John Duder Wants You To 'Choose Carefully'

Taken by a school friend who has only recently taken up photography as a serious hobby. He knew that he would be taking pictures of wildlife almost exclusively, so he bought the same equipment as a friend who was already shooting excellent wildlife pictures. This took him to the top of the OM Digital range, with an OM-1 and a 150-400mm lens. Unlike the lizard in his picture, he won’t get caught on the hop… Flap-necked chameleon (Chamaeleo Dilepis), photographed in the Kruger national park, South Africa.  Settings: f/6.3, 1/250 s exposure, ISO 400, +0.3 exposure bias, focal length 500 mm, spot metering mode. © Martin Miller.

Picking the right model is a problem whenever there’s a choice, and is often unnecessarily and confusingly difficult, whatever the product… One of the most stressful outings I had when my children were small was to a toy superstore: fun evaporates when the choice overwhelms you.

And that’s how it is with camera models. Should you choose the cheapest, most basic one you can find? Or go all out with a professional body? Both are flawed choices for the vast majority of people, and I’m going to set out some reasons why.

To start at the top end: you will be paying a lot of money, acquiring, possibly, the biggest and heaviest camera in the range. You will also be setting expectations for yourself and others, and you may be buying yourself some unanticipated problems. You will be like the rich mum in a big off-road vehicle trying to fit it into a small space in a school car park, uncertain of where the corners are, and wishing you’d bought something much cheaper…

Top of the range: when you won’t get a second chance and need to react rapidly, you need to know your equipment, and have an outfit that is suited to the task. Heavyweight equipment is popular for wildlife, but Martin’s choice of OM Systems delivers performance for less avoirdupois. Working with equipment that is not pushed to the limit by the shooting condition allows a less-experienced photographer to deliver excellent images. African elephant (Loxodonta Africana)  Settings: f/8, 1/500 s exposure, ISO 200, -0.7 exposure bias, focal length 150 mm, spot metering mode. © Martin Miller.

Let me cite an example. I did a lighting demonstration and workshop at a camera club a few years ago. One of the members was slinging an EOS 1D, £5k of durable high-tech metal and glass. If someone is carrying that kind of kit, you expect that they know how to use it, right? Imagine my surprise when it failed to trigger the flash units: the owner was as nonplussed as I was.

A frantic resort to the internet on my mobile sorted the problem. Deep in the menu system, there’s an option to switch off the hot shoe and co-ax socket, and the default is, it seems, off. I assume this just works better when the user is shooting in wet conditions: but in a studio, it’s downright embarrassing. When you get a new car, you find out where the controls are before you leave the dealer, don’t you? The higher up the range you go, the more controls there will be that defeat the non-reader of instruction books…

And there’s that expectations thing: as emperor of the club, you may have a deep red complexion if anyone asks you what colour your vest is, so to speak, when you show off your new clothes. Therefore, it’s likely that you will get more fun for less money with a better-specified prosumer body. The 50% cost reduction should allow you to buy at least a couple of really decent lenses for the same total budget.

Big is not necessarily better… I only considered the size of my octabox in relation to the room I use it in most after buying it. It’s difficult to navigate it through doorways, and using it can lead to clashes with ceiling lights. For domestic use, something smaller would give similar light, but without getting in the way.

Similarly with – say – studio flash equipment. There’s no point, if you are working at home in an ordinary domestic space, in buying the most powerful units, or the biggest softbox. I have a large Godox octabox, and it’s a danger to light fittings and ornaments. Similarly, really high-powered units would be unusable at more than a fraction of their full wallop.

The same argument extends to lenses. Although I waxed lyrical about my new Sigma 105mm lens a couple of months ago, it’s not a lens that I take with me for street pictures. It’s wonderful for natural light portraits, though, and that justifies its place on my shelf. Similarly, I tend to use my 85mm f/1.8 lens far more than the optically-excellent Samyang f/1.4 that I also own: it’s smaller, lighter, and more responsive. It’s spent more time on the front of my camera than all my other lenses put together since I bought it, and the only reason it’s not dominating my output so much now is that I bought a second-hand Samyang 75mm lens last year (have a look at John Riley’s review if you’re a Sony user).

