Here's a GX8 pic from today's afternoon walk. Panasonic 12–35/2.8 lens at 35mm & f/5.6. ISO 500. <snip>
-Dave-
You know, it's beginning to seem as though cameras like the m4/3 or even the RX100 could be thought of as "primary" cameras, meant to be used or printed without much tweaking at all. In other words, like the old film cameras, where the emphasis was on getting what you wanted in-camera, with limited possibilities thereafter (in the darkroom.) The bigger sensor cameras like the new Sony or the 810 or the MF cameras are more like "secondary" cameras, where the secondary manipulation of the photo comes to the fore -- basically a data collection that you plan to extensively manipulate and perfect in Lightroom or Photoshop, where the extra capabilities of these camera can really be used, where, for example, you can radically crop yet still get a fine-grained image.
There are all kinds of psychological/historical questions embedded in the way we see images -- do we think of somewhat harsh, noisy, contrasty and even blurry images as "action" or "news" photos simply because we've been trained that way, or is there something eye-like in those images? Something that replicates an eye-brain link? Or, if we took the same image with a medium format camera and came back with a really spectacular, fine-grained, noiseless, almost creamy image, would we accept that as a valid action image as readily as the more noisy image? To put it the other way around, would a carefully exposed MF shot seem as intuitively valid as a street shot, as a more noisy image?
To go back to the music analogy, I don't think there are a large number of people (though there are always some) who would argue that chamber music is more inherently valid as music than, say, blues or jazz or rock. In fact, chamber music really used to be more like rock before it got constipated. They are just different experiences. But it seems that in the photo world, the lower-megapixel, shorter dynamic-range, etc., cameras are simply taken as inferior, and that the raison d'etre of m4/3 is simply smaller size and lower weight, rather than an inherent virtue to be found in lower-definition images. In music, an inherent virtue is found in rap, rock, country, jazz, blues, etc. vis-a-vis chamber music. But not so in photography?
