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.