chez wrote:
Actually many airlines are replacing their fleets with the latest aircraft due to huge improvements in fuel efficiency...so yes, even technology that is a few years old can get replaced with something newer if there is a use case for it.
That actually explains, in part, my personal reasons (related earlier in this thread) for choosing to not upgrade to the R System: the use case for it is weak. (YMMV.)
As i explained, I primarily though not exclusively use a 5DsR for tripod-based landscape photography. While the nearest Canon R body (R5ii) is a fine camera and has some real-world advantages (and some disadvantages) relative to the 5DsR, they are not significant enough to warrant the replacement for that use.
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Related to some other posts in this thread, it would be good for some of you to look up a definition of “technology” (like this one) since it doesn’t mean quite what you think it means. Hint: It does not mean “a really new thing.”
Some technologies: the wheel, sailing ships, pipe organs, pens, paper, wrought iron, fabric, etc…
… which is why photographers objecting to “technology” generically doesn’t make any sense. :-)
Fuel efficiency is often the decisive factor. New-generation aircraft such as the Airbus A321neo and Boeing 737 MAX consume 15–20% less fuel than their predecessors, a margin that can represent millions in annual savings per airplane.
As fuel remains one of the largest operating expenses — typically 20 to 30% of an airline’s cost structure — modernization pays off quickly. Replacing aging aircraft with newer types also supports sustainability commitments and CO₂ emissions reduction goals, an increasingly important factor for both regulators and investors."
That actually explains, in part, my personal reasons (related earlier in this thread) for choosing to not upgrade to the R System: the use case for it is weak. (YMMV.)
As i explained, I primarily though not exclusively use a 5DsR for tripod-based landscape photography. While the nearest Canon R body (R5ii) is a fine camera and has some real-world advantages (and some disadvantages) relative to the 5DsR, they are not significant enough to warrant the replacement for that use.
- - -
Related to some other posts in this thread, it would be good for some of you to look up a definition of “technology” (like this one) since it doesn’t mean quite what you think it means. Hint: It does not mean “a really new thing.”
Some technologies: the wheel, sailing ships, pipe organs, pens, paper, etc…...Show more →
But those technologies that you listed were a really new thing in their day.
EB-1 wrote:
EF is not archaic like a typewriter. They are still sold new and maybe production stopped in the 2020s.
As of a few weeks ago when all those influencers were hosted in Japan by Canon, EF lenses were still in production. DPReview writes here about a tour of the Utsunomiya factory where L lenses are made. From that article:
“The machine we were shown was making EF 24-105mm F4L IS II USM lenses but can be reconfigured to make EF 16-35mm F2.8L III USM: the two lenses having been designed with similar layouts and a high degree of shared componentry to allow one series of robots to build either lens. Unlike the hand-made approach, the whole setup would need to be significantly redesigned and rebuilt to be able to assemble any other lens, at significant investment cost.”
Obviously, such machines require floor space, so to automate like this and keep lens production in Japan, instead of building lenses by hand in a lower-wage country, Canon had to choose which lenses to keep making. The machine for your favourite legacy EF mount lens was probably cannibalised for some RF lens-making machine which now occupies its floor space. Other brands might instead assemble lenses by hand in a lower-wage country, and offer a wider choice of lenses but with a bigger copy variation.
Just don’t expect a wide choice of EF L lenses to buy new.
chez wrote:
If you think all there is to a good photo is it being sharp…then any p&s would work for you. Many features of advanced cameras such as eye AF relieves the photographers from tedious things like trying to keep the eye in focus to things that really make a great photo like capturing the exact moment.
I see many photos posted that are shot with advance features that are technically great, but lack that thing that makes them a great photo. That is something that comes from the photographer, not the camera no matter if it’s a p&s or the latest digital....Show more →
What is the obsession with making a great photo and how do you define it? I'm sure there are many definitions and none of my images would remotely qualify. Does that mean I should use crappy cameras and mediocre lenses? I use the most reasonable gear for subjects and my organs on each project.
EB-1 wrote:
What is the obsession with making a great photo and how do you define it? I'm sure there are many definitions and none of my images would remotely qualify. Does that mean I should use crappy cameras and mediocre lenses? I use the most reasonable gear for subjects and my organs on each project.
EBH
No, you should use gear that makes you comfortable as long as you go into it with your eyes wide open and realize fancy gear won’t all of a sudden transform your photos from hohum to great. I get a feeling many members feel they can purchase their way to grit photos not realizing it takes a lot of practice and skill.
Oh, I know nobody cares about my photos. But I know it is worth a lot of testing to maximize the results. I know almost exactly how a lens performs at each aperture and radius of center, mid, edge and corner. There is also a difference from distance to subject and lens to lens. I've used some optically weak lenses due to necessity where there is a small range of good IQ vs. diffraction (sometimes literally one or two 1/3 of a stop) and the bokahs are in a bad place to hide.
Knowing what the gear will do and how to control it within the lens/camera envelopes focuses the mind to concentrate on the subjects and desired image.
