The Everyday Camera

Every functioning camera takes photographs, but it is the photographer who makes the picture. The equipment matters, but higher cost doesn't always translate to better equipment. A large format 8 x 10 camera for instance, is large, expensive, and heavy. It doesn't make a very good walk around machine. 

The camera is like a paint brush. Until I took an art class, I had no idea how important a good quality brush was. It can be very inexpensive. I also didn't know why there were different kinds or what purpose they served. The correct tool gave me proper control, and got out of the way. This applied to everything I do. I have spent a year (since April 2013) on a quest to find a film, and a digital camera that I would be happy to use everyday.

Must have features of the everyday camera (for me and maybe for you).

• Flash hot shoe (this eliminates most of the older film cameras that don't have it), built-in camera flash is sometimes nice but not necessary.
• Depth of field preview (this eliminates budget class Digital and Film SLRs) most people will never use this. I use it for close up and macro work and sometimes portraits. Rangefinder cameras such as Leica, and Canonets don't have an ability to give you dof preview. Rangefinders don't do well in close up or macro work. They are not good walk around cameras for me. When I go for a walk, I like to take pictures of everything, including flowers, insects, plants, and later learn about what they are. I want to fill my frame. A $10k Leica setup can't fill the frame or give me the control that a cheap used (d)SLR could for macro work. I admire Henri Cartier Bresson for his work. He fills the frame with a lot of interesting stuff, people, and patterns, but I have never seen a single piece of close-up or macro work from Bresson. He is a composer and has a focus on humanity and the abstracts. I'm not. If you want to spend $10k on a Leica, go ahead, don't cry to me when you realize it's only really good for journalists. If your ultimate goal is to take pictures like an abstract journalistic artist, a rangefinder camera is for you. I have a hard time making or looking at photos of people and things I don't care about.
• A wide selection of interchangeable lenses is important. If the camera is the paint brush, the lens is the paint and the film is the canvas. The characteristic of paint helps the artist express his/her idea with contrast, hue, saturation, sharpness/softness, distortions, and a certain "flare" (sometimes it really is lens flare). The paint will react to the canvas (film/sensor) differently depending on the combination.
• Film/Sensor is the canvas. The choices of film/sensors is fun and sometime frustrating. When you switch from one film to another, you get different results. Just like when you switch from one digital sensor to another. My 24mp Nikon D3200 under performs in terms of color rendition when compared to my 6mp Nikon D100. The D3200, on an overcast day, shot in RAW, no matter what white balance or saturation, adobe or sRBG was used, it turned skin tones orange. If I knocked down the orange, it turned the faces monochrome. If I wanted to turn all my photos to monochrome, I would have just shot monochrome film. The D3200 also isn't saturated enough on a sunny day, colors are flat. When I bumped up the saturation in Photoshop, the photos just looked weird. The D100 always produced the correct skin tone and saturation no matter what the situation. A Canon 50D will produce purple fringing bordering the highlights, but the 40D, 30D, and 20D, doesn't. Sony SLTs are notoriously bad with purple fringing. I regretted buying it. The Pentax Q is bad with purple fringe (no surprise since the sensor is made by Sony) I regretted buying it. An inexpensive 14mp Samsung NX100 doesn't purple fringe, but a 14mp Sony would. Shot with the same lens with an adapter I might add, so it's the freaky Sony sensor, not the lens. This should end the arguments. The Sony made back-lit sensors had not been nice to me. Somehow if you own a Sony and don't want Purple fringing, you need to buy their Zeiss magic sauce optics. I tried my real German Zeiss lenses on my Sony SLT and it produced plenty of purple fringing still. I don't want to buy their expensive Zeiss optics only to get rid of purple fringing so I resorted to boycotting Sony out of my life. My Canon S95 edits out all the color fringing areas and desaturates it to gray. This makes it somewhat livable. I'm not sure why Sony can't be bothered to even do that.

Olympus OM-1
$15 dollars used at the thrift store
50mm 1.8 Zuiko
Kodak 400
No purple fringing on the tree branches.

Pentax Q $800 dollars at Fry's electronics
 and it under performs a $15 dollar film camera.
If you like super natural purple fringing, this is the camera for you. Not for me.
Some people say it's because digital sensors are "high res" so you can see purple fringing.
You can see it even at very low resolution.
How come I never saw it in my low res 110 or 35mm  film?
I think the back-lit sensors creating it's own internal reflections or some other voodoo. What do you think?

