That amazing D800.
I penned a reply to Russ this morning, but as seems to happen quite a lot these days, the effin’ screen froze and I had to switch off by, literally, pulling the plug on it. So it’s all lost.
Anyway. Let me get back to the point I thought I’d made. The D800 and its half-twin may well be the best things in photography since Victor dreamed up the 500; I even accept that they are, if I must, just to keep you happy. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is the use you owners actually make of it, made of all your other, previous cameras, and why or where changes are gonna happen by this purchase.
(Jeez! Now the bloody font keeps changing on me!)
I think that nothing’s going to change, that you’ll go on making the same images you always have, that the same subjects will enthral you as ever they did, that the difference will be that your imagination will believe that you can and will climb new mountains and face fresh pastures. I predict you won’t. Photography’s a strange beast. It’s a mistress, a whore, a saviour and even a friend in need, But it never changes you into somebody else. And that’s a huge problem for photographers who hope that it can and, perhaps, will.
As some may know, I’m reading (avidly, as it turns out) a collection of Ansel Adams' letters (from and to) and it’s amazing to see how common photographic ills are, how so many of us suffer from the same questions of worth, doubt, and anxiety about pretty much everything; we set up windmills for ourselves, fight giants who aren’t even aware that we exist. I seem to deduce a sea change in his attitude and priorities; from a young chap concerned with cameras, lenses, papers and developers etc. he later ceases reference to any of that stuff, delving ever more deeply into the reasons why for a photograph, of its purpose and even, sometimes, of its validity in the greater scheme of things. Politics, both environmental and photographic, seems to become more the focus of his letters than does photography itself; format, too, concerns him: he states at one point that he might well turn to 10x8s and abandon the practice of ‘large’… in other words, and relevant to this topic here on LuLa, the idea of making bigger and bigger prints, though he always could, fails to be an answer to the emotional man. I don’t think much has changed. I think anything that gives what the late D700 can give is all any amateur need aspire to own. And that was available several years ago. Why did I buy? FF and low-light friendly. It never occurred to me that I might desire to make prints bigger than A3+ - I still wouldn’t really want to and even the size I can make has ground to a halt after the realisation of what running a goddam printer really means: you work to use up the ink so as not to allow the thought that you’ve bought into another form of yacht!
If you make real money from your photography, that’s another matter entirely; if you don’t, then buy the boat instead. At least you’ll get to attract some girls. Cameras only impress other cameras.
;-)
Rob C