After 14 years, I finally did it—I switched to a new camera system. Before I tell you which one, let me explain why.
Since I first picked up a camera, I’ve been shooting with Canon, and I liked it. It was easy to use and the colors were great. After my first Canon, I upgraded to the 5D Mark III. To this day, it’s still my favorite camera. Not because it was perfect at everything, but because the glass was incredible and the colors were top-notch. It was also pretty damn good in low light.
When I moved to the 5D Mark IV, it felt only slightly better. The colors, though, seemed different. Using the same preset on the 3 and the 4 gave me two completely different results, which made editing between two bodies a real pain.
Then mirrorless took over, and I made the big jump from the 5D system to the R5. At first, I loved it—everything was fast, autofocus was insane, video and facial tracking were flawless. But the camera lost some of the romance for me. It was almost too good at everything, but not great at any one thing. A shoot that used to be 500 photos turned into 3,000. The tiny digital viewfinder felt like staring at an LCD screen instead of putting my eye to the camera. It made photography feel more like spray-and-pray than being deliberate and making art.
After five years with the Canon R system, the problems started piling up—errors saying my cards didn’t work, brand-new Canon batteries showing up as “incompatible.” As a working professional, I couldn’t deal with that. So I decided it was time to try something new until I found a system that really worked for me.
Right now, I’m testing the medium format Fuji GFX 50S II, and so far I’m enjoying it. I’m still adjusting to a new color space and learning how to edit these files differently than what I’m used to. Capture One handles the greens and yellows in a completely different way, and it seems to prioritize clean skin tones, but that can leave heavy blue contrast in other parts of the image. The trade-off? The dynamic range is so much better on the Fuji system.
Yesterday I took it to the beach. Despite 40mph winds, I was able to capture a few photos—and for the first time in a long time, I felt that spark again.
