One of the most frequently asked questions, regarding photo equipment, is which brand to get, which is the best, and what to avoid.

To put the obvious thing aside, my knowledge about photographic brands is limited to what I’ve used, and what I’ve seen others use. Of the major brands, I never used Nikon, Hasselblad, Panasonic, Fujifilm, Pentax and Leica. Sure, I technically used a very old Leica from the 1940s to shoot my first roll of film, and I used a Nikon D80 a few times but no, for all intents and purposes I haven’t used those and I don’t know much about them. With Nikon, the reason is that they publicly stated that they will never make a 35mm full frame camera, exactly at the time when I was deciding between Canon and Nikon, so I went with Canon. Of course, Nikon announced a 35mm digital camera soon thereafter, but by that point I completely lost any interest in them, since they were for most intents and purposes identical to Canon, and it’s one of those situations where you need to pick one and stick with it.

My main suggestion would be to see what your intentions are, first. If you want to get something basic to learn photography, get something used and cheap in the category you’re interested in, learn for a while and then you’ll know more about what you want to do. Don’t worry about getting “the right brand” initially, because there’s no reason why you should stay within the same system if you only have one camera and one lens. However, if you are really into it, the best advice is to see what the professionals are using as their bread and butter system, and just get that. Main brands have the greatest availability of new and used equipment, the used marketplace is very active and if it’s a system like Canon EF, that’s producing lenses in the same system since 1987, there will be abundance of high quality used equipment that’s fully compatible. For instance, the earliest Canon EF lenses work great on the new RF bodies with the Canon adapter; there are no compatibility issues. This makes Canon RF an excellent modern system to get into, because the selection of glass is extremely deep. With Sony, the situation is theoretically worse because the adapters for Canon EF glass aren’t fully compatible, but there’s a wide selection of 3^rd party modern glass from brands such as Tamron and Sigma, and almost anything else can be adapted to Sony, so the selection of glass is almost endless.

Avoid marginal and new brands. Anything non-mainstream means poor availability of everything, and high prices. Also, avoid “luxury brands”, the ones that should belong in the LVMH group; stuff like Leica, Hasselblad, Zeiss and so on. Have in mind that Schneider-Kreuznach recently had Rokinon/Samyang make lenses for their brand, and “Zeiss” lenses are produced by Cosina and Tamron. Hasselblad had their H series of digital cameras and lenses produced by Fuji, and they have recently been bought by DJI, the Chinese drone company. Leica is more-less married to Panasonic. So, yeah, that’s what you would be buying if you’re a sucker for old German and Swedish names from last century. You’d be getting Cosina, Tamron, Fuji or Panasonic.

My logic is that quality is where the money is, and money is in the main stream. The most main-stream companies can afford the greatest budget for development of lenses and cameras, because that’s what people are actually buying. If you think some marginal boutique brand can afford the engineers, equipment and the patents of a Sony or a Canon, you’re kidding yourself. The reason the boutique brands are expensive isn’t because they are better, it’s because they have to be, because they don’t have the economy of scale. You’re not paying for quality, you’re paying for development and manufacturing costs divided by the number of expected sales. Zeiss is literally not making anything Tamron or Cosina couldn’t produce, because guess who’s actually manufacturing their designs. I know people like to delude themselves into loyalty to small brands, thinking it’s a competition between handcrafted gems made by skilled artisans, vs. some nameless faceless corporation, but it doesn’t actually work like this. How it works is that Sony sees that there’s a market, and then just hires the best people in the business, acquires everything relevant from Minolta and Olympus, and then has the budget and the market to produce some of the most wonderful lens designs I’ve ever seen, stuff that merges art, science and the highest optical tech. The lesser companies will just be unable to afford retaining the best optical engineers, so in the end, it’s the big guys who will end up with the nerd artisans designing the most insane glass. Also, you’ll be getting a honest product for a honest price, not marketing bullshit worthy of Rolex or LVMH.

Sure, it adds to the mystique of a lens if it’s branded Zeiss, Leica or Hasselblad, and since photographers create art they want to believe that some unique properties of the glass helped create it, but honestly, a lens is what it is, regardless of the brand. It has objective, scientific and technological properties that can be tested. I don’t even mind lenses being expensive if the price is backed by quality. I just prefer to pay for the quality of the lens, not the quality of some marketing department doing the branding.

Image produced by absolutely nothing fancy.

Also, don’t buy into the bullshit about main stream brands producing confectionary images, that look “artificial” or “plasticky”, while the boutique or “art” brands produce “film-like” or “genuinely artistic” results. It’s complete nonsense. What the main stream brands produce is high quality gear for honest money, and what you’ll do with it, whether it will be plasticky nonsense or genuine art, that’s up to you. Some people say “digital” as if it’s a derogatory thing, and they say “film-like” as if it’s praise, but honestly I’ve seen so much “film-like” ugly trash, and so many absolutely beautiful, artistic digital images, that I don’t even know what they mean by all that bullshit. If you think Michelangelo had super-special artistic hammer and chisel with which he created his sculptures, then you’re an idiot. What cameras and lenses need to be is reliable, well designed and well made. They need to have technical properties required for the desired application. Whether the result is art, that’s up to the photographer.

