What I Think Works…as of This Evening

I keep working on my photo skills as well as my gear. I am strongly aware that my baby son’s first year will never happen again, so I am doing what I can to produce quality photos and edit them well.

I’ve learned a lot of things since 2023, when I finally bit the bullet and started buying new equipment and learning to use it.

When I found my wife in 2021, I had a 2006 Canon 350D, a Samsung Galaxy S8, a Yi action camera, and a Gopro Hero 8 Black. The 350D was a decent amateur DSLR for its day. It had an 8-megapixel APS-C sensor, meaning it was smaller than a full-frame sensor, which would be about the same size as a rectangle of 35 mm film. In 2006, putting 8 megapixels on an amateur-level camera was fairly impressive.

We started traveling in order to see each other in 2021. We made three overseas trips with phones and action cameras. The 350D stayed home, covered with the cockatoo dust it had accumulated after years of hanging near a bird cage. I don’t recall why I didn’t take it with me. Weight, maybe.

We got acceptable photos and a little video that year, although I screwed up more than once and ruined videos. I found the Yi to be difficult to work with. I have a video about 10 seconds long which I accidentally shot so it would be sped up upon viewing. I would guess it was supposed run more like 5 minutes. All that’s missing is the Benny Hill music.

In 2023, instead of taking the 350D on trips, I bought a used 200D. This is a more advanced camera from about 2017. I was under the delusion that my 2006 zoom lens needed to be saved, so I stuck with Canon. The lens fits the 200D. This was a bad idea, since I turned right around and bought a better zoom. I should have gone with Sony or maybe an Olympus.

I also bought a Sony A7IV and a Sony ZV1-M2. The A7IV was my no-holds-barred (few, anyway) quality-gear splurge. It’s a full-frame camera. I thought I should have the gear to do a truly top-notch job of capturing things. The ZV is a compact camera made to appeal to vloggers. It has a built-in zoom lens, and it’s very handy. Much better photos than a late model Samsung Galaxy, too.

I have never taken the A7IV anywhere. It’s heavy and expensive. I don’t want to carry it on trips, and I don’t want to have it stolen. It’s great when air travel is not in the plan, however.

When we went to the Far East for the second time, I took the ZV and the 200D. I was not ecstatic about the shots I got with the 200D. It was like I had forgotten everything I knew about composition, and I didn’t think they were sharp enough. The video was also extremely amateurish. I don’t know how I managed to perform so badly. The ZV gave me good video, but the stills were not always great. I relied mostly on my phone for stills.

I learned something interesting: the ZV1-M2 quits in hot weather. My wife and I were on a food tour in Singapore, and I noticed the camera’s monitor would go dark during video shooting. At first I thought it was saving energy, but in reality, it was turning itself off, without so much as a warning beep. It was overheating. Black camera that absorbed heat. Hot equatorial sun. I later learned that the ZV is just about useless for video in hot, sunny weather. Oddly, Sony does not trumpet this fact in ads. You find out after your videos of your priceless trip are ruined.

In retrospect, I find it amazing that anyone recommends this camera. It’s like buying a car you can only drive 10 miles at a time. Its primary purpose is video, and that is the only purpose at which it fails.

It is helpful if you remove the battery from your ZV and power it using a cable. The battery contributes a lot to the heat. But it’s still a very poor video camera for anyone who shoots videos in hot weather, unless they’re very short. If you have this camera, it’s fine for short indoor videos. Other than that, stay away. And it’s not cheap. I think they still cost about $900.

Since I began to buy better stuff, I have drawn a few conclusions, which may very well be wrong. And they overlap.

1. The most important thing is equipment that works, not equipment that works perfectly.
2. A handy camera you use is better than a heavy, complex camera you dread taking out of the bag.
3. Useful lenses are more important than buying the best camera.
4. Unless you want to spend a lot, don’t buy a few pricey lenses with top optical quality. Buy lenses that shoot well in low light.
5. For video, and maybe photos, you want some kind of stabilization.
6. A very good camera phone will do everything 95% of the population wants.
7. You absolutely must use wireless external mikes.
8. Good photography is almost completely about choices.

I guess I’ll start with 1.

Consider 2015. Ten years ago. They made pretty nice cameras. Twenty megapixels and more. Good connectivity. Good features. Excellent accessories. You can spend maybe $600 and get a very good, lightly-used camera from 2015, with a nice low-light prime lens that will be useful in lots of situations. On the other hand, if you buy a very, very good newer camera with a truly excellent low-light lens and a big sensor, think more like $4,000. Will the photos be 4,000/600 as good? No.

If you want to take photos that are optically very good, and you aren’t a perfectionist, buy a very good camera and lenses. If you want to take photos that are technically superior, spend 6 or 7 times as much for superior equipment. But consider the fact that many of the world’s great photographers used cameras and lenses that were, objectively, bad by today’s standards. Most of photography is about content and exposure, not corner-to-corner sharpness or minimal chromatic aberration.

2. I would guess my A7IV weighs over three pounds with the big zoom attached. There is no way to have a normal day with that hanging on you from breakfast to bedtime. You’re not going to drag it around with you unless you take pictures for a living. The a6400 weighs much less. It’s doable. The 200D also weighs less. All the other cameras weigh less. Then there is the phone, which is pretty good. Figure out what you are willing to lug around and use, and concentrate on whatever that is for day-to-day photography. If you insist on heavy cameras, you are going to end up using your phone nearly all the time.

