New cameras, new possibilities

I have been taking pictures since 1965 and have had many cameras along the way. I still have the beat up old Minolta 101 that I used in high school, and perhaps 75 yards of the black and white film negatives that it produced. When the digital camera revolution arrived and I jumped in with a 1.3 megapixel Olympus. Today we have 24 megapixels or better and there seems to be an arms race among DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera manufacturers like Nikon and Canon; they are adding more and better pixels. But there is a new technology that is gaining ground; mirrorless digital cameras. These have the advantage of not needing a mirror in them, which allows for a smaller and lighter camera with all of the image quality of the bigger and heavier DSLRs.

In the last year I have been experimenting with these new cameras and all of mine are made by Fuji. Wow! They are light and easy to carry and do many things that would have been thought to be miracles 40 years ago, but the bottom line is that the image quality is excellent. Back in the day (1974), my camera had two adjustments; shutter speed and aperture. Today one can alter any aspect of the four major contributors to the image; shutter speed, aperture, sensitivity to light and size and type of file created (.jpg or RAW). (The Photoshop wizards in the world like RAW files because they can make so many changes to them, but I have never learned to use Photoshop and don't really care.)

I am not ready to give up my big cameras, but I find this new world of mirrorless to be intriguing; it is the future. I took my Fujis to my local camera store and loaned them to the owner for a week. He liked them so much that he became a Fuji dealer. There is something to this mirrorless camera revolution. In the end, cameras are just tools and most of them can produce good images if the photographer does his or her part. But mirrorless cameras do it with much less size, weight and cost.

Here is a shot of my Intern building an insect trap. The shop was very dark, the light was flat and I had to push the Fuji pretty hard. I don't think my big cameras could have done any better.