Photography Thoughts: New cameras lead to new lenses lead to new cameras lead to .... a cascade!

View from Braeriach in the Cairngorms, June 2023. Sony a6600 & Sony E 11mm f1.8

There's a cascade of tech that often follows the purchase of just one item. Suddenly previous items don't work so well with it as they did with the item it replaced so it seems a good idea to replace them, which triggers more of the same until a whole system has been replaced even though the original intention was for just one item.

This has happened with my camera gear. Back in May I replaced my seven-year old Sony a6000 with the Sony a6600 as the former was developing some irritating quirks and the old batteries faded very quickly. The a6600 has a much bigger battery that lasts much longer along with some other appealing features the a6000 lacks. 

Sony a6600 & Sony 11mm lens

At the same time I replaced my old Samyang 12mm lens with the Sony E 11mm f1.8 because the latter has electronic connections and so its details are in the DxO Photolab 6 database, which I now use for processing raw files. At least that's what I told myself and wrote in this post. I suspect though the desire for a new lens to go with the new camera also played a part.

That I thought was it. My other lenses were all in the DxO database and all still worked fine. However some rainy weather changed my mind. The a6000 isn't a weather-sealed camera. The a6600 is but the only weather-sealed lenses I have are the 11mm and the big Sony 70-350 zoom, which I don't use that often and never take on multi-day walks. I did use the non-weather-sealed Sony 10-18mm f4 zoom a fair bit and always took that on long walks. Now I found that having weather-sealing on the camera but not the lens was frustrating when it was raining, especially when there was an alternative in the weather-sealed Sony 10-20mm f4 lens, which is also smaller and lighter. So I traded in the 10-18. The 10-20mm doesn't have image stabilisation, unlike the 10-18mm, but the a6600 does, unlike the a6000. 

With the Sony a6600 & 18-135mm lens in Knoydart, May 2023

My most-used lens however is the Sony E 18-135mm zoom. This doesn't have weather-sealing. At present there is no weather-sealed alternative to this, which is probably good for my wallet. I both want and don't want Sony to bring out a new weather-sealed 18-135mm!

So, long-windedly, this brings me to the new Sony a6700, the replacement for the a6600 that was launched recently. This has a few advantages over the a6600 - the controls look easier to use, the screen flips out to the side, the eye tracking focus sounds astonishing - but nothing like those of the latter over the a6000. So why am I considering (and so far resisting) buying one?

Because I now have a system whose components aren't as compatible as I'd like them to be. On long walks I usually carry two cameras, both in case one fails (it has happened) and so that I don't have to keep changing lenses and risking dust and dirt on the sensor. Along with the a6000 I carried the older Sony Nex 7. Both cameras take the same battery. Neither is weather-sealed or image stabilisation. Essentially they are interchangeable. 

Now I have a camera that takes a different battery and that has weather-sealing and image stabilisation plus two lenses that have the former but not the latter. If I take the a6000 as my other camera that means carrying different batteries and remembering which body and which lenses are weather-sealed or stabilised. Not a big hassle but I'd rather have two bodies that work the same way with all my lenses and take the same battery, hence my interest in the a6700. I've probably persuaded myself to buy one in writing this post!

Now I just need that weather-sealed 18-135mm!

So deciding to replace a camera body has ended up with me also buying two new lenses and likely to buy another new camera. I didn't intend this!

I haven't mentiond image quality. That's because I don't expect the a6700 to take noticeably higher quality ones than the a6000. The a6600 certainly doesn't, In fact the images from it are indistinguishable from those from the NEX 7. The new lenses are more likely to make a little difference but probably not much. 

What does make a difference, and with some images a big one, is DxO Photolab 6, which I wrote about last month. 

Photography Post: the amazing power of DxO PhotoLab editing software

Image after processing in DxO PhotoLab

DxO PhotoLabs is raw photo editing software designed to bring out the best in your images, I've been using it for processing noisy images for several months now. I've been impressed with the results and wondered what it could do with older images. After working with a few I'm astonished. Images I'd kept just for the memories have leapt in quality revealing details I never knew were there and losing ugly noise.

The above photograph was taken handheld in 2010 on my Pacific Northwest Trail walk with my 8 megapixel Canon 350D DSLR camera and Canon EF-S 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 lens. The ISO was 1600 and the settings 1/5 second at f5.6. On the original raw file the dark sections are solid black and the whole image has a great deal of noise, which isn't surprising given the equipment and the settings.

Original raw image

DxO has a huge database of camera and lens information and tailors processing to the specific equipment used to take the image. In this case it has produced amazing results from an under-exposed image taken at far from optimum settings with camera equipment that whilst okay for its day doesn't compare with current gear. Details have appeared in the shadows (these show up better with a high resolution image on a large screen than on this small JPEG), the noise has been minimised, and the image is sharper. Here's a crop from the processed image. I wouldn't have believed I could get such detail and sharpness from cropping an image from that camera and lens.

Because of the noise and underexpsoure I processed the image with DeepPrime XD, the most powerful of four denoising options. This does take a little time and the resulting DNG file is 38mb. The original raw file is 13mb. For most images this isn't necessary and processing is much quicker. But for images like this it's wonderful.