Digital Capture Options and Opinions

Lately, I had the opportunity to spend a few hours with two, sometimes local, photographers, who teach workshops near my farm. They are sometimes local, because one owns a get away home, just up the road and they use it as a base for their workshops. Most recently, they asked to use some of my horses, as subject matter, for one of their sessions and from that came the aforementioned sharing of time.Naturally, both of them are digital shooters, as are their students and both are much younger than I,but the chance to exchange ideas and war stories was good fun nevertheless.One, is a commercial photographer and a chess player,a game for which I hold a particular fondness, while the other, although shooting commercial and business subjects,has an affinity for and perhaps even a desire to entertain entering, photojournalism.Both of them derive a good portion of their income from teaching,something I did for several years, many years ago. Naturally enough, we had many areas of common interest to converse about and more than a few differences on a variety of subjects.

During the course of one such discussion, the subject of going digital entered the conversation and I found myself being strongly encouraged to re-enter the realm of photography full time once again. I must admit I was more than mildly interested, but sceptical about the probability,due in part to the costs and the learning curves. Learning the new technology would be no problem,but the time it would take to master them was and remains, a quite different matter,to my mind. My new found advocate however, felt differently. His take was that with my existing photography knowledge and expertise, I would have little,if any, problem and that the medium,digital capture, had evolved so greatly that even the expense would be minimal,compared to even a few years ago. He felt that anything over 12 MP was unnecessary for good quality results and that this would allow me to purchase less than top of the line camera bodies with which to begin shooting once more. Add to that my existing lenses and he could see no reason not to be able to proceed with minimal expenditures. Keeping in mind, that minimal is a relative term when talking about photo gear, it still sounded intriguing. I was far from sold and further still from deciding to do it, but it was food for thought.

What I found equally as interesting though, was the dialogue concerning what peripherals were really needed. By his evaluation, PhotoShop was preempted by Lightroom and computer time would be minimal to none except if one screwed up in the camera. He advocated use of an Ipad and we actually agreed on a laptop,because of the type of work I would do. In his opinion, 98% of my images should not require post production in PhotoShop,a statement that was strongly at odds with everything I had previously read or discussed. It was,without question, an interesting if not downright seductive premise, since one of my greatest arguments against digital capture was,in fact, the exorbitant amount of computer time required to finish the images, in post. I understand PhotoShop, but I am far from enamoured with using it. Although I still have many reservations, not to mention a colossal lack of investment capital, I feel that more discussion is warranted.