There are many nice things I found upon my return to the world of photographic gear, too. At some points I was genuinely admiring the newly produced gear, such as the FE 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 GM lens, and many of the GM lenses in general, which draw light in such amazingly beautiful ways that I saw this only with absolutely the most high end optics in the past, and if circumstances allow, I will probably end up getting some of those for myself, because they leave me thinking what I could do with something this amazing. I was also seriously impressed with Sony A1II and A7RV cameras, and will probably get the latter for myself, if the finances align. It has a viewfinder that solves the lower resolution and lower refresh rate issues of my A7II, its computer is much faster, the autofocus is brilliant, and the resolution and dynamic range are much improved.

So, the thing is, I don’t actually think that the gear doesn’t matter, nor am I unable to perceive the advantages of better gear. I also think my gear is quite good, including the lenses that would be summarily dismissed by others as dog shit unworthy of being coupled with a decent camera, and some cameras that would be summarily dismissed as amateurish toys.

5d with a “shit” lens

You see, I believe in a thing I call “minimal technical requirements”. Every task has those, and there is usually quite a difference between what they are, and what people think they are. Since I did quite a bit of testing, I discovered that certain things matter far less than one would expect, while others matter far more. For instance, camera sensor’s ability to render colour is of supreme importance. If it doesn’t, I will instantly dismiss it as unsuitable for my uses, and I actually did that multiple times, with all kinds of cameras that don’t get written about, because they don’t deserve to be mentioned. Those are usually found in phones and compact cameras with small sensors, and what they render is inherently so bad and electronically processed in attempt to “improve it”, that I find the result instantly repulsive.

On the other hand, sensors in some small cameras, such as Olympus E-PL1 and Sony R1, had the minimal technical requirements for producing large prints of great colour and detail; if you use them within certain parameters, that is. If I used those cameras to take pictures, it wasn’t because I thought they were poor tools unsuited for the task, and I wanted to make a statement about using shit tools to produce good results. No, it was because I thought they were genuinely good tools.

Sony R1. Obviously not sharp in the corners. 🙂

Are there better ones; sure. However, that’s the thing about the minimal technical requirements. At some point, if the equipment is good enough, nobody will be able to tell what camera or lens made that B2 print at the exhibition. They will see the motive, colours and detail, the picture will be speaking for itself without technical flaws detracting from its beauty, and that’s all that matters. Better equipment won’t improve anything if the lesser equipment was able to meet the minimal technical requirements – and be assured that my technical requirements are quite strict. They are, however, reasonable, and grounded in real use scenarios. I only once made a print larger than the B2 format. B2 is, for the most part, ideal for viewing from normal distances, in either an exhibition or at home. Anything bigger forces you to increase the viewing distance, and that’s not actually helping the experience. The second viewing scenario is the 4K monitor, and that’s the most realistic one today.

