Well, I never thought this would happen.
I met a photographer who started out in digital before the dawn of all things digital like I did.
I met Kirk Saint a few months ago at a 2 day convention. I couldn’t believe he started out with one of these cameras like I did.
We’re talking way back. As in the year 2000 back. When Canon introduced what I consider to be their most groundbreaking camera ever.
And few, very few have heard about it. Maybe because it was primitive, at a mere 3.4 Megapixels.
But most thought it simply couldn’t do the job. Many, in fact, thought digital was crap and a passing fad. Even the dude who owned our local camera store thought this.
The best thing about this camera was the price. A very reachable $3,500.00 for the body. Not bad considering the next best thing was about twenty grand or so.
By today’s standards I consider this camera, if I were to compare today, on par with a Model T Ford. With a hand crank no less.
But whatever. Back in the day, it was revolutionary. And I bought one, with a Canon 50MM lens.
I was Hasselblad and Nikon. I sold everything I owned. All of it.
Except for my Nikon 105MM lens.
Hey, I needed a portrait lens. So I found a dude in New York who sold Nikon to Canon lens adapters. I was in, in a manual focus way, for $85.00 plus shipping.
Kirk’s story was similar to mine in that he got great results from this camera, in spite of the small file size.
I was pulling off wall portraits the first year I switched.
(see link below for examples)
I had to be able to otherwise I wouldn’t have taken the plunge.
Consistently I was getting great results. While everyone told me I couldn’t. My reply to the nay-sayers, was “bullsh*t, look what I had printed from my dinky little 3.4 MB file.”
Proof’s in the pudding, as they say. It ain’t bragging if you can do it.
My next camera was the Nikon D1x or something like that. A whopping 5.5 MB. Again, I pulled off hundreds, nay, thousands of wall portraits over and over.
If it does the job, it does the job. I prefer to obsess over marketing, than file size.
See samples below….
Yours in photography and success,
Robert Provencher
P.S. Last month I interviewed Kirk. He runs a successful studio in a small town shooting amazing Santa images, cool sports photos and more….Members, login, go here.
Below…a few samples from my Canon D30, images that were enlarged, with ease, to over 30 inches….:
Correct! Proper lighting is more important than pixel count.
Even more important, large pixel count cannot compensate for poor lighting.
Key importance: know how to operate the camera properly.
Second, the best possible portrait lens one can afford pays dividends over pixel count.
thanks….well said, great advice.
Rob
Right on, Frank!
Hee Hee!
I had a Nikon D100 with almost the same pixel count! You know what, because it was a small sensor, working with a full frame film set of lenses, they only used the absolute sweetest part of the lense!
I ended up with 3 of them and they made us a few hundred thousand pounds. Daftest thing was that I shot mostly in manual mode using a meter – the inbuilt thing was worse than a chocolate kettle.
To be honest, I still have one in a cupboard somewhere!
Learnt my photoshop stuff from you though – thanks!
Gary
thanks Gary…cool story. I think I had a D100 as well….after I dropped the Canon in two feet of water after using it for 8 solid months bringing in huge sales. It was a cool, fall day on Thangsgiving weekend, shoots all day, last one , big family on the dock, cold slippery fingers….ooops. Plop….in she goes. Good thing I had a film camera back up in the car:)….I switched to Nikon right after…Never thought about how the sensor only uses the sweet spot. Good observation….
My first digital was an Olympus 2500. Yup – loaded with 2.5 megapixels. And I sold LOTS of images, up to 16×20!