Winter has passed and spring has arrived in South Australia.
It is becoming warmer and the light is changing very quickly: sunrise is an hour earlier, sunset is an hour latter and the light is more intense and brighter early in the morning and in the late afternoon. The change in the seasons was very sudden.
The warmer weather means that there are more people on the coast, such as joggers, fishermen, dog walkers, walkers, surfies, day trippers, children swimming and playing on the beaches etc, which in turn makes our poodlewalks more complicated. People say that winter on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula coast is to be avoided, as they find it too cold.I enjoy the winter on the coast.
Recently, I have been looking at the new Sony A7RII to replace my Sony NEX-7 —the improvement in digital technology is all about full frame and pushing the limits of 35mm IQ, low light, high ISO and even image stabilization. Even though I have moved away from using 35mm rangefinder film camera’s, I’m just looking at the moment; I am still in debt from my recent exhibitions and the current work on the Australian Abstraction book. The new technology is expensive—the Sony A7RII is more than 3 times as expensive as the Sony NEX-7 was new.
I cannot afford to buy this kind of digital camera yet. One core problem is that the cost of the upgrade is so high with the latest product cycle release (which appears to be every 3-4 years or even less). Sure the Sony is half the price of Leica digital M 240, but I for one still have a hard time justifying replacing a $4000 camera body every 3 years, knowning that my old camera has lost well over half of its original value over that 3 year window.
Another problem is the image quality (IQ)–as my concern is whether the Sony A7RII still has both the smooth, plastic look, and the bluish, flat shadows produced by most digital cameras.The emphasis in digital photography is on the color pop/contrast. It has to be snappy. Sometimes this works for an image, sometimes it doesn’t.