What I found was that, to my eyes, my small sensor camera doesn't make fish look as fishy as my large sensor camera does. This was the first time I used the X10 to photograph a decent fish and the results were quite pleasing. A couple of days later I took a DSLR along and thought I'd try some comparison shots. Back home the shots from teh DSLR looked much more 'fishy'. That's the only way I can describe them. Not just the colours but the way the form of teh fish was revealed.
At full resolution on the computer screen there was also a difference that was subtle. More detail resolved and clearer. I wasn't using an expensive lens on the camera either. My next comparison was a couple of self takes. The two shots (of different fish but both taken with flash) are in the composite below.
I much prefer the 'look' of the lower image (despite it's technical flaws caused by me rushing the picture taking using a previously untried method of tripping the shutter).
For the casual camera user the small sensor should have the benefit of getting more in focus for shots like this - yet when I browse fishing blogs I still see people with in focus faces behind blurred fish. However this is often only apparent when the pictures are viewed large. At the sizes the embedded photos are on the screen they look quite acceptable. This is something Eric Weight touched upon recently when he mentioned the rise of tablets and smart phones for viewing photographs.
Eric was bemoaning how the smaller screens will force the majority of photographs to favour subjects that appear large in the frame at the expense of fine detail. It is rather ironic that this shift in viewing practices is occurring at a time when cameras are gaining more pixels than ever before.
Another way of looking at this shift is that it is a return to how casual amateur photography began. I have photographs taken by my father during the Second World War (I also have the camera) which are nothing more than contact prints from the 120 negatives (the negatives are long gone). That was how all early photographic prints were made. If you wanted a large print you used a large negative or plate. In a way the viewing experience is going retro!
Then again, as most photographs today are taken by looking at a small screen on the camera (or phone), the resulting image is likely to be viewed at pretty much the size it was conceived. This will avoid the pitfall of making these images too detailed. The downside is that just as the compression used to make MP3s and CDs reduces the subtleties of sound, so making small photographs to be viewed small reduces the visual subtleties. This seems to be a symptom of the age we live in. Good enough is all that most people want. There listening and viewing experience is all too often either transitory or an adjunct to some other experience. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. All too often I find myself trying to simultaneously read a blog and listen to a radio programme - taking in neither.
With fishing taking up a lot of my time this last fortnight, and enjoyably, I was beginning to wonder whether I still had any drive to make photographs. After all I don't do anything much with them. Then it stopped raining and I remembered how I'd been thinking of recording the sodden landscape. With nothing else to do I picked up a couple of cameras and set off to see what I could find. Having made some landscapes that I felt were getting somewhere before the fishing took over I had some ideas in mind.
What I have come to realise is that for me the landscape has to have some man-made element in it if I'm to make a picture. I just seem to need some hard edges to help my composition. I'm also finding that black and white often works better. Maybe I'm trying to steer clear of the romanticised landscape? But then again perhaps it's a different kind of romanticism?
The fields around here, and most everywhere else I suspect, are nigh on waterlogged. I've see a few with lying water that farmers have had to cut channels through to drain them. A picture of one might go some way to showing the effect of the rain on agriculture. I found one such today and for once I had taken my tripod with me.
Nothing is simple, and while the shot from the tripod was the most successful (I envisaged the crop when framing the shot) I took one shot hand-held with another camera and lens. The resulting images raised a worrying question.
The left hand picture was taken using a rather expensive lens, the one on the right with a lens I picked up used for about a tenth the price. At these sizes I might as well have used the X10, but comparing the two files at 100% (with the same degree of sharpening applied) I'm hard pressed to tell the two apart when it comes to sharpness and similar pixel-peeping differences. And there isn't that great a difference in the depth of field either - the main reason I had used the tripod was to allow a smaller aperture.
There is a difference between the two 100% crops below (ISO values are not the same - which accounts for some of the image quality drop), but I'm not sure it's enough to get excited about, and is unlikely to be noticed in a print.
For some time I have been thinking that it's better to use the lenses which are most useful rather than the ones that are sharpest. Especially if you have no need to make prints any larger than A3. From that point of view I could take the vast majority of my photographs with my two cheapest zoom lenses.
Where I think the real value of expensive lenses lies is not in the sharpness department that most people seem to rave about, it's in subtle nuances of colour, contrast, and smoothness of the out of focus regions and similar functions that are all but impossible to measure. It's the aesthetic quality of the images they make which is what stops me getting rid of them. But if the photos are only ever going to be seen on an iPad...
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