A 10-year search to choose the best camera
Keane Lem is an international photographer and filmmaker based in San Francisco. He runs the website whereandwander.com and believes that living in the moments of photography leads to the best narratives.
Lem migrated to Sony’s mirrorless camera system in 2015 with the selection of the Sony a7 II from Nikon DSLR. Until then, he always used the Nikon D700 and D800 as his main cameras for weddings and commercial photography. Of course, he had worked with Olympus, Sony and Panasonic cameras for travel photography.
In a major leap forward in 2020, Lemder migrated from Sony’s full-frame system to Fujifilm, which has a smaller APS-C sensor, and now continues to operate with Fujifilm X-T4 and X100 V. He does not focus on tools and chooses the tools he needs based on his purpose. In this article, Lem’s experiences about choosing the right tool for the purpose of photography are presented, and the opinions published in this article are merely a reflection of his experiences.
Sensor size
Lem began his first world tour in 2010. Instead of the Nikon D700, which he used for commercial applications, he used a small Panasonic GF-1 camera with a 3.4 microscope, a 14- to 42mm kit lens, and a 20mm f / 1.7 aperture. کرد. He also brought with him a $ 15 tripod for strong winds. Lem says:
It was interesting to travel so freely and lightly as a photographer. From that trip, I learned that portability and photographic content are more important than image quality and camera equipment.
With a GF-1 compact camera and a small tripod, Lem adjusted in about 10 seconds and was able to capture more images in sequential sequences than the larger Nikon camera. Lem says about this experience:
This set was my favorite because of the simplicity and compact size of the equipment. To be honest, I do not remember the number of megapixels or RAW images in the GF-1.
One of the important points of photography is the quick preparation of the camera after turning it on and the speed of taking it out of the bag.
Marzurga desert in Morocco
Migration from Nikon to Sony
The first silent experience with a Sony camera and APS-C mirrorless sensor was the Sony NEX-6, the previous model of the popular a6000 camera. Choosing this camera was the first step in moving from the GF-1 to a compact camera with a larger sensor. He recorded many of his travel videos and landscapes with a 16mm f / 2.8 wide-angle pancake lens and used CCTV and Voigtlander lenses for his portraits.
Then came the Sony a7 II, which fixed many of the Sony a7 bugs. The Sony a7 was the first mirrorless full-frame camera with a replaceable lens system. As a result, Lem could achieve the desired quality in a compact format similar to DSLR fullframes. He photographed with the a7 II for a
