made it imperative that you keep up with the Joneses. If Jonesie has a Z9, you need one to feel like you're still in the same league. And yet, I'm constantly seeing a stream of photos from older cameras that really hold their own and tell unique stories. 

Here's what I'd suggest you compare instead of the capability of your camera or the size of your lens: the photos you actually take. Are they as good as they could be from the gear you have? No? Then you don't need new gear, you need training and practice. Both of which tend to be less expensive than buying new cameras and lenses. 

Most people don't like hearing that, as they don't like hearing that they're at fault. It's easier to blame it on the gear. 

In my long career in photography I never felt I was as good as my mentors and instructors. But I also never felt it was that Galen Rowell used better equipment than me (he didn't, he used two older, less expensive lenses than I had). What I tried to learn from him and others was how best to use what I had. I didn't consider it a failure that I wasn't as good as him, I considered it an aspiration to get as good as him. 

I'm as much as a gearaholic as any who have GAS (gear acquisition syndrome). I'm just curious about new stuff and what it might do. But I try not to let that play into my creations. I was (almost) as happy running around Botswana with the Z8, 70-180mm 2.8, and 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR lenses last month as I was in April with the Z9, 35-150mm f/2-2.8, and 400mm f/2.8 TC VR S lenses. In fact, I was happier in one fashion: my more consumer gear was easier to carry, stow, and protect. (I wrote "almost" because f/2.8 at 400mm versus f/6 does make a difference to backgrounds, and I'm spending a lot more time these days concentrating on things behind the animals.)

Value what you do with your gear, not your gear itself.