Buying Fancy Cameras

Sooner or later it happens to most keen photographers.

"I suppose that my present camera is all right. But one of those geewhizbang models (costing three times what my present camera did) would be so much better. I think I shall mortgage one of the children and go GET one."

Okay - I'll bite ..... WHY will it be so much better?

If said keen photographer is about to embark upon a career in sports action photojournalism or about to head off to some bullet infested world trouble spot or about to work full time in some highly specialised commercial/scientific field of imagemaking there may be some very good reasons INDEED for buying a geewhizzbang.

If you expect a camera to perform faultlessly all day every day for months on end in hot, humid, dusty or icy conditions, bouncing in and out of suitcases etc, high end designated professional bodies and lenses truly make sense. You want the camera to be sealed against undesirable conditions, be able to shoot fast and long. You want back up flash cards on line. You want ultra bright viewfinders. You want bodies that will endure constant heavy use without complaint.

Gear that earns you a good full time living, enabling you to get the paying pics AS and WHEN you need them is worth every dollar you pay for it. End of story. In the digital photography world, if the gear is still functioning reliably (however beat up it looks) after four years, you have done very well. It's time to update to the latest capabilities by then, in any case.

You will notice that most of the camera characteristics, to which I refer, have something to do with physical body toughness, weather sealing, high activation number shutters and backup image file security. About the only actual picture taking function I mentioned was the high fps rate.

Let's return to the everyday REAL world of you and me ... the keen amateur. Aside from the small percentage of us with more time and money than is entirely respectable, we seldom use our cameras for more than a dozen or so frames every couple of days. Several people I know, who describe themselves as enthusiastic amateurs, would be lucky to shoot more than a dozen or more images per WEEK on average.

Do we really NEED the characteristics of the professional kit I describe above. Of course not!

When I have a camera which is four years old, it usually looks and behaves as good as new. Why? It's simple! I DON'T crawl around in middle eastern deserts, dodging stray mortar shells. I DON'T stand for hours at football games with my camera rattling away at 9 fps during every critical play. My life is NOT so hectic that I don't have the time to put my cameras down gently and avoid scrapping them along rock walls. I DON'T have to stand outside some celebrity mansion in the rain, hoping for a glimpse of a movie star having sex with the pool attendant. What is more, very few of YOU do these things either.

The vast majority of shutterbugs do not NEED professional spec cameras. Let me repeat that. Most of us are silly to be spending big bucks on geewhizbang cameras that provide capabilities which will never be required.

"Ah but ...", I hear you say, "... surely the pro gear will give me better images!"

"Ah .... NO", I hear myself reply.

If the truth be known, for almost ALL of us amateurs, for almost ALL of the time, top-of-line, D3 type cameras of this world will provide NO better images than the D90 level cameras (at one fifth the price) which are the practical, sensible units we OUGHT to be using.

I discuss the Nikon range simply because I know it best (not because it necessarily IS better than some other brand). If we shoot an average of (say) 50 images a week, in four years we will probably have shot a total of 10,400 images. I hear some people screaming that they would shoot FIVE TIMES that many. Okay then let's make it 250 images a week, EVERY week. After four years we would have shot 52,000 pictures.

The D90 has a shutter which has been tested to more than 100,000 successful activations. Why do we need a D3?

The D90 has weather sealing not dissimilar to the D3. Why do we need a D3? The hires LCD screen on a D90 is the SAME as that on a D3. Why do we need a D3? At all but absurd ISO levels, observable image quality from a D90 is effectively IDENTICAL to that of a D3. Why do we need one again?

Of course the D3 is bigger and heavier than a D90. Remind me - why is that a GOOD thing? The D3 is full frame while D90 is only DX. There is lots of evidence that unless you use correspondingly better (AND doubly expensive) lenses on a full frame body, your picture quality may actually get WORSE. D3 anyone?

Look. We can go on and on about overweight files being a pain in the neck, soft cuddly rubber grips which inevitably peel off and regiments of fiddly, gimmicky, totally unnecessary features which endure the life of the camera unactivated. One starts to run out of reasons why us shutterbugs will ever NEED a fancy camera beyond something like the D90.

Funds burning a hole in the pocket? Want to spend money on your hobby. Take some advice. Go buy admittance to a very good course about quality post processing. You'll thank yourself for the rest of your photographic life.

