Let’s talk about how we all got to the digital place with cameras today and why it’s not a big deal to have a high-res camera its really about what you need to get the job done. A lot of you out there are doing photography for fun and have the GAS “Gear Acquisition Syndrome” issue to buy the latest and greatest. If you are a working photographer there is no need for over kill in equipment. Today there are so many older digital cameras that can do the job that there is no need to buy new with all the bells and whistles. I was able to get a Canon 6D for $500. with only 14,000 clicks. Look around and see what you can get for your cash & it’s not that expensive to even get a repair done! Think of it like owning a classic car!
When us working photographers were introduced to the world of digital photography the first cameras were not that great but some of us that were ahead in the game jumped in. We started to use what we thought would be the best at that time. I started to use some that were not very quick and not able to make large files. The wait time in storing the images to the cards was painfully slow. Canon had the quickest so that when you snapped the shot you did not have to hang about till you could take another shot. I started to use there point and shot, cameras G1 & G2 and one another thing that was great is that they had an LCD screen on the back of the camera so you did not have to shoot polaroid® film as you could review the image on the back of the camera. The cameras were still very low res so we could not switch out the work we were shooting for catalogs or posters so I was still shooting film for those projects, but the images shot with a digital camera were just fine for the internet.
(All the images in. this set were shot with a G1 super low res 3.2 you can see they lack dynamic range but they still look OK for the web for their time.)
After a time, canon came out with there 35mm SLR style camera D10 which got us back to using all the lens we had for our film cameras. This was a game changer and it started the switch from film in a big way, soon the chips got to be able to do the same sort of resolution as film with more dynamic range. I remember the first time I informed a client on a catalog shoot that we should start to use digital. On the next shoot with them they asked me to shoot film and digital and you guess it they never used the film. The saving for shooting digital was also a great thing for our clients and they jumped at that as of no film costs. Today we all use digital and think nothing of it but some of us still remember the big change.
