On digital cameras for travel photography

NOT real happy 'bout the camera!

The last time I travelled overseas on a journey like this I carried a bag full of Nikon gear - a 35mm SLR and three lenses. A proper tripod, not one of those compact, lightweight jobs that tremble in a stiff breeze. 40 rolls of film. Polarizing filters for the lenses. Batteries. Cleaning equipment. Did I say it was a large bag? It was also hard work, because it all had to be carried around at an average altitude of 4000m.

I was shooting transparencies (slides) and when I got home the cost of processing the films and scanning the images to high resolution CDs cost more than my return flight to Kathmandu.

I used to hump all that gear around the coastal trails near my old hometown of Margaret River in Western Australia too. Hard work when it was hot. Left me unable to contribute to carrying camping gear. Drove my fellow hikers or family insane when I'd stop for a shot and decide I had to change lenses or film first. It takes a while to set up for some shots too, so when I was tired or being waited for I'd pass up good opportunities because I knew if I didn't spend the time I'd just be wasting film.

Then came digital.

I wasn't interested for years after the first cameras became available. Their resolution was crap, labs producing good quality prints hard to find in WA and I wasn't yet into Photoshop. I was selling digital cameras in my business long before I thought one might be useful myself. The first one I ever owned was thrown in as a sweetener by Fuji when I bought our first digital printer.

I can't recall its model number, but I do remember it was a true pocket size number with a solid brushed alloy body and a unique vertical design. It had the now laughably low resolution of 1.5MP, but at the time it was the highest you could get without spending twenty grand. It's recommended retail price was AUD1600.00 and when you plugged its card into our new printer a 4x6in print looked great. An uncropped 5x7in print would look OK as long as you held it at arm's length, but forget even trying anything larger than that.

Despite its limitations, that camera got me hooked on the possibilities of digital. Chief of which in my view was portability. I could carry that thing anywhere with no effort at all. Coming joint second was the instant feedback and the ability to experiment to my heart's content. No film = no-cost failures. No tripod? No problem. Try anyway. Attempts were free and best of all - sometimes they'd work! The resolution issue killed it though. Snapshots was all it was good for.

Everything's different now of course, although I reckon digital's still got a few more hurdles to mount before it's every bit as good as film. The other thing about the technology that concerns me is the potential threat it poses to our pictorial historical record.

Um - this post is actually about how I came to choose the camera I'm currently using and why that choice was a mistake, but I guess that last statement needs a bit of explanation. If you're unwilling to drift off-topic with me, skip the following italicised paragraphs.

In mentioning my perception of a threat to our history in pictures, I'm not talking about the ease with which digital images can be manipulated. The manipulation of photographic images has been part of the craft since its inception. Some of the most famous and striking images of the First World War for example, are darkroom compositions combining elements from multiple negatives. They're not "true" photographs.

The pictorial historical record isn't created by professional photographers alone. Since the 1880s the vast majority of it has been created by normal folks with cameras recording the events and environments of their lives. The negatives and prints they made were durable (especially the B&W ones) and required no decoding. Hold 'em up to the light today and you get the picture. These images could be thrown in shoeboxes in attics and as long as fire or water didn't claim them, they can be pulled out and read today. These are the images that have come to form the majority of our historical collections.

What worries me is the ephemeral nature of the present digital imaging technologies. Current storage media for digital images such as hard drives, CDs and DVDs don't last anywhere near as long as film and besides, who's going to have the hardware to read those even 30 years from now? More images are being captured today than ever before, but they're being stored without backups on media that just won't survive the test of time like the mature technology of film has.

It's also extremely unlikely that everybody taking pictures today will translate their collections to whatever new media are bound to emerge. To do so would be more time consuming and costly than most will deem their casual streetscapes and holiday location shots worthy of, hence it's probable the majority of images currently being recorded will be lost even if the ability to read them is extant in the future. Anyway - back to the point...

Knowing I was going have the opportunity to point a camera at a lot of cool stuff on this trip meant I faced the decision of taking my Nikon gear and shooting on film, or buying a better digital than the one I'd been using so far.

No contest. Digital won hands down. So much cheaper, so much easier to carry large numbers of images around and essential for Dreaming Track posts! The question was - which type? SLR or a top of the range "prosumer" compact? As portability was my principal attraction to digital and an SLR would mean going back to carrying a large bag of gear along with our already bulging packs, I elected the latter.

The Fuji Finepix S9600 I settled on had all the features I wanted. Fully manual operation capability, a lens that spanned the range of the three I would have had to carry with an SLR and RAW file capability. It also uses AA batteries, which is a bonus in my view as you can buy those almost everywhere. Proprietary rechargeable batteries are virtually impossible to replace on the road and sometimes the road doesn't have electricity to let you charge one either. A further advantage of the compact camera is that you don't have to worry about dust settling on the sensor which often happens while changing lenses on an SLR. You do, apparently, have to worry about ants. The 9600 is a 9MP camera that yields an 18MB file in RAW mode. Ample for almost everything I might want to do with the images. Perfect. Or so I thought...

Now that I've been working with this camera for some time, its limitations have become plain and painful. Chief among them is its lens quality. It's adequate for average conditions, but has an unacceptable degree of flare in high contrast scenes. Bright sky against dark mountains for example. Or shots toward the sun. I like high contrast scenes and the sky/mountain thing is pretty common where we've been lately! There's also a serious barrel distortion issue when shooting at the lens' widest angle. It's passable in some landscape shots, but pure evil for architecture and people.

The camera also has a significant noise problem when shooting at sensitivities above 100ASA. This has seriously reduced the number of usable images I've been able to capture as the 100ASA limit radically increases the necessity of a good tripod.Sigh...

I'm an idiot. All this has confirmed what I've always believed: When it comes to the tools of your craft, compromise is crap. I should have got an SLR and brought along a decent tripod. God knows how I would have carried it all, but I'd have a much larger archive of great images if I had. I've pretty much decided to get an SLR, but when the time comes I'll be faced with the same trade-offs as before.

There are some excellent mid-range SLRs out there now. I've been looking at Canon's 40D and Nikon's D300. Thing is - either of those a compromise too! Although they're is not a great deal larger than my current camera and have far superior image processing and lens quality, they're still not professional cameras. I'd hate to buy one and be kicking myself again in a year or so for not going straight to the top. It'd be a costly error! Those cameras and their dedicated lenses are more compact than those of the pro models due to the cameras' sensor size. The downside is that the lenses are incompatible with the pro bodies' larger sensors, so upgrading later would mean buying a whole new suite of gear, rather than just a new camera body.

One last thing: Even if I do say "Hang the expense!" and buy the best, I'll have a camera that's even larger and more massive than my old film one!

Ah me! I'm so bad at making decisions like this...