It was 1995 and the professional photography world was about to be taken over by the digital revolution. At that time I headed the R&D department for the largest computer peripheral retailer in the business (depending on who you asked). We took tens of thousands of product catalog images each year for online presentation, catalog presentation and magazine ads. It was an arduous process of developi
ng film, light boarding negatives, then sending our waxed candidates to a digitizing service. Only then inserting large .tiff files into postscript page files, and then off to the printing services, or magazine companies. A strange time where everything about the process was digital except the actual photography itself. What started as a personal endeavor, [Digital Photography in the RAW] a consulting business educating companies on the benefits of digital photography and the creative editing 'raw' images provided over film, soon became a professional service offered by the company I was working for. In the end we had developed partnerships with Kodak, Canon, Nikon and offered complete ‘turn-key’ cataloging systems as our branded products. Through the development of these systems, I amassed a huge database of cameras, their features and capabilities. I eventually sold the consulting end to the company I was working for, and sold the database to an online camera review entity (NDA). In the decade that followed, digital cameras reached a state where neither consulting or testing required anything more than buying a camera, taking some images, and keeping it or returning for something better. It was no longer something that only businesses could afford - services no longer required. Digital Photography in the RAW simply evolved into a professional/personal photography entity through which I Personally have gone through a lot of cameras. By that I mean purchasing or getting a loaner from a few companies I have history with, and shoot with them for a while. Sometimes keeping them, some times returning them. I have given/gifted/sold many cameras so I no longer have all of the ones I kept. The dirty little secret of it all… I personally still shot film until 2007 and my Nikon D200. I have tried many, many cameras since, but always held onto my D200 and Canon 40D - until 2021 and selling everything except a few lenses for the Nikon Z5 and the Z ecosystem. You can find countless reviews on the Z5 harping on this or that, but the reality is I personally do not need the fastest autofocus system out there, the fastest shooting speed, or the highest resolution. The mere fact that the camera autofocuses at all is the greatest thing ever. I have decades of shooting wildlife with manual focus and no more fps than my thumb could provide, and at ~24mp I get the imagery I got from good quality film and a (too expensive) wet scan. At this moment in time my decision on the Nikon Z had little to do with the camera, I would have considered a Canon RF body, but the slew of Canon f/6.3/7.1/8/11! lenses they are churning out is unacceptable for someone who doesn’t immediately foresee buying a companies most expensive lenses. I have never owned, nor even shot, a lens slower than f/5.6, and I'm certainly not going to start in 2021. The slower lenses seem to be a copout by Canon. They improve ISO performance so they can cheap out on lenses to give the same performance of a decade ago…? Nikon isn’t much better with their entry kit lenses and nauseatingly expensive primes, but I have a few F lenses and an FTZ to persevere their roadmap, and an adapter for some Canon primes. Not sure why Nikon has yet to make a Z prime smaller than their F lenses, like Canon, that seems like a copout too given they do not have to make room for stabilization inside of them. However that is where we are today.