Specialist kit can be cumbersome, so while I love my Sigma 105mm f/1.4 lens (left), I walk around with a more modest 85mm f/1.8 lens (middle)on my camera. The Sigma is wonderful for occasions when the light is really low, and where a slightly longer focal length is needed, like the shot of the Kate Gee Band playing at the Rock and Roll Brewhouse in Birmingham (right).

At the opposite end of the price range, I find that there are a couple of good reasons not to pick the absolute bottom-of-the-range model. In many cases, this is a bit of an ‘old bloke special’ – like the base-model car with all the luxury features stripped out, and which was almost never available from dealers. Where the L model has electric front windows, central locking, six speed gearbox and air conditioning, for a princely £475 less you could have something minus all of these, if you didn’t mind waiting for two months. I think that’s called a false economy.

What do you lose with the base model camera? It’s not principally about megapixels or AF speed, but it will involve the vital second control dial, and probably the number of customisable buttons around the place. This means that instead of pressing a button and turning a dial, you need to go into the menus (or use the touch screen) to do things like adjusting exposure compensation, or re-centring the AF point. It’s not impossible, but it slows you down a good deal.

One of my favourite images from Martin’s portfolio. Working with equipment that is not pushed to the limit by the shooting conditional allows a less-experienced photographer to deliver excellent images. Magnificent frigatebird (Fregata magnificens)  Settings: f/4.5, 1/2000 s exposure, ISO 200, no exposure bias, focal length 150 mm, pattern metering mode. © Martin Miller.

As well as what they don’t have, there’s an issue with the features that the base model may have, such as ‘modes’ for things like portrait or landscape. These do things like fine-tuning the colour balance, or biasing the way Program mode works, but they’re not necessary, and so they are not usually to be found on higher-level models. That’s fine – they can easily distract you from more important things, like choosing the right focal length, and composition.

My brush with the bottom of a range came when my original-model OM-D EM-1 packed up, and I acquired an OM-10. It definitely passes my first test for a camera, with two control wheels, and is thus a far more serious camera than some. The EM-1 also has a couple of cunning additions (a lever which changes the function of both control dials, and two semi-circular buttons on the left side of the top plate which give access to further useful settings). I believe that later models also have a joystick on the back of the camera, making it simpler to move the AF point around.

And I have a feeling that it outperforms the EM-1 on sheer quality – but it is far harder to control focus, because of the lack of customisable buttons, and limited customisation of the ones it has. It’s a great camera for casual use in good light, but becomes demanding and then annoying for a portrait session, and very difficult to use for an air show.

The original top-of-the-range OM-D faces down the more basic OM-10. Note the bigger, more satisfying grip on the black camera, and the larger number of function buttons that make it easier to control under many conditions.

And there are also differences that are simply differences, and the advantage may lie on either side. Comparing the EM-1 and the OM-10, it’s entirely clear that only one of them is pocketable, with the 10 having a smaller finger grip and a slipper body: pick them up, though, and the finger-grip on the EM-1 is wonderfully seductive… So if you want a camera to carry around unobtrusively, but with the ability to deliver high quality, the base model can be best. Note, though, that the original EM-1 is a great deal smaller than the current top-of-the-range OM System models!

I noticed that my Alpha 7R III doesn’t have the panoramic setting on the mode dial that my (now full spectrum) 7R II has, and while I don’t know for certain, I suspect it’s because a third customisable setting is useful, and Sony have made the assumption that users will know what settings to lock to shoot the elements of a panorama, and have both the software and the computing power to meld them… Expectations, again.

Two panoramas shot with an Alpha 7R – the upper one was shot with the camera’s panoramic mode, which produced a JPG file 5536 by 2160 pixels. The lower image used the same 75mm lens, and was merged in Photoshop from nine separate RAW images to create a TIFF file of 22507 by 7285 pixels. Note how much more coverage there is in the manually-constructed panorama. I suspect that the banding is due to a slight unevenness in the shutter run. The sophistication of the in-camera merging leads to costs in achievable quality.