3. Any 20-megapixel camera made can shoot excellent photos, but not without the right lenses. A $10,000 camera with one crummy zoom is less useful than a used $200 camera with several good lenses.

4. You can spend $15,000 on one amazing lens, but when people look at your photos, almost no one will be able to tell the difference between the photos it takes and the ones you can take with a $500 lens. You’re better off with several okay lenses than one lens that makes photo nerds cry when they see it on your camera. If you can afford it, get very good lenses, but if not, get lenses that will take okay photos with the exposures you want. It is EXTREMELY important to have lenses that shoot well in low light. You will find this out when you try to use your $1,500 f/3.5-5.6 lens to shoot a once-in-a-lifetime event in a dim restaurant. Go for 1.4 primes, at the highest.

5. Shaky video is annoying to watch. You can buy a thing called a gimbal, and it’s a big, cumbersome device that holds your camera and moves it up and down to cancel out your shaking, but it’s a royal pain to use. There are cameras that stabilize, and there are lenses that stabilize. Stabilized is better. My understanding is that a stabilized system will also let you shoot images in lower light (if it stabilizes images as well as video), because you will not move as much, and you can use a lower shutter speed without getting blurring.

6. If you don’t want the hassle and expense of getting camera gear, get a phone that does a very good job. Some phones are much better than others.

7. Buy external mikes, like Rode or DJI. My wife has the speech volume of a turbine-powered helicopter at home, but getting her to speak up on videos while traveling is nearly impossible. I have videos where you can see her lips move, but that’s about it. You, too, will find that ordinary situation noise kills speech, so buy external mikes. You can even use them with phones and selfie sticks. And use dead cats (wind noise suppressors) unless you like listening to wind instead of people.

8. Choice, not gear, is what makes photography an art.

I came up with my own system for categorizing photos. There are two kinds in the system: documentary, and artistic. A documentary photo’s main purpose it to show that something happened. “Wayne Newton kissed me at his show.” “This is really my driver’s license.” An artistic photo is, well, art. A documentary photo doesn’t have to have artistic merit, and it doesn’t have to be done well. An artistic photo has merit, and generally, although not always, it should be technically good.

A lot of people think photography is not an art, because you don’t have to draw or paint something in order to take a picture of it. They think it’s like having a sprained finger x-rayed or Xeroxing your behind at the office Christmas party. Of course, this is not true. An artistic photo evokes emotions. It usually seems to tell a story. It may tell a story that has nothing to do with what was actually happening in front of the camera. For example, a photo of two strangers at a bus stop, who don’t even know each other, may seem to be about dramatic events taking place between two people who have some kind of relationship. The mind and heart of the beholder fill out artistic photos with backstories that may be completely imaginary.

You choose your subject. You choose your camera. You choose a focal length, f-stop, ISO, and shutter speed. You choose the angle. You may be able to choose the lighting. You may shoot a number of shots and then choose the only one that says what want to say.

This is what makes photography a legitimate art.

If you want to take artistic photos, which is what I want to do (even when shooting my family), if you master the art of making choices, you will not be blocked by your equipment’s limits. You may not perform as well as you want to, but it’s better to have the right choices and the wrong equipment than the wrong choices and the right equipment. Bottom line: you should use whatever equipment you can get, today, instead of moaning about being unable to take pictures because you don’t have the gear you want.

I say all this stuff, but I keep buying gear. I got myself a couple of f/1.4 lenses for my a6400, and they have made a huge difference in my life. I can take shots now in light that used to produce noisy photos that looked awful. I also replaced the Sony ZV1M2 with a Canon Powershot V1. It’s bigger and heavier, but it will do everything the Sony will do and more, and it has a built-in fan.

I like the small size of the Sony, and it’s a little annoying to put the Canon in my pocket, AND I just wrote that handy is better than not-handy, but I’m willing to put up with a little more bulk in this case, given the enormous advantages the Canon offers. It shoots better in low light, it’s not going to overheat as fast, and it has image stabilization for still shots.

It’s too bad I don’t put photos of my son on the web, because he is extremely cute and possibly the most photogenic person in history. I’m not just saying that as his dad. He is really something. And I don’t consider “photogenic” to be a compliment anyway. Many ugly people are photogenic.

If I could post some of the shots I’ve taken lately, I think people would see how helpful the 1.4 lenses have been, not to mention how much better the ZV1M2 and the Powershot are than my phone.

I’m continuing to work on my editing. I just got a new PC. I bought a gaming computer because it happened to have a lot of parts that were excellent for editing photos and video. I am learning Affinity 2 and Topaz AI. I have Photoshop Elements, but I find it annoying and not noticeably better.

Editing photos is shockingly relaxing and satisfying. I don’t know why. I honestly think it’s one of those things that will improve your health if you do it regularly, like spending time outdoors.

I am going to put two very large hard drives in the new PC to store photos and video. One will back up the other, and my hope is that no catastrophe will wipe both out at once. I am hoping 10 TB will keep me going for a few years. It would be nice to have two huge, fast SDD’s, but that would run around $1600, and I don’t think I really need them.

I don’t like the idea of cloud storage. I don’t trust it, and I have an irrational (I hope) fear of having hostile people root through my files in order to harm me or my family. I also think it would take a decade to upload a single terabyte.

Now you know my current stance, valuable as it may or may not be, on the subject of photography.