AF is worse for some of the MILS on unrecognizable small subjects. There are also other things abou the newer tech that are worse, though overall it is better. I feel like 10 years away to never from having a full set of RF lenses and not using any EF lenses. They will probaby bury me with the 500/4. IS II.
I’ve been mulling over this topic since I posted it…
And I now think it comes down to the fact it’s so darn boring.
Like E-Bikes or pcp air rifles… progression has certainly improved the ease of getting where we want to go, or what we want. But at the same time it’s taken a lot of the fun that made the hobby attract you in the first instance.
Climbing onto a E bike and being “pushed” along is great fun but very little else. Likewise putting pellet on pellet effortlessly at 25-40yds using massive scopes on a totally recoilless air rifle very quickly gets old.
Selecting people, cars or animals and AiServo at 10,20,30fos absolutely increases getting the shots you were after…
It’s all clever stuff… but it’s also boring and expensive. All these “ aids “ we now can’t live without is so sad. We used to push ourselves to become better, now the pushing has gone we just participate. The dopamine hit is like the easy wins gamers get addicted too.
I’m determined to go my own way. I’m not yet ready to be bibbed and fed…I’ll feed myself thank you very much.
P.S. I discovered Pentax over a year ago… believe me… that truly is a photographers camera…..taxing, but the rewards….. Sweet Jesus!!
While I think I get where you are coming from, I don’t share your conclusions. It certainly is true that we don’t have to always jump on every Newest Thing.
I’ve been making photographs long enough to have used some (now) quite old gear. I started with fully manual film cameras that didn’t have automatic anything. In fat, the earlier that I used didn’t even have any focus aids — one focused by estimating the distance to the subject and turning a knob to about that estimated distance… and using a small enough aperture to allow the inaccuracies.
Modern improvements to photographic equipment have made photography (and the experience of making photographs) no worse and in virtually all ways have made it better.
And while those features are available on our gear when we want/need them, we can still choose to work in the old ways any time we think that might be better. I manually focus virtually all of my landscape photography, even though my camera has sophisticated AF… not because I want to imagine that I’m working like old-time photographers worked, but because it makes more sense in that case. But I still get the very real advantages of modern equipment when I need them.
I’m not saying that all of us always necessarily need this year’s newest thing, but the continuing improvement of the gear has only been a positive thing.
Some imagine that reverting to older gear might be a rejection of obsession with gear rather than photographs. But I think the opposite is actually true. Both the notion that the newest stuff is required for good photography and the notion that the older stuff is best for photography reflect a focus on the gear rather than the results.
Pixelpuffin wrote:
I’ve been mulling over this topic since I posted it…
And I now think it comes down to the fact it’s so darn boring.
Like E-Bikes or pcp air rifles… progression has certainly improved the ease of getting where we want to go, or what we want. But at the same time it’s taken a lot of the fun that made the hobby attract you in the first instance.
Climbing onto a E bike and being “pushed” along is great fun but very little else. Likewise putting pellet on pellet effortlessly at 25-40yds using massive scopes on a totally recoilless air rifle very quickly gets old.
Selecting people, cars or animals and AiServo at 10,20,30fos absolutely increases getting the shots you were after…
It’s all clever stuff… but it’s also boring and expensive. All these “ aids “ we now can’t live without is so sad. We used to push ourselves to become better, now the pushing has gone we just participate. The dopamine hit is like the easy wins gamers get addicted too.
I’m determined to go my own way. I’m not yet ready to be bibbed and fed…I’ll feed myself thank you very much.
P.S. I discovered Pentax over a year ago… believe me… that truly is a photographers camera…..taxing, but the rewards….. Sweet Jesus!!...Show more →
Pixelpuffin wrote:
And I now think it comes down to the fact it’s so darn boring.
Like E-Bikes or pcp air rifles… progression has certainly improved the ease of getting where we want to go, or what we want. But at the same time it’s taken a lot of the fun that made the hobby attract you in the first instance.
It sounds like you’re looking for a skills-based hobby, and photography mostly isn’t that any more. There are “soft” skills you need in particular genres like planning based on weather and tides for landscape photography, studying bird behaviour for bird photography, or posing a model for fashion photography, but those aren’t things that can be marked from 1 to 10 in a camera club or online competition.
Skills-based hobbies include things like orienteering, golf, and classic car restoration. Some hobbies are hybrids of skill and leisure, like sailing or playing a musical instrument, but in those cases the shared experience with others is usually about the experience and the skill is just a prerequisite.
melcat wrote:
It sounds like you’re looking for a skills-based hobby, and photography mostly isn’t that any more. There are “soft” skills you need in particular genres like planning based on weather and tides for landscape photography, studying bird behaviour for bird photography, or posing a model for fashion photography, but those aren’t things that can be marked from 1 to 10 in a camera club or online competition.