…why am I not using it myself? Regarding the four thirds setup from the last article, where I recommended it to beginners who want to learn photography.

I could do a short or long form answer to this.

The long form is, I did use four thirds sensor cameras for quite a while, and I’m very much used to both the aspect ratio and the way the sensor works, depth of field and all. It’s not that I don’t like it, or that I can’t produce good pictures with it. However, it’s not doing everything I want. For instance, I tried photographing a night sky with stars, and the picture would fall apart from noise. Or I would try to take pictures of deep dark tones in something, and they would turn brown from noise contamination, instead of the deep black tones. Or I would try to control the depth of field, and I would have too many constraints put on it – you need to come super close, you need greater focal length, you need more aperture, and so on. With 35mm, I can blur things out at f/4 with a wide focal length if I want to, and with 4/3 I’d need a f/2 lens for that, and when you get a f/2 lens, it’s both expensive and heavy and you look at that and think, wasn’t this supposed to be a small and light camera system?

Also, with 35mm it’s easy for me to blur out the background, and it’s still easy to get everything sharp for a large landscape print. It’s easy to get both resolution and dynamic range and reasonably low noise. With four thirds, it’s “pick one”, but then you lose the other. With 35mm, I can have 24 to 61 megapixels of resolution while retaining deep, voluminous tonality in the dark. I can have extremely shallow or very deep depth of field. I can occasionally be forced to crop something quite strongly, and still retain enough resolution to make a big print. Sure, it has its own technical nonsense – for instance, the Olympus four thirds lenses are of such technical quality, that I got quite a surprise when I switched to 35mm Canon and it turned out that even the high quality lenses display all sorts of CA, corner softness etc., that I wasn’t seeing on four thirds. However, the overall image quality on Canon was still better and more to my liking.

The excellent image quality of the Olympus “kit” zooms means that for very little money you can get the general image quality – colours, clarity, lack of optical defects – that is otherwise typical of very expensive glass on the 35mm. The sensor on the camera, however, has a much narrower sweet spot than the 35mm. With the Canon 5d, I could get a very “juicy” ISO 3200 shot, while on the four thirds cameras of the time ISO 800 was already a mess. Sure, the modern micro four thirds cameras have much better sensors, but still, you really need to push technology there, and 24MP on a four thirds sensor is pushing it about as much as a 100MP sensor would be pushing 35mm.

So, although it’s a great system for getting into serious photography for the price of the memory card for my A7RV, and you can print a very nice exhibition on B2 to B1 sizes with the modern four thirds cameras and lenses, I like how I can take a casual shot of a cup on my desk with the 35mm, and it becomes a study of light and shade. It makes things easy for me. I understand that might not be the case universally; some people actually struggle with 35mm, exactly because of the depth of field that makes it difficult to nail the exact focus and contain the subject within the DoF, and four thirds can make this simpler.

Also, as one learns photography, they will make so many mistakes that it almost doesn’t matter what equipment they use, as long as it is minimally competent. A beginner will struggle to get things in focus, they will struggle to hold the camera steady, they will struggle with composition, they will shoot into the sun and make a mess of it, they will shoot the wrong things at the wrong times of the day, they will forget to take the tripod and then try to shoot blurred-out water and get everything blurry instead. They will try to take pictures of waterfalls during the day and then understand that they have 1/1000s exposure, then try to stop it down to f/22, still not have long enough exposure but come home with a card full of shots completely soft from diffraction. I made all those mistakes in my time, and my landscape shots were so technically flawed that I couldn’t even get fully sharp 5MP on the E-1. So, whether a beginner gets a 24MP body or a 5MP one, they will struggle with composition so much that almost everything they make will end up in the trash, and the rest will be misfocused, motion-blurred, or have some other technical flaw that will render it useless. In case they actually nail the composition on something, the technical deficiencies will either limit the actual resolution or make it irrelevant altogether. So, better not dump too much money into that phase of the learning process; you need something that makes it easy to learn, not something that aims at technical perfection in the hands of a master.

You can learn just fine on a 200 EUR system. As you improve, you’ll know what you want and what to get, but one has to start somewhere. If you have a smartphone with a good camera, you can practice composition with that. What can a smartphone do?

Many nice things. It’s a one-trick pony, though, which is why I recommended the used four thirds set instead, but you can start learning urban or landscape composition with a smartphone just fine. I obviously used a smartphone on occasion, because that’s something I always have with me, even when I don’t take a proper camera.

So, it’s much like playing music. A beginner can take a Stradivari and still make sounds like a strangled cat. A master violinist can take a beginner’s instrument and sound amazing. This doesn’t mean a beginner couldn’t benefit from a well-made instrument that makes it easy for him to learn. The fortunate thing with photography is that the digital cameras were already quite good 20 years ago, and you can now get them for the price of a good memory card. It was much worse before, when the technology was progressing quickly, and even the newest stuff wasn’t all that great, while the older stuff was completely useless. You couldn’t get an older, used digicam and have it be any good. It’s different today. You can get a used Canon 5d mk II with 21MP resolution for 250 EUR or so. I didn’t recommend it in the previous article because the lenses would make the whole system more expensive, but in any case, photography is now quite accessible.