Camera Gear History

Camera Gear History

My first real camera was a Minolta SLR. When I got more serious, I went to Nikon F’s. When I did my grand tour of Africa and South America and my Russian tour with the San Francisco Symphony, my kit weighed 23 pounds. Too much. I then switched to a complete Olympus SLR system which was excellent and much lighter. However, when autofocus came out, Olympus never followed with their own autofocus cameras.

I tried the Minolta system, but there were two issues. One, the ergonomics never felt right, and two, their system had separate cards for different camera functions which was too awkward.

I switched to Canon A2E's in the early 90's, and started out with their 28-105 and a wide angle zoom. As soon as the image stabilized Canon 28-135 f3.5-5.6 IS came out, I got one. At this point, I can't imagine shooting without an image stabilized lens for anything but ultra wide angle or a very large aperture for out of focus backgrounds. I upgraded the A2E’s to the EOS3, which I think was one of the best SLR’s ever. It had eye focus spot selection, which meant that you could look at a spot on the screen and it would choose that as the focus point. It also had a hyperfocal focusing distance mechanism, whereby you could pick two focus distances by pointing at them sequentially with the camera, and it would determine the aperture and focus distance to keep both in focus, or tell you that it was impossible. I terribly miss both these functions and am surprised that Canon or anybody else hasn’t incorporated them in newer cameras.

At that point, in the late 90’s, I was shooting slide film, but started to shoot negative color film for the increased dynamic range. When I went back to scanning the film and processing and printing myself on the computer.

Then I moved on to digital with 2 Canon 20D's in 2005 for our trip to Egypt, I got the Canon 17-85mm f3.5-5.6S IS. I also got the Canon 10-22mm f3.5-4.5S and the Canon 70-200mm f2.8L IS. Whenever I needed a really wide angle and used the 10-22, I found that about 80% of the time I ended up shooting very close to a 24mm equivalent focal length. I had had a similar experience with my Canon 17-35mm f2.8L. This just reinforced my suspicion that if I had a 24-105 focal length zoom, it would cover both my wide angle, normal and mid telephoto requirements without having to change lenses very much. And Cannon did come out with a 24-105 f4 image stabilized lens which became my mainstay.

I continued with Cannon, upgrading to successive full frame digital SLR’s through the 5DMkIII. But by 2014 it became clear that Cannon was falling behind in sensor technology. Sony was the clear leader. I bought a Sony A7r and an adapter so I could use my Cannon lenses. And there was no going back. Sony now has a very complete lens lineup (see my Current Gear Blog Post) and I am now using the Sony A7riv and am completely happy with it. The focusing is fast and accurate, the ergonomics are fine, and the 60MP sensor is amazing, I have very little hesitation shooting at ISO 12,800.