A Joy and A Curse

by Carol

After a recent day out shooting my lower back and shoulders were killing me! I felt like an old lady! I carry a full frame Canon and 3 lenses - two of which are significant zooms. They are in a well padded camera bag with my filters, batteries, etc, etc, etc. I often have a purse and a tripod hanging off my shoulders too. And this is nothing compared to what I travel with!

Now you must understand, I love my 5D Mark II. After initially starting my journey with a Sony Alpha, I made the difficult decision to change my kit because, at that time, used Sony lenses were rare and I wanted to be able to search eBay and amazon for well priced lenses as my skills and interests expanded. I was also sold on the idea of a full frame camera to gather every pixel.  I scrimped and saved and finally bought the Canon, thinking it would be the last camera I would ever buy. Over the years I added lenses - a long zoom, a wide angle, a portrait lens - until I thought I had gathered all the basics I could need. 

I should have known better. Working in a technological field, I knew that electronic progress marches forward unrelentingly. But I also realized that it is so unrelenting that you can't possibly keep up with it all. At some point, you just have to decide what features are important to you and stick with them. 

What I did not anticipate was my own aging and its effects on my attitude as well as my muscles. What did me in was my last trip to Europe two years ago. I lugged so much equipment up and down cobblestone streets and the steps of quaint inns that I began to feel ridiculous. Everything I did involved a maze of planning. Did I need every lens every day? Would carrying a backpack mean that every time I wanted a lens I had to kneel down and remove my backpack, dig in for what I need and restrap it on? If I stuck in a purse for evening, would I miss a shot at dinner because my camera wouldn't fit in, or would I end up wearing a heavy camera around my neck all night and never use it? Did I end up bringing my 50 mm because it was the lens I needed or because I was tired of carrying the others? At some point would the money I spend on equipment mean that I could spend less for travel? I know, I know - all of this is part of the fun of photography! I love seeing what different lenses can do. But the truth is, that I have a limited budget and I have my favorite lenses that I use most of the time, so why am I carrying all this stuff half way around the world? I was becoming lazy and settling for a zoom, wasting the equipment I worked so hard to buy. I was jealous of the easy mobility of those with less gear.

Of course, other baby boomers were having these same thoughts, which is why I thought this post might interest some of our readers. I began to pay a lot of attention to David duChemin talking about his new mirrorless Fuji. (here) I asked a lot of questions of some of my acquaintances who had already made the move. Last summer I began renting mirrorless cameras to feel them out. Eventually I decided to make  a kind of trial run. While I was still not convinced that I would ditch my beloved full frame, I did see the writing on the wall. I narrowed down my choices.

I explored the Sony Alpha A7 R2, the Olympus OM-D 10 and the Fuji X-T10 that convinced duChemin to make the move. The Sony, which offered a full frame in a mirrorless camera, seemed like it had the most technology in a more traditional package, but frankly, with the lenses I would use the most often it was almost as heavy as my current camera. I did fall in love with the Fuji which has a CMOS sensor.  but it's lenses are around $1000+ a piece and I am not yet sure whether I want to make the move in that big a way. If I eventually become convinced that this is my path, I will sell my current gear and choose it. I was worried about the Olympus being a 4/3 sensor, but that worry abated when I read that technology had advanced so much that the Olympus actually could do much of what my Canon did in a 4/3 format. The light weight, affordable lenses and great stabilization (yes, old people shake more too...) convinced me. I purchased the OM-D10 at a Labor Day sale where it came with two tiny zoom lenses. The camera and both lenses fit in a regular purse (that I picked up at Marshall's and padded a bit) with my wallet and phone and sunglasses and keys.  In our recent Rhode Island trip it was with me and accessible everywhere we went. It was a joy to walk around with only a purse!

Certainly, there are major adjustments to be made. The menu is very different than that of the Canon and there are buttons that can be assigned varying functions. I haven't played with the WiFi yet, and I still feel very awkward with it. I wasn't happy with my first day's shots in R.I., but after playing with the settings the second day's were dramatically better. I have lots of homework to do. I want to make comparison shots, and to try different lighting situations. My goal is to know it backwards and forwards by my planned trip to Italy in fall 2017in the hope that maybe it will be all I need to bring.  I'll let you know how it goes.....

