I’ve already had a very significant amount of money invested in cameras, lenses, and accessories when the mirrorless bug bit me. So I bought myself a nice new mirrorless camera body.
But wait, now I need a $250 adapter in order to use my current lenses on the new camera.
But wait, I am moving from a crop frame sensor to a full frame. I won’t be getting the most out of the camera with those lenses, time to consider new lenses.
But wait, now that I am leaning toward wildlife photography, my expensive pan & tilt ball head for my tripod is not so useful, so I need a gimbal head.
But wait, it turns out that my version of my favorite photo editing software (Adobe Lightroom) is not compatible with the newer RAW format, and Lightroom is now available only by paying a monthly ransom rather than a single purchase.
OK, despite all my complaining, I lovelovelove the new camera.
Just be happy you’re not buying film, paper, chemicals, and darkroom equipment, and building a special room in your house to do all the processing. And spending hours standing in it breathing smelly chemicals waiting for processes to finish.
To say nothing of the money wasted when a print doesn’t turn out the way you want. Or when you ruin a whole roll of film by processing it wrong. Or the disappointment of finding out that a shot you worked hard to capture, and will never be able to take again, is over/underexposed, out of focus, or otherwise unusable.
All things digital photographers will never experience.
And that good gear will serve you for years to come!
I have let my photography hobby fade over the past several years, but have a substantial amount of Fujifilm X-camera gear, with multiple prime lenses–the 90mm is an absolutely awesome portrait lens.
A few months ago I started recording YouTube videos using my phone or my Logitech Streamcam…then I realized I could use those older Fuji cameras and lenses.
Wow, what a difference it makes to film video through proper camera lenses.
I’ve had this bug since I was a kid; so, some 60+ years of varying degrees of addiction. From Brownie Hawkeye to film SLRs to the Nikon D7200. Luckily, most of my lenses made the transition from Nikon N70 (film) to the D100. Not so lucky with the newest one. I ended up selling a few that just wouldn’t work with it. I was really hoping to be able to adapt my Celestron C5 to the camera, but the adaptor I bought didn’t work. Just as well, as it would have meant changing from a ball mount to a gimbal mount on the tripod, like the OP mentioned.
I took a photography class in high school and desperately wanted my own darkroom. Thank god I never had the room for one.
Nowadays, I pretty much just use the cellphone for photos, but the camera gear still skulks in the closet, whimpering and wondering why I don’t love it any more.
I’ve been selling off a bunch of stuff on eBay recently, after not using eBay for many years. I’ve accumulated a pretty decent amount of cash, and I thought it might be a good time to upgrade to a mirrorless camera. My main interest is night sky landscapes, so I started doing research on what body had the best low-light capabilities. What I found was: none are better than my current camera, the Nikon D800E (a decade-old design) . It’s both surprising and disappointing, but it also means I don’t have to fork over a couple of grand for a new body…
I’ve recently been in the market for a Canon 6D (12 year old body) to get astro-modded. I do quite a bit of nightscape stuff now, and I think it’d be a nice (and relatively inexpensive) addition.
I have a question: I have my dad’s old Minolta 35mm camera and a whole camera bag full of different lenses. (He had a bad case of G.A.S. but was a terrible photographer. It pretty much became a family in-joke.) I haven’t used the camera in years, since film more or less went away. Can I buy a relatively inexpensive digital SLR and swap in different lenses like on the old film camera? Does it depend on the camera?
(As a result of the monthly photography contest threads, I’ve thought about trying to up my photography game, especially since most of the photos taken with my phone look like crap.)
Early Pentax used the most primitive of mounts - a threaded screw-in mount. Those lenses are unlikely to work on any modern camera without an an adapter, and even then they will be 100% manual.
If you think still photography is expensive, just try video production. It’s everything still photog is but at 30 frames/second it escalates rapidly. And you have to be an audio engineer with audio recording equipment as well.