And that reminds me of the one time when it is common sense to go to the top. My friend Martin has had a lifelong interest in nature, but has only recently developed an interest in photographing birds and animals. He’s recently retired, and so decided to take pictures of birds and animals, and a complex interaction with a former colleague at the British Antarctic Survey (of a sort familiar to many members of this website, whenever two or three users are gathered together) led to their outfits converging on Olympus Systems’ OM-1 and the rather wonderful 150-400mm lens.

Martin’s careful technique, which you would expect from a scientist, has led to a pinsharp image of this Green iguana (Iguana iguana)  Settings: f/8, 1/400 s exposure, ISO 200, -0.3 exposure bias, focal length 150 mm, spot metering mode. © Martin Miller.

You can see from the attached images that the approach has been thoroughly successful in Martin’s case. He has bought exactly what he needs for a highly specific job, in an area where cutting corners simply doesn’t work, as witness my own efforts with rather cheaper kit. And, crucially, Martin learned about the settings that he needed from an experienced practitioner in the area: as a man with a highly scientific turn of mind, he has followed the logic. That’s something that I wish was more common among newcomers to the hobby!

When choosing a model, the assurance, confidence and proven skills of an experienced professional like TheCrimsonWhite pays dividends. Her modelling fee buys, in effect, a far higher number of successful frames in a given time, and less wasted time. Once you have gained experience as a photographer you can afford the risk of working with inexperienced models.

And with my tongue slightly in my cheek, I shall extend the scope of this article to embrace the practice of making photographs of professional models, where the same logic holds good. You won’t get value for money from booking Kate Moss (I have no idea of her daily rate, but I suspect it’s enough to buy my whole photographic outfit twice over), but I entreat you, if you are a complete novice, not to seek out a girl who has never modelled before and is looking for ‘time for pictures’ work.

The problem that you will face with this approach is that neither of you will know what you are doing, and the results will, consequently, be likely to prove unsatisfactory. You will do far better if you decide to spend a little money on booking a model with some experience, and work in a studio where the owner will set up the lights for you. Then you can leave the poses to the model, and use the settings the studio owner suggests, taking the pressure off you to do anything other than take the pictures. Believe me, the first time around, this is sufficiently challenging on its own.

Working with equipment that is not pushed to the limit by the shooting conditional allows a less-experienced photographer to deliver excellent images. African leopards (Panthera pardus pardus)  Settings: f/6.3, 1/1000 s exposure, ISO 400, no exposure bias, focal length 375 mm, spot metering mode. © Martin Miller.

Admittedly, you won’t get any ground-breaking images from this approach – but you are unlikely to shoot pictures that win competitions the first time you attend a Grand Prix race… It’s sensible to learn to walk before you try to run!

You could, of course, maximise your learning by booking a place on a hands-on workshop of the sort that I run, as do many other tutors of various levels around the country. But that is, perhaps, another story entirely.

To sum up, I suggest that you should aim for the middle ground in any purchasing decision, unless there is an overriding reason to seek the refinements available at the top end of a range, or you understand and can live with the limitations of the bottom end. I suspect that there’s a good reason that the lowest-specification model is known as ‘entry level’ – it is the hook that pulls you into one system or another, and you may well decide (after a few months’ experience) that you need a few extra features: maybe going one model up, but buying one generation back, and secondhand, would offer real benefits.

So much advertising these days is about emotions: do what you feel. And I would never discount the value of being in love with your camera: it will add to the joy of every image you make. But it’s best to avoid an asymmetrical relationship, where you are infatuated with something entirely unsuitable – your mother probably warned you about such things. So pause, think a bit about what you need from a camera or lens, and consider a long engagement before you hand over a load of money.

Another of Martin’s carefully-shot wildlife images shows the benefits of selecting the right equipment. Working with equipment that is not pushed to the limit by the shooting conditional allows a less-experienced photographer to deliver excellent images. European bee-eater (Merops apiaster)  Settings: f/4.5, 1/2000 s exposure, ISO 400, -0.7 exposure bias, focal length 400 mm, spot metering mode. © Martin Miller.