Are any of you mirrorless users? I'd be interested in your experiences. And,by the way, don't forget the wise words of Maxine:

Looking Backward To Go Forward

by Carol

"Play back your photographs. Do any of them illustrate the feelings you have for the landscape? Do you need to continue the dialogue with the land?"
                                                                      Patricia Turner
                                                                     A Field Guide for The Contemplative Photographer 

It's amazing what you can learn by looking back. Just as Kondo preaches that tidying up your house can inform your life, refine your taste, and center your mind on what is important to you; so I have found, does looking through your photography catalogues.

In the continuing effort to cull my photos, I have recently hit on a method that actually keeps me interested and motivated with the process. I decided to view my hard drive cleanup as a series of projects. Rather than proceeding date by date through a million poor photos I should have deleted at the time they were taken, I decided to look experience by experience. As I learned from Patricia Turner, it is worthwhile to create a sense of place in your photographic stories. It helps you carry the essence of your travels forward into your life experience. With time and separation you can often see how your memory has taken a life experience and condensed it down to its essential moments and lessons. So I am taking my favorite places and experiences one by one and really diving into them. I hope to create books or series or stories that inform , or simple individual photographs that are better metaphors for time and place. The bonus is that I am finding photographic lessons at every turn.

I began with my Cape May photos since that was the genesis of my photographic journey. I took workshops there for 4 years running, learning the basics of my craft and meeting many of my closest photography friends. Coincidentally (or not) we always went in May - so this feels right for the season! Starting with Cape May 2009, and going up to weekends spent there as recently as last year, I am watching my photography improve, and my style emerge. I am recognizing things I would do differently today, solving issues with light that I didn't have the technical knowledge to handle then.

So here comes lesson number ONE that I would like to pass on to all of you. I am eternally grateful that my photography teacher taught us right from the beginning to shoot in RAW format! Because sitting here in 2016, I can pull out a photo from 2009 that looks amateurish and often......I can FIX it! Of course my compositional skills have improved and I can do nothing about photos that should have been taken at a better angle, or should have included more "shoulder," but I can straighten the crooked ones. I can sharpen those that are only barely out of focus. I can darken backgrounds where necessary, or create a better crop to emphasize the subject. I can convert to black and white those where the color is off. I can also make some into abstracts, or use them as textures - something I didn't even know existed in 2009! Even more important, I am better able now to think about the history of the place I visited and use my skills to make the photos tell the entire story better.

I sense that many people somehow fear using RAW, and I am not sure I understand why. Some say it takes up too much hard drive room, but here is my experience. The first year I shot in RAW and jpeg. I'm not exactly sure why I did that. I didn't really understand the difference and RAW seemed too technical to me. As a result I took up twice the hard drive space! Add to that the enthusiasm of a new photographer (can you say 25 pictures of the same slightly out-of-focus flower.....) and in the first Cape May workshop I averaged about 2000 photos A DAY! As I plow through now, deleting all the jpegs of that flower and all the repetition, and keeping only the RAW one to work on, it becomes obvious how much that lesson helped me.

For example, I had a disastrous period after the workshop when I was trying to learn how to resize photos for the web, not understanding the process at all. (Honestly, resizing is still one of my biggest challenges.) I shrunk every photo I loved down to 600 x 400 so I could proudly post it. Then I tried to print them out to hang and didn't understand why they were all blurry! Every one of those wrongly resized pictures that was jpeg was lost forever. The RAW ones I was able to resize correctly here in 2016 and keep - because I still had the pixels!  I always recall my teacher saying - "why on earth would you spend the money on a great camera (many of us paying extra to get a full frame) and then toss away the pixels it's capable of creating?" So there you have some hard won advice. Keep the pixels!

While this is one of the technical lessons I have extracted as I go backwards through the years, I am also finding many about my life experience years after my trip. (more to come....)

"Cement Ship" Cape May Point

 "In the end, what distinguishes contemplative photography from any other kind of photography is the continuing reflection on the images one makes. Minor White calls photographs “functions” and not “objects”. They are just stepping stones and we move from one to another. For me, it has been what sustains my interest in the medium. Each image I make is just another building block in the citadel of self-understanding."

                                                                                                            Patricia Turner