Just before we go - there remains ONE solid reason for buying a geewhizbang camera. That reason is ... STATUS. Everyone knows that he (or she) with the best camera must be the best photographer. "Hey, there's a guy with a D3 ... let's go ask his advice." Sigh!

Shaken Confidence in Web Based Galleries

I have written several articles on this blog, encouraging people to consider the use of web based photo galleries as a means of displaying their work to the world, providing any BODY at any TIME with instant access to their work for a wide variety of reasons.

Potential customers get to see what you can do before giving you work. Clients get quick and convenient access to proofs. Family, living long distances away, can see the progress of children and grandchildren. Friends and relatives get to see pictures of family celebrations and one's adventures on vacation. Fellow photographer hobbiests get to admire one another's work, learn from one another and ENCOURAGE each other.

Potentially the greatest benefit of web-based galleries is that your images are stored remotely from your home and are thief proof, fire proof, flood proof and (theoretically) digital crash proof.

It seems I spoke too soon.

The recent near disaster over at Pbase.com has shaken my confidence somewhat and I am having to revise my thinking with regard to the security advantages of web galleries. Pbase.com stores and provides access to hundreds of millions of images - belonging to hundreds of thousands of photographers across the globe. Just how safe ARE these images?

For those who are not aware, the published story goes as follows. A large datacentre in North Carolina, where the server and data storage for Pbase is kept, suffered a major power outage on September 24. The resident UPS devices became exhausted before power could be restored and the site simply went down in disorder. Upon the restoration of power, the server failed to come up correctly and several days of frantic activity were necessary before parts of the site could be revived at all. It appears that it had become necessary to install an entirely new server and port across the ENTIRE database of images, gallery formatting, management software etc to new hard drive banks.

The result is that (as of yesterday - October 11) not everything was working correctly. Evidently, some data HAS been lost, not every subscriber's galleries HAVE been satisfactorily restored to their previous state, forums are NOT working and the all important statistics system (possibly the most comprehensive on the web), reporting daily activity and hit counts to individual subscribers - is STILL down.

All of this has been discussed at length on various web forums and a lot of people are unable to understand how such a major website can simply collapse like this given the theoretically foolproof redundancy and off-site back up systems which are in such widespread use today.

A number of questions come to mind:

a) Could my thousands of images on Pbase have been entirely lost?
b) Just how vulnerable are such systems to power outages, system failure, computer viruses and systematic cyber attacks?
c) Is the business model for such web gallery systems viable? Does it really allow for the kind of bulletproof security which we have come to anticipate?

Now let's get some things crystal clear. I think the guys who conceived, designed and implemented Pbase have created a wonderful thing. Aside from the happenings back on September 24, I have had nothing but GOOD experiences with Pbase. I have no evidence that the people in charge at Pbase are trying to do anything OTHER than what they believe to be in the best interests of their subscribers.

Having said that, my confidence in the Pbase system has taken a severe hit. Given that I sometimes use my galleries for professional purposes, I can't really afford to have my display site down. Consequently I have opened another set of galleries at Smugmug. i.e.
http://www.hobbsie.smugmug.com

Let me voice some personal impressions concerning Pbase and Smugmug.

To my mind, the Smugmug software is smoother, faster, more presentable and more flexible than the Pbase equivalent. What is more, I believe that my pictures and the display pages simply look BETTER at Smugmug.

On the other hand, the stats routines at Pbase (WHEN they are in operation) provide fantastic feedback to subscribers. As a Pbase supporter, you are told how often people look at your pictures along with which individual PAGES and IMAGES they look at. The communications system between supporters is EQUALLY brilliant, along with the simply SUPERB "Photo-a-Day" setup which shows EVERY new PaD image to EVERYONE. At Pbase you feel "connected" to a global network of like minded "fellows" in a way which simply ISN'T as true at Smugmug (or anywhere ELSE to my knowledge).

I await future developments in the Web gallery industry with great interest.

PS In the interests of accuracy, I note that the Pbase forums are now back up - 18 days after the power outage. I notice ON the forums that quite a number of Pbase supporters have done just as I had done - start up galleries on Smugmug. It was with some interest that I note the establishment of a "Pbase Refugees" community at Smugmug. Pbase statistics routines are still down.