• Auto focus isn't necessary for me. I just get enough depth of field to cover everything I want in the scene. Even when shooting sports, active children, and cars. I usually frame a scene, and wait for the subjects to fall into place. Everything is pre-focused. Most of my best work happens when I do this. When I don't, the pictures materializes into a collection of mindless, tasteless, uninteresting copies of people and things. I also find AF hunting or just plain focusing annoying no matter how fast it is. If I have AF, I ending up relying on it. Then once in a blue moon when it fails I get frustrated, and makes me miss the decisive moment. I don't care that my picture is a tinny bit out of focus, I want my composition, and I want it NOW! AF is great when you only want your camera to focus on one thing at a time in each picture. Not good for landscapes and not good for any other time you want to have some focus on foreground and some focus on the background. If my family is visiting a historical building, I'd like the picture to have my family + the building sharp. AF will generally waste the depth of field, the camera would choose f/16 to get the background sharp, but when scale focusing manually, I'd only need to be on f/8 to f/11.
• Ergonomics is very important! No body wants to carry a 10 pound dumbbell of a camera around their neck all day. The pros make their assistants carry it. If you make pro money and has a chiropractor on speed dial, go ahead, get a Canon 1DX with a gigantic L zoom. Strap it to the back of your neck and let me know how things go. I don't want to use my kid's stroller for my camera. Aside from weight, it has to be shaped right. I fat finger the button for flash when all I want to do is change my shutter speed on my Canon S95. That camera, although has excellent image quality, and light weight, doesn't work for me. My 3 year old son has a better time with it than I do. It stays home and collects dust. A view finder is an important part of ergonomics. the LCD screen on the back of the camera is horrid under any well lit situation. Holding a camera to your eye helps put down your vision, literally. Your imaginative vision, is what photography is all about. When it comes to choice, a large optical view finder is better than a large EVF(electronic view finder). A large EVF is better than the tiny optical view finder in a cheap dslr. EVF lag a concern? I couldn't knotice any with the Samsung NX range. I do knotice it in some other brands. Go play with the EVFs before the purchase. They're not all bad. 

Through this journey, I have found what worked for me. Under the 35mm format, I tried and extensively used the Canon AE-1, AT-1, EOS Rebels, EOS Elans, Nikon FG, F3, F801s, Yashica FX-D, Minolta SRT101, XD11, X370, X700 and many more. Those were all fabulous cameras in their own ways. I have tried a wide variety of lenses, from Canon, Nikkor, Yashica, Minolta, Zeiss, to some obscurely private labeled brands such as Sears, and JC Penny, Access, and Soligor. I couldn't justify a Leica due to its lack of depth of field preview for Macro work. I could zone focus a rangefinder camera just fine, however I'm no street photographer and Leicas are not for anyone who wants to explore macro work. Leicas are excellent but the wrong camera for me. I like my Minolta AL and Canonet 17 just fine under the rangefinder category. I won't use a rangefinder camera everyday due to its limitations. My top choice 35mm film everyday camera is the Olympus OM1 with 28mm, 50mm, a 35-70 macro zoom, and a 75-150mm lens. It has a large view finder, mirror lock up, light meter, self timer, depth of field preview, and very long battery life. The older Zuiko lenses are prone to flare, but I don't mind. For digital bodies, I love the image quality of my Nikon and Canon DSLRs, but can't live with the ittybitty tiny viewfinder (horrible for manual focusing). I ended up buying a used Samsung NX100 with an EVF and a whole bunch of lens adapters for my Nikon, Canon, Olympus and Zeiss lens collection. It's not a good performer in low light, but I don't walk around at night or go to concerts everyday, so I don't care about that. Why are you shooting in bad light anyways? Bad light? Use a flash. Not enough flash power? Bring a bigger flash, or get closer. This is comical. The APS-C size crop and depth of field factor is acceptable. Smaller than APS-C sensor size will cause more distortion and not enough background blur control I would care for. Yes, I'd rather shoot all day everyday with my used $100 Samsung NX100 eBay special than my thousands of dollars of Canon or Nikon DSLR bodies.

Iris
Samsung NX100
Vivitar/JCPenny 28mm f/2.8 OM mount from Knight Camera
Handheld, shot at f/8

For professional grade work. Stick with medium format!