Skills-based hobbies include things like orienteering, golf, and classic car restoration. Some hobbies are hybrids of skill and leisure, like sailing or playing a musical instrument, but in those cases the shared experience with others is usually about the experience and the skill is just a prerequisite....Show more →
I totally disagree that photography is not a skills based hobby. If that’s the case, why do we have such a varying degree in image quality even though many use the latest and best gear. We see a small subset of members that consistently post great images while the vast majority of members just don’t consistently produce the same quality.
chez wrote:
I totally disagree that photography is not a skills based hobby. If that’s the case, why do we have such a varying degree in image quality even though many use the latest and best gear. We see a small subset of members that consistently post great images while the vast majority of members just don’t consistently produce the same quality.
In terms of my classification above, it’s closest to a hybrid. There are people posting here who lack some skills, and another much larger group that produce technically competent but uninteresting images. It is notoriously hard to get to the level in photography where your images really speak to people, so we can’t expect those to be a big proportion of the images posted in a place like this.
melcat wrote:
In terms of my classification above, it’s closest to a hybrid. There are people posting here who lack some skills, and another much larger group that produce technically competent but uninteresting images. It is notoriously hard to get to the level in photography where your images really speak to people, so we can’t expect those to be a big proportion of the images posted in a place like this.
But isn’t it a skill that allows photographers to consistently create photos others admire? You claimed that the skill in photography has been removed with the latest gear…but there is much much more skill involved beyond making a technically nice but boring photo.
melcat wrote:
It sounds like you’re looking for a skills-based hobby, and photography mostly isn’t that any more. There are “soft” skills you need in particular genres like planning based on weather and tides for landscape photography, studying bird behaviour for bird photography, or posing a model for fashion photography, but those aren’t things that can be marked from 1 to 10 in a camera club or online competition.
Skills-based hobbies include things like orienteering, golf, and classic car restoration. Some hobbies are hybrids of skill and leisure, like sailing or playing a musical instrument, but in those cases the shared experience with others is usually about the experience and the skill is just a prerequisite....Show more →
well, it seems to me that the skill of “seeing photographically” is pretty important in photography. In fact, I’d say it is more important than the technical skills in the end. And these “seeing” skills require quite a lot of practice and repetition. Compared to learning what an f-stop is or how to focus or what shutter speed to use, they are a lot deeper skills, too.
Pixelpuffin wrote:
And I now think it comes down to the fact it’s so darn boring.
Any competent photographer can capture more great photos with modern gear than he can with older gear. Modern cameras can simply perform physical and optical operations that older cameras are simply not capable of doing.
Go to a baseball game with your old DSLR and sit next to a photographer that has a mirrorless camera with Pro Capture (or Pre Capture). Try seeing which of you can freeze the baseball speeding over home plate the most times in the same amount of time.
You would quickly discover that the other photographer would come away with a hundred times more captures of the baseball in the strike zone.
The latest cameras have far superior auto-focus for capturing high-speed action. Skilled photographers can certainly benefit from having more efficient cameras.
I would think that this would depend on the photographer's main interests. A portrait specialist doesn't need a camera capable of catching a baseball half way across home plate. The ability to interact with the model is far more important. That baseball shot would be a boring photograph in any event although I know the point you are making.
By the way, the most iconic photograph in sports history is, in my opinion, Cassius Clay standing over Sonny Liston. We all are familiar with it. A film camera totally incapable of capturing your suggested image took that shot so again, the purpose of the camera is the real consideration.
John Power wrote:
I would think that this would depend on the photographer's main interests. A portrait specialist doesn't need a camera capable of catching a baseball half way across home plate. The ability to interact with the model is far more important. That baseball shot would be a boring photograph in any event although I know the point you are making.
By the way, the most iconic photograph in sports history is, in my opinion, Cassius Clay standing over Sonny Liston. We all are familiar with it. A film camera totally incapable of capturing your suggested image took that shot so again, the purpose of the camera is the real consideration. ...Show more →
I think your point about different genres/subjects perhaps being more or less sensitive to the most recent technologies is fair.*
But I think what our OP is suggesting is that using the modern equipment is actually detrimental to photography. To say that you can make a fine portrait with a somewhat older camera is quite different than suggesting that the use of a modern camera will make it less likely that your portrait in will be excellent.
The thing that some seem to miss is that using equipment with more advanced capabilities does not come at the expense of photographing the way we might have photographed with older equipment. You can put the camera in full manual mode if that is your preference, but you can also then switch to modes that are more automated when the conditions demand. It isn’t like equipping cameras with newer capabilities has taken away the old capabilities.
* As I wrote earlier in this thread, I’m still using a decade-old DSLR system for my landscape photography since it functions quite well for that purpose. On the other hand, I use a much more recent system for my travel/street photography.
John Power wrote:
By the way, the most iconic photograph in sports history is, in my opinion, Cassius Clay standing over Sonny Liston. We all are familiar with it. A film camera totally incapable of capturing your suggested image took that shot so again, the purpose of the camera is the real consideration.
I did not say that a film camera was incapable of taking such a static boxing image. I said a DSLR is not as capable as capturing a baseball over home plate as easily and frequently as a camera with pre-capture and/or superior auto-focus.
