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February 2007
Last month I took the step that a lot of photographers have already done. I bought myself a digital SLR camera. I am not replacing my trusty and much
loved Hasselblad, but rather this new camera should compliment it instead.
I have found that in some circumstances it’s not practical, or even possible, to carry a large and relatively heavy medium format camera with you,
especially when climbing a mountain to get an elevated view of the scene to photograph. Also, sometimes you just don’t have the luxury of time that is
needed when setting up the shot with a completely manual camera such as the Hasselblad. Previously, I had always used my Minolta Dynax 7 in circumstances
such as this, but when a friend asked me to take the photographs at her wedding this summer, it made me ask myself whether it was time to move to digital.
Weddings are not something that I do on a regular basis, but faced with the prospect of having to buy some extra camera kit for the wedding, I started
questioning whether I really wanted to spend the money on a dead-end system, now that Minolta has succumbed to economic pressures and pulled out of the
camera market, or whether to trade it all in and go digital with a system that has a future. At the end of the day, the digital argument won, with Canon
getting my money from now on as I purchased the Canon EOS 5D. I’ve been thinking about it, edging ever closer, for the last couple of years, yet I needed
something, like my friends wedding, to give me the impetus I needed to make the digital leap.
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High Street across Haweswater, Lake District, England. |
Having a digital camera has also had a secondary effect - the greater ability and ease with which to build my stock image library. My digital workflow
is very similar to that when I use film, but instead of scanning slides, I am converting RAW images to TIFFs. However, the conversion of RAW files is
much easier and quicker than that of scanning, and as such, is a process I enjoy much more than scanning slides. As I am able to convert and process
many more digital files in a day than I can scan and cleanup slides, I can get more photographs to my image library in a shorter space of time. And with
no film or processing costs, I can experiment more and take photographs I never would have taken before. If an experiment doesn’t work, you simply hit
the delete button. No harm done.
People say that shooting digital makes you lazy. Just take loads of pictures, don’t think too much and sort it out later on the computer. I’m determined
to resist this mentality, and hopefully my days out with my Hasselblad will keep me disciplined enough to try to get it right in camera, and eBay will
soon be seeing the contents of my film SLR camera bag. After all, it’s the pictures that really matter, not the camera.
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