PhotographerEarlier this week one of my Fujis, which has been my reliable workhorse for studio and commercial gigs, started to give up the ghost. It was starting to misfire the shutter, and was generally sounding rather rough. By the weekend it had completely died.
I started to think what I should put my money into as a back-up body to my shiny new D300s. The Fuji did make some lovely images, and can still be had for reasonable prices, albeit limited to used examples. It is however a fairly elderly example, and I’ve come to realise that the economics of servicing the old boy is just too out there for me to be able to reasonably hold on to one anyway. I still have one body of course, but that’s been sold due to those very facts. It’s the end of era; I’ve moved on from my Fuji fix.
What is a fit replacement for something of a legend amongst the commercial and wedding/portraiture crowd? Surely my D300s will go some way to replacing it? Well, not quite; they are indeed quite similar in use, but beyond ergonomics they don’t really share a huge amount. The D300 is a speedy bastard, and requires a bit of massaging of RAW files to get the best out of it, when you do though, it easily matches and then betters the technical output of the Fuji, even if it doesn’t have the immediate loveliness which resulted from Fuji’s processing witchcraft. The D300 takes more effort in post, the Fuji requires you to fiddle about in the camera a little more (I’ll be quite glad to be rid of the stupidity of the Fuji menus for one). Not that that really matters for the majority of my work, which isn’t ridiculously time pressured as per documentary/photojournalism.
With the need for manipulation in the Nikon files in mind, I decided that what I needed was something which consistently put out soft-proof ready files with as little meddling from Photoshop and Lightroom as possible. They didn’t have to be technically spot on, but would be good enough to tide clients over and placate them until the real goodness of the D300’s files and the Leica’s scanned negs arrived in their eager hands. Having asked around, tried about 15 different bodies of all different shapes and sizes I came to a decision.
That decision was an E-P1. It isn’t perfect; it’s a bit on the slow side, isn’t natively M or F-Mount (which matters when you’ve got an investment in glass) and doesn’t have a decent solution for manual focus. It doesn’t matter that it’s slow, as I can cover fast-moving stuff with the Nikon or Leica, and the majority of my work doesn’t involve fast (built for comfort rather than speed you see), nor does the mount issue hold given the availability of a plethora of mount adapters. The manual focus thing still jars, but given the fact that I use my 24mm M-mount on it 90% of the time for paying gigs (and the 17mm it came with for pleasure) I have a huge amount of DoF and just go hyperfocal, which nicely compensates.
Best of all however, the files which come SOOC are spot on for what I need. They’re sufficient to form digital contact sheets before the hard-proof files from the big-boy cameras come out to play. After all, in a backup, as with many things, sufficiency is all that’s needed.