not sharp wide open at 35mm

But there’s a catch: image quality isn’t everything. Minimal technical requirements of image quality are only a part of it. If a camera is so difficult to use that you feel it’s struggling against you, it’s simply not a good tool. One can use such a tool regardless, but I eventually end up replacing them with superior ones as soon as possible. It’s just that my opinion of what tool is comfortable and good enough, and some forum’s opinion, might differ greatly. For instance, some people will treat image quality as the greatest priority, and will buy the lens that makes the best possible images. I, on the other hand, like image quality very much, but if a lens is so heavy that all my pictures will be taken with the iPhone because I left the heavy thing at home because I’m not taking that for a ten kilometre uphill walk, then what exactly is the point in having that thing? Using it for special occasions that never happen? That’s why I don’t have a special occasions watch, because I see it as wasteful and pointless. I have a good everyday watch I use for everything, from washing the car and mowing the lawn to dressing up for some occasion. Fuck special occasions. I don’t want a camera or a lens that’s a jewellery piece impractical for daily use, which is why I never buy those “universal” 24-70mm f/2.8 lenses that are huge unwieldy bricks, and also insanely expensive for what they are. I also think that “universal” high performance things are a waste of money, and specialized, more practical lenses are the way to go. For instance, I don’t need wide aperture on a lens that will be used for landscape photography from f/8 to f/22. I can save money there by getting good, light and inexpensive glass for such uses, which also makes my kit light enough to actually use. However, if I’m impressed by some camera or a lens and I think it will actually improve my photography, I will eventually end up buying it. My considerations are practical rather than ideological; for instance, when digital cameras were either too expensive or horse shit, I shot film and produced digital files by scanning. When digital cameras became good and affordable enough, I switched to digital. I have no brand loyalty whatsoever – I use whatever suits my needs. I used Minolta, Fuji, Olympus, Canon and Sony. Currently, it is my opinion that both Canon and Sony are excellent, and I would have no qualms with either. When something is convincingly better than what I’m using, I’ll switch to that in a heartbeat, but I won’t switch if the differences are minuscule or unproven. Basically, my gear choices are defined by how much money I have and what kind of work I intend to do. I also don’t feel a need to appear “professional”, because I’m not. Professionals produce work for others. I see photography as my personal art form, together with writing, and I wouldn’t actually describe myself as an amateur either. If I had to describe what I do, I’d say it’s mental/emotional state photography using mostly nature in high fidelity colour medium. If I say something is good enough, it doesn’t mean it’s good enough for an undemanding casual user who doesn’t know any better. It means it’s actually good enough that I would be unable to get discernibly better results with any kind of gear.

I have recently been getting into photography again after quite a large hiatus, mostly in order not to go crazy from following global politics and to give myself a reason to go out even in bad weather and leave the damn Internet behind.

I feel similar to what a bear must feel after waking from hibernation – oh, there’s new stuff around, and some old stuff is gone or changed, but everything is more-less the same. There are great new cameras and lenses around, and the stuff that was considered great when I followed it all is now considered mediocre and obsolete. The gear nerds are still having an anxiety crisis over which $2500 lens is sharp enough wide open to match the 50MP sensor on their new and shiny “professional” $5000 camera, because God forbid something not be sharp enough in the corners, because that’s the only objective measure of photography that counts in the online forums, because everything needs to be objectively measured in order to get a pay-to-win situation. If you actually had to look at the pictures themselves, one might get a heretical thought that twenty years ago cameras and lenses were perfectly good enough to produce beautiful pictures that could be printed as large as a normal wall would take it.

It’s not all bad – that nonsense allowed me to buy some excellent lenses used very cheaply, because people who absolutely had to have the best and newest stuff are dumping the yesteryear’s bright and shiny gear for pittance, and I just scooped it all up with a Muttley snicker.

Something interesting apparently happened while I was absent; it started while I was still very much in the photo gear thing, but it developed further over the years. You see, Canon had a nasty habit of merely warming up their lenses and sensors, the next generation being packed in a more modern and fancy case but not removing any of the optical flaws of the previous generation. The price, however, tended to grow steadily. Since people could do nothing about this, they merely complained; the professional market was split between Canon and Nikon and they both did very similar things. However, at some point Sony, the producer of the most advanced sensors on the market, decided to enter the high-end amateur market with their A7 series of full frame cameras, accompanied with Zeiss-branded lenses that were supposed to evoke money-spending emotions in retired dentists. However, something incredible happened: the professional photographers decided that Canon lenses can be easily adapted to the Sony body, and they work just fine, thus allowing them to get rid of Canon and their stupid bullshit. However, as they migrated to Sony en masse, they started asking for more professional features in the bodies, and for better native lenses, and so Sony, unable to believe their luck, very quickly mobilized their immense resources, and made some of the best glass in the world – starting from the Minolta G heritage, but quickly exceeding it with the modern designs in their “price no object” GM series. They also made high-end A9 and A1 series cameras that are basically mobile supercomputers with incredible processing speed, designed for sports and wildlife photography, but of course primarily targeting all sorts of wealthy geeks who want to “be professionals”. Across a decade, Sony became the new no1, and Canon found themselves in an unenviable position where they had to instantly get their shit together or otherwise Sony will eat their lunch and put them out of business. So, they took the mirrorless thing seriously and created a very good series of lenses and cameras in the RF range, and obsoleting the SLR range and EF lenses. This worked well enough that the high-end market is now almost evenly split between Sony and Canon, with Nikon being the distant third.

