Camera Models
I sometimes forget that digital photography is a relatively new technology. One place you see that is when you photograph with different camera models from the same manufacturer. Even if you set everything identically, you often get slightly different results due to differences in sensors.
I had recently purchased an Olympus E-620 as a back-up camera. It is lightweight, small, but it still has a tilting LCD which I love (actually, I am so used to using such an LCD now, that when I pick up a camera without one, I feel much restricted). I did something with that camera that I highly recommend to everyone buying a new camera. I went out and shot with it over a few days … only with that camera. It is very hard to learn what a new model camera can and cannot do if you simply integrate it into the rest of your camera gear. By shooting with just that camera, you get to experience directly what that camera can and cannot do. You learn its idiosyncrasies, its quirks, its strengths and weaknesses.
By doing this, I learned how the 620 felt in my hands, how it balanced, how its controls functioned. While cameras from a specific manufacturer will have similar controls and functions, these controls will change from model to model. When you force yourself to work with the new camera, you learn these things. You also learn surprising new controls, and sometimes, you discover, as I did, a control on the new camera that you did not know was on your other cameras.
I also definitely learned that the 620 sees colors a little differently than my E-3. Again, this is typical for most camera models. I did not do any “tests” — I’ll be honest, I find a lot of the tests boring and not all that useful. I am more interested in what a camera will do in real-world situations than how well it photographs a test target. However, if you just shoot with one camera, the new one, and shoot a lot of different subjects, you will start to see differences. I found, for example, that the white balance settings were different enough to affect how I would shoot with white balance. By this I mean that Cloudy on my E-3 was not exactly the same as Cloudy on the E-620. This is simply a reflection of two things: the relative newness of digital photography technology and the fact that white balance does not have an international, agreed upon standard.
That doesn’t bother me. It is simply information to be used the next time I use the E-620. I know I have to work with white balance differently on that camera, and that’s fine. Such changes are consistent, so once you figure it out, you can use new settings with confidence. The photo is of a salt marsh at sunset near Los Osos, California, and was shot with the E-620 and HDR exposure technique.