I believe that from time to time it’s important to change the way you work, whether it is your mindset, technique or equipment.
If you do so it’s also important not to change everything at the same time. For example of you change your technique you shouldn’tchange the camera at the same time as it’ll be more productive to avoid learning a new camera while you are trying to work the lightin a different way, if you know the camera it’ll be easier.
This year I decided to change all the equipment including post processing gear. It was a bit of a stretch because I changed 2 things at the same time.
First I switched from DSLR to Nikon Z mirrorless. A camera is a camera but with the mirrorless you have to rethink your way of taking pics to get the best out of it, you shouldn’t use a mirrorless like a DSLR otherwise stay with the DSLR.
I’m not into trends and I usually hate equipment so there should be a very good reason to switch. For the mirrorless the reasons are the better video abilities, the viewfinder and most important for me, the size and weight reduction.
Weight and size are critical for me. I’ve always tried to reduce the footprint in all my activities and photography is no exception. A mirroless camera is smaller and lighter but the housing is also much smaller.
A Z7 in it’s Subal housing allows me to save almost 2 kilos compare to the same DSLR setup, around 30% gain!
The electronic viewfinder you love it or hate it. Well, we all hate it at the beginning. But once you understand that it can help you a lot to get the exposure right for every single shot you don’t ever want to switch back to DSLR. I now get so confident in the viewfinder that I almost never use thescreen to check the pics in the water, that’s saving time, energy and avoid to be distracted from the scene you are photographing.
Then I decided to switch editing software…that was the most difficult thing to do….! I was a very happy Lightroom user for more than a decade so why did I decided to ditch it? Simply because of Adobe business model. In my opinion with their cloud based solution and subscription model they go against the photographer’s freedom.
Cloud is for me a no go, not for data security issues but for the carbon footprint of the servers…For the same reason I never keep emails on the server, they go direct to my computer and be aware that when you come to my house I throw you out if you use spotify, netflix and other streaming abominations to the environment… as a nature photographer you must do everything you can to reduce your impact. Clean up your act before lecturing people. Then the subscription induces some kind of dependance.
So I went for Capture One. Bold move for me, it was very hard at the beginning to « erase » my workflow and rebuilt a new one.
But after half a year I can say I did what was right. Capture One is superior in every points and I’m amazed by how much the RAW developing module isbetter than Lightroom’s one. I even used it in old files and could recover colors I couldn’t in Lightroom. To get the best out of the big files produced by the Z7 and the power of Capture One I also decided to put my library on SSD external hard drive, it helps a lot to get the best performances and again reducesby 200grams the hard drive weight in the backpack.
Now if I decide to change something else I guess it’ll be on the photography part. But I’ll wait a bit more to enjoy the new camera and post-production setup!
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