2012-2016 (Olympus E-500 with 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6)
The first DSLR I ever used was my dad’s Olympus E-500. It was a dinky 8MP shooter that introduced me to manual control. Learning the exposure triangle is 10x easier when you have the camera right in your hand. The 14-45mm kit lens was slow and clunky, perfect for learning the importance of f-stop, shutter speed and the gloriousness of sunlight. Almost everything I shot worth showing was outside because I had no lighting knowledge or equipment; I mainly shot close friends and my ultimate Frisbee pickup games.
At 45mm, the kit lens was f5.6 which meant any attempt at decent bokeh required the foreground subject to be hella far away from the background. These portraits were the result of me taking a bunch of blurry ass pictures before realizing I needed more light and a larger aperture. It’s a start right?
Milestones: basic exposure triangle, basic manual control
2016-2018 (Canon Rebel t5i with 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 and 50mm f/1.8)
I bought my first DLSR two years ago; it was the Canon Rebel t5i and included the kit lens and heavy ass PIXMA photo printer. I remember how excruciatingly slow the 1-3 business days of it took for shipping. Beside constantly checking on the UPS tracker, I watched countless video reviews on the camera before it got it. Classic post-purchase rationalization.
The t5i body more than doubled my previous MP count and had a whole host of fancy features I had to learn, primarily back button focusing which is great. Still, shooting with the kit lens was still underwhelming. It was still difficult to get the deep bokeh blur and I still had to shoot primarily outside. From this, I learned that the ISO quality and capabilities of a camera body was incredibly important.
After a couple of months, the lack of dramatic improvements from my previous camera made me worry. The basic conveniences of having a newer body was great but I wanted my pictures to look better. I needed a new lens and more light.
Similar to most photographers, my next purchase was Canon’s 50mm f/1.8 STM. The 2015 version was still affordable and came with some improvements from version II. At the time, I knew that putting a full-frame lens on a crop sensor body meant I had to apply the APS-C crop factor (x1.6) but I DID NOT KNOW that the crop factor also applied to the f-stop as well. I effectively had an 80mm f2.8 lens which was enough to see an immediate improvement in photo quality. From that point on, I pretty much just shot with the fifty wide open which meant I had to get familiar with chromatic aberration.
My portraits were looking cleaner and had that background blur I wanted; I was happy with it! At the same time, I started to shoot RAW and learned some Lightroom basics. Most of my edits were just fixing lens distortion and making the greens more “summery”. I generally had some sort of vignetting, either from the lens or from LR in these photos.
Milestones: importance of ISO capabilities and quality, how to get better and easier bokeh, importance of quality glass, crop factoring
2018-Present (Canon 6D with 50mm f/1.8 and 70-200mm f/2.8)
A couple of months ago, I upgraded to a full-frame Canon body and bought the Tamron 70-200mm. The body gave me a couple more MP but more importantly, a larger sensor. Not only could I take advantage of my lens’ entire aperture, but I also had better low light performance with a larger sensor.
Using a fast 70-200mm lens brought a change in how I thought about prime and zoom lens. My initial thought was that prime lens were superior to zooms and I almost took pride in having to use my legs to change up framing. But after using the zoom, the conveniences of all that zoom is incredible and more often allows you to frame what’s in your head more quickly.
Another apparent advantage was ISO performance and capture in low-light situations. I’m not exactly sure of the exact reason why the sensor performs better in low light (if larger sensors are inherently better at collecting light or if the quality of the sensor is simply superior or both) but being able to comfortably shoot at upwards of 6400 ISO if I needed to is very nice. With my previous T5i, the excessive digital noise rendered all ISO settings past 1600 useless.
I’m glad I upgraded to the full-frame sensor. The improvement of quality and shooting conveniences are substantial, especially for the price. Even the body feels more ergonomic and robust, adding confidence for me to take it out in less than ideal conditions. Still, all the equipment in the world doesn’t make one a better photographer and there’s always more to learn with photography. But it’s nice to take a look back once in a while and seeing my work improving over time. Here’s to more photographs.
Milestones: learning basic flash photography with speedlite and light modifiers, basic Adobe Premier and After Effects editing for time/hyperlapses, full frame goodness