That aside, I also found out that I have to retire the Canon 5d. After I used it for more than a decade, Biljana took it over and continued to use it for another decade, but a few days ago I took it in order to test her new macro lens and saw that it’s quite fucked. The AF was showing very bad back focus and erratic behaviour, the light meter overexposed every third shot by seven stops or something, the screen was so washed out one couldn’t make anything out on it, and the viewfinder accumulated so much dust over the 19 years of use, it’s now really bad. All in all, the thing refuses to die outright, but at this point this is actually worse, because all the things that have half-failed accumulate to the point where the camera looks like it’s actively resisting your efforts with its decrepit nonsense. So, it’s being relegated to my camera museum, and Biljana got a Canon RP body, which apparently works great with EF lenses.

It’s actually funny how staying out of some specialised scene and re-joining it after many years gives you perspective.

I’ve been out for the better part of a month; some covid variant, I guess. It was messing with my lungs, and I had a slight fever for weeks every time I exerted myself physically, so I had to essentially stay put and wait for things to get better. I lost September somewhere. The symptoms were reasonably mild, but persistent, and I didn’t feel like pulling the devil by the tail.

When I got better, I got myself a new lens to motivate myself to go out more and take pictures. It’s a Sony FE 50mm f/1.8, the cheapest and lightest 50mm for the system, and I like it a lot, since a heavy lens would be pointless for me – what good is the best image quality in the world if it’s so impractical I always leave it at home and take all the pictures with the iPhone, which makes everything look like crap? With this one, I get excellent image quality with very few compromises, and I can still use shallow depth of field for closeups.

Yeah, the autofocus is pretty awful, but I don’t care much, since I’m not shooting sports. That’s what I always had difficulties explaining to people on photographic forums: I don’t actually care for autofocus or some weird gimmicky features on the spec sheet. I care for things that matter for the kind of pictures I’m taking – smooth bokeh, tonal depth, color quality, dynamic range, landscape detail etc. I will nitpick forever over the things that matter to me, and just brush off stuff that doesn’t. I used to change cameras quite frequently before technology of the early digital cameras caught up with what I wanted, but once Canon 5d came out, I held on to it for decades and Biljana still uses it now. Now I’m using Sony A7II for I don’t know how long, 8 years or something. Those things became really, really good somewhere around 2006, and I simply don’t need the new and improved version. I did, however, need some motivation to start taking the camera with me again, and I guess I need to buy something new every now and then to change my perspective enough to make it worthwhile to take pictures, because shooting the same things gets old quickly.

I was on Hvar for the last ten days, mostly to try to soak up the last warm and sunny days of the year, and also take pictures. This time I had a new lens to work with, the Sony FE 90mm G Macro:

So, what’s so cool about this one and what is it that it does, that can’t be done with the equipment that I already have. tl;dr: It’s the best macro lens in the world.

It has the least chromatic aberrations wide open, greatest sharpness, wonderful front and rear bokeh, image stabilization, autofocus and weather resistance. If you want to work in the closeup and macro range, which I do a lot, it’s the best lens you can get, with the possible exceptions of Zeiss Makro-Planar 100mm f/2 and Olympus m.Zuiko 60mm f/2.8 Macro. As a portrait lens, the Sony is so good, they compare it with Zeiss Batis 85mm f/1.8, which is one of the best portrait lenses out there. So, considering what you’re getting, it’s actually a bargain, regardless of the apparently high price. The price seems high as long as you don’t look at what it does and what you’d have to get to match it. So, why is it better than what I used so far, which is a Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 on macro extension tubes? First of all, Canon creates completely different-looking images, so it’s not a direct replacement, it’s a different tool in a toolbox, like hammer and pliers. In the same way, a Minolta MD 50mm f/1.7 on macro extenders makes completely different images, and I would prefer it for some things. What Sony 90mm G Macro does is allow me to take this:

… and in the next moment, without changing lenses or removing macro extenders, it allows me to take this:

Essentially, it’s a wonderfully versatile walkaround lens for my kind of photography, and the only thing I need to complement it is a good wideangle.

