Dave Stevenson
Forget all the nerdy technical minutiae that comes with DSLRs: the trick to taking fantastic pictures is actually getting out there with your camera…
Congratulations are due to Canon, which with the 550D may have finally finished inventing new categories of DSLR. A few years ago, there were two categories: entry-level bodies such as the venerable Nikon D70, and professional ones such as the Canon 1D. Simples, as they say.
Then things got complicated. Professional bodies spawned semi-professional offshoots such as the 5D and the D700, while entry-level bodies created mid-range semi-professional shooters such as the 40D and D200. A basement was cracked open, and we were given the likes of the Sony Alpha A200 and Canon 1000D. Last year, Canon went the whole hog and gave us the marvellous 7D – for me the most important DSLR of 2009. Now between the 7D and the bottom-end 1000D, there are no fewer than five cameras currently being manufactured – and that’s only Canon’s range. Nikon has the same number of cameras in its consumer range.
An unfortunate side effect of all this is the rise of a ferocious breed of camera nerds. These were much in evidence at Focus on Imaging in March, a trade show ostensibly for professional photographers. You couldn’t move without tripping over someone’s camera bag and pristine professional telephoto lens. Given the paucity of anything interesting to shoot, it was difficult to believe that photographers had brought all this gear to the NEC without the thought crossing their minds that it might just look impressive.
Which is fine, of course, but pristine photographic gear always seems like a bit of a shame. If you have a chance, spend a minute peering at the glass cabinets somewhere like Jacobs Photographic on London’s New Oxford Street, where you’ll see a panoply of battered, scratched top-end lenses waiting to be re-homed. (If you do go, take a credit card. External bashes do little damage to the resale value of a decent lens, it turns out.)
There’s more for nerds (like me, admittedly) to get hot and bothered about than ever before. It used to be you could sweat over how quickly a decent SLR would swallow a roll of 35mm film. Now you can count the frames per second, the ISO limitation, the resolution, the focus points and the resolution of HD video.
This is all, broadly speaking, a good thing. I had the good fortune to speak to Doug Perrine the other day, who won the Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year award in 2004, and he had no doubt that the technical advances in DSLR technology meant people are taking better pictures than ever before. He should know, as he and the organisers of the competition had to struggle with the limitations of his winning photo, taken with a 6.3-megapixel Canon D60.
But it does mean there’s a certain amount of naval-gazing going on. As Chris Weeks at Digital SLR Photography magazine points out in last month’s issue, visit a number of camera websites and you’ll find an ocean of pictures, cropped to 100%, with heated discussions beneath them as to whether Canon or Olympus cameras have better signal-to-noise ratios. It’s not that image quality isn’t important, of course, it’s just that you can’t tell anything important about it by peering at an image’s individual pixels from half an inch away. I’ve been to exhibitions. That isn’t how people look at photographs.
It’s not that I want cameras to do less. For me, the biggest advance in DSLR technology during the last five years is the addition of HD video – both long overdue and of huge importance to self-employed photographers, who find themselves adding a potentially lucrative string to their bow by being able to offer high-quality video to their clients as well as stills. Enhanced noise handling abilities mean full-frame cameras such as the 5D are now more or less matched by crop-frame cameras such as the 7D, and that means you can take more photographs in more varied light with less-expensive cameras. See what I mean? Good things.
But here’s an idea. The next time you find yourself bogged down in the unnecessary minutiae of DSLR terminology, pull on some hiking boots and go and take some pictures. ‘F/8 and be there’ is a photographer’s catchphrase for a reason, and it’s got more to do with the overriding importance of moving your feet than middling depth of field. Put it this way, no-one ever became a better photographer because they could identify a camera’s manufacturer by examining the demosaicing of its raw files.
This isn’t an argument in favour of luddites and fans of the green square mode on the top of their cameras – knowing how your camera works means you’ll take better pictures, which unless you’re thinking of starting a photography column in MacUser, is a good thing. And it isn’t an attack on photographers who enjoy the magnificent engineering that comes with modern DSLRs. The feel and noise of a mirror, sub-mirror and shutter curtain faultlessly exposing millions of pixels for a fraction of a second and creating a picture isn’t anything I expect to get tired of.
This all comes to mind because spring’s here. Finally, you can step outside without sinking up to your neck in mud and getting all manner of detritus in your camera’s innards. The parks are getting greener, the birds chirpier, and the sheer number of places you could go to take amazing pictures is opening up beautifully. If you’ve got a camera and know how to use it, there’s never been a better time to stop worrying about the technology inside.
