04 October 2020

So, everybody is always making fun of the following sentence: „Hey, this is a huge and expensive camera! You must be a really awesome photographer!“
Then there are people like Chase Jarvis who stand for the mantra: „The best camera is the one you have with you!“

Well, we all like to talk about gear and we all know that there are certain boundaries to cheap cameras and many think an expensive camera on a novice won’t do better than the cheap ones, so let us get that out of the way and let me talk about where I came from gear wise and where I’m now.

My photographic journey startet in school actually where I was attending a short one week photo class with the old Minolta SRT-101 of my father. I did shoot with it for that week but we didn’t process the pictures ourselves and after the week all the fuzz was kind of over.

The next time I began doing photography again, was when my father gave me a Minolta X31, my first digital camera, for when I began my studies in Hamburg. This little gem was and still is a very nice compact camera with a bright lens and good image quality for its size.

The next camera was what started my becoming a photographer. I bought a Kodak Z710 in 2006, mainly because I wanted more reach than my Dimage X31. I snapped the standard set of vacation and street pictures with the Kodak and began looking into HDR, which started me getting into manual exposure and digital post processing. As the Kodak was very poor for manual exposures, I searched for something new and got the Minolta (again ;-)) Dimage 7 from my uncle. Sadly this beautiful camera died half a year after I got it. Bought a Fuji S9600 as a follow up but realized pretty soon that there was no real step up in image quality compared to the bigger sensor of the Dimage 7. That’s why I sold my Fuji and startet getting into DSLRs.

From Nikon to Pentax back to Nikon, to Canon, to Olympus and finally reaching Samsung my journey took me through a wealth of camera bodies since February 2009. I have started DSLR photography with a 3MP Nikon D1 and upgraded to the D1x after the D1 died half a year after I purchased it used. Those cameras where true pro working machines build to last, huge, heavy and sturdy. After that I went from Samsung GX20 (Pentax K20D) to Nikon D200, than EOS 40D and after the Autofocus failed 3 months after purchase got an Olympus E600 which only lasted 1 month before a critically Sensor failure. Following the e600 I got a Samsung NX11 and shot with it for more than two years. The camera was later replaced by a NX20 followed by the NX300m, which I shot until the end of Samsungs NX camera endeavour. After Samsung gave up its camera business, I went searching for something new and ended up with the plan to go DSLR again, as most digital viewfinders had a much to short eye point which meant I always had to look around inside of them to see everything through my glasses. This has gotten better today. I looked into the Nikon D700, Olympus E-3, Pentax K-3 and EOS 5D and finally decided against my heart (which loved the E-3) and got the hyped 5D. The 5D was equipped with way to many medicore lenses instead of just one or two great ones and after another year I decided to get something newer. As I had already sold nearly all my lenses already I switched Systems again and am since using my Nikon D750. 

The end result of my 11 years of being infected by GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrom) is the awareness, that every single one of my cameras was able to shoot very nice to even stunning photos but I was always put down by the "smart" choice instead of opting for the camera that got my juices flowing. I recently added an Olympus E-5 to my Nikon D750 and I have so much fun trying to master the E-5 and my pro Olympus lenses (12-60 SWD and 50-200 SWD) that my D750 spent the last five months in the drawer... Maybe now my heart has finally found a camera... At least that is my hope.