Talking about wideangles, I was kinda worried about the problems some photographers had with Canon lenses adapted to Sony FE bodies, where sharpness would drop off towards the edge of the frame. The problem is supposedly caused either by a focusing error, or interference with parts of the adapter, or with the FE mount itself, which is narrow for a 35mm. I couldn’t test the issue with my EF 17-40mm f/L lens, because it’s always unsharp in the corners due to its inferior optical design, but I did test it with the EF 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye, and the problem doesn’t exist with the Viltrox III adapter:

The edges and corners are completely sharp, and the only limitation is the depth of field (as visible on the above image in the bottom corners). Maybe my adapter is just that good; I do think the problem would show itself with the widest-angle lens there is. I would not hesitate to use Canon EF wideangles on a Sony FE body with this adapter, when edge and corner sharpness is critical.

There’s also controversy regarding the Sony FE 28-70mm f/3.5-5.6 OSS kit lens and its usability. In my experience, the lens is excellent. It’s very sharp even wide open, it doesn’t create distortions, chromatic aberrations or flare; vignetting is visible wide open but not when stopped down, and if used as a landscape photography lens from a tripod with meticulous technique, it creates stunningly good images and has no flaws whatsoever. Its problems are of different kind: it has poor close focus, so it’s useless for closeup/macro shots, and the aperture is slow, which makes it difficult to isolate the subject from background. When those two aspects are combined, it becomes useless as a walkaround lens for me, and considering how great the aperture blades are designed and how good the bokeh could be if only it focused closer and had bigger aperture, it’s a shame. However, as a moderate-wideangle to light-telephoto landscape lens, it’s excellent:

People have been maligning the Sony Vario-Tessar T* FE 24-70mm f/4 ZA OSS because it’s expensive and it isn’t sharper than the “kit lens”. The thing is, if it’s as sharp as the kit lens, it’s plenty sharp, thank you very much. It would be really difficult to get it sharper than completely sharp. As for it being expensive, I agree, but it also has harder contrast and color saturation than the 28-70mm, and it also has fixed aperture, and some dust and moisture sealing, which might make it attractive for some people. For me, the 24-70mm f/4 doesn’t add any real versatility that would make it useful for closeup photography, and I prefer the milder contrast and color rendition of the 28-70mm kit lens.

Another thing I got was the Meike battery grip for Sony A7II.

Essentially, it’s a cheap copy of the Sony battery grip, and is as good. It addresses the problem of poor camera ergonomics, and also the mediocre battery life, at the cost of making the camera bulkier and heavier. I’m not sure the result is as comfortable as a Canon 5d body, but is significantly less awkward and tendon-pain-inducing than the Sony A7II body alone with a large and heavy lens attached, when you go for long photographic walks. I recommend at least trying it; it might not be the solution to everyone’s problems, though.

As for the camera I used, the Sony A7II, I’m in love with the colors, resolution and the depth of information in deep shadows during the long exposures. I would like it to be less noisy during the long exposures, in higher ISO and in deep shadows, but regardless, the image quality is fantastic. The only problem with Sony that I had so far is that the first copy of the FE 90mm G Macro arrived with dead electronics – it was completely fubared: no aperture, no focus, no nothing. Some flat cable probably had a flimsy connection, or was subject to G-shock in transit, but I returned it, received a functioning replacement and my experiences with the lens so far were superlative, except that it’s a heavy brick. There are several other lenses I’m considering: one is a wideangle with better geometry and field curvature than my EF 17-40mm f/4L, and another is a telephoto, which is something I never bought because the good ones are very expensive and very heavy, and I would probably end up not using it much, but I still miss one considering how much I liked ones I had for review years ago. But yeah, that’s about it, rambling over. 🙂