Over the last few weeks (Jan-Feb 2012)it`s been cold and in general miserable so to stop me going mad and to get a job done that has been on my mind for a while I dug out all my full external hard drives. I rarely delete images, I tend to make folders of the days shoot, date them and store them.So! there I was faced with the drives and gradually ploughed through them and found a number of images that were good enough to use and keep me out of trouble till the weather warms up a touch and it`s more of a joy to get out and about in the fresh air.
So! what have I found out after going back maybe 10 years or more? I found that don`t matter how low a pixel count a camera has or how difficult to use or slow to focus etc a dedicated photographer will still find and make the most of the equipment to hand. I`ve looked back on images taken with the humble Nikon 900 series 3 million pixel images and although not any good for stock work certainly make for decent web based images and I`ve put aside a few from that Nikon cmaera. Next up were images from the Canon D30(3 million pixels)and the D60 (6 million pixels)and again those cameras took superb images and I`ve selected a number of those images to work on in the future.
All of a sudden some images started to appear on screen that were( within the realms of my humble shooting skills) absolutely head and shoulders above not only the older stuff as previously mention but (wait for it) much more detailed and sharper than my now sold 1DSmk3 and current 5d2 and most of the images were shot previous to me owning and shooting manual focus Contax lenses. Those images was shot on the Canon 5D but mostly the original Canon 1ds. So! what`s going on then? well basically it boils down to 11 million pixels being spread over a full frame sensor making the photo sites(pixels) a lot larger than they are in lets say the 5d2 where you have 21 million pixels spread over the same area, which means smaller photosites so more noise. Now don`t get me wrong , cameras like the 5d2 with it`s super lcd, live view and built in video are out of this world for day to day general shooting and will always bring home the goods, are big enough to print massive and any decent stock agent will want the images on sale on their site. But there is no mistaking what I`m seeing on a 27" calibrated Dell monitor! those images from the likes of the 1ds take some beating (just like your early girlfriends that you side stepped in search of better things and then realised further down the line just how in harmony you were with them:-)

So! I wonder what the images from a good 1ds and something like my Contax 21mm 2.8 or Leica 50mm f2 Sumicron will look like???

I`ve seen a low mileage copy and am in negotiations for it so I`ll let you know just how it turns out(maybe I never should have let it go in the first place but we all get carried along in the rush to have the latest)
I`m driving a 10 year old VW tdi Golf at present and it went in for it`s annual MOT just yesterday, they loaned me a modern pool car and after driving that around for the day I`m not letting my Golf go till it drops:-)

17.02.2012