mirrorless

Mirrorless for twelve months and counting
My brother’s car photographed in the New Forest National Park. 04 May 2023. Photo: Neil Turner

Twelve months ago I swapped over from beloved Canon EOS 5D MkIVs to Canon mirrorless. In that time I have had quite a few different mirrorless bodies: two R6s, an R5, an R3 and my absolute favourites the R6 MkII. It wasn’t all plain sailing but I have ended up in a position where, when I tried to use my one remaining EOS5D MkIV on a job, I struggled. From a position of feeling desperately uncomfortable with EVFs (electronic viewfinders) I appear to have performed a complete 180 degree switch and found the optical viewfinder, mirror and prism set up hard to re-adjust to. That’s pretty remarkable given that I had almost forty-two years of using SLRs and DSLRs (with the odd rangefinder) and only one with mirrorless as my main camera option.

In the next few weeks I expect to part with that final DSLR and a few more of my EF lenses and pretty much complete the switch because going between the two options isn’t going to work for me.

So what have I learned in the last twelve months?

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I can’t imagine being without a fifty
©Neil Turner. October 2022. Canon RF 50mm f1.8 mounted on an R6 body

When I worked in a camera shop in the early 1980s we used to sell ninety percent of the camera bodies with a standard lens. Olympus, Pentax, Nikon, Canon, Minolta, Ricoh and a few others all came in a kit with a 50mm lens. By default almost every camera owner ended up with a decent quality pretty fast and actually very versatile bit of glass. Even before I took that job my second SLR (an Olympus OM10) came with a Zuiko 50mm f1.8 and I kept that lens as long as I had Olympus cameras. They were cheap and did the job at a time when very few people shot with zoom lenses.

Since then I have owned over a dozen other 50mm prime lenses as well as two different 55mm ones. At no point in the period from 1981 until today have I been without at least one 50mm optic. At one point I had no fewer than four Canon fifties: f1.0, f1.4 f1.8 and the f2.5 macro. I swapped the f1.0 for an f1.2 a few years ago and it was only comparatively recently that I culled my collection to the point that I “only” have three; the EF 50mm f1.2L, EF 50mm f1.4 USM and the relatively recent RF 50mm f1.8 STM. The two EF lenses will be going soon and it looks as if my collection of fifties will be down to a single lens for the first time since 1995.

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An update on my mirrorless journey…

It’s hard to know where to start when talking about the changes that shooting with mirrorless cameras have made. In the absence of anything profound I think that I will start with something that has been said by others but which I need to express very strongly. So much so, I’m going to make it a quote:

“Canon got everything right when they introduced the EF to RF converter”

Why did I feel the need to say that in quite such strong terms? I hate changing systems. Back in the day (1995) when I swapped from Nikon F4S bodies to Canon EOS1Ns, and had to swap all of my lenses as well, it was tough. Nothing was familiar apart from the rolls of film I was slotting into them. Changing everything in one hit meant that I had to get my head around half a dozen different things all at once. This time around, swapping from Canon EF to RF I got to keep my familiar (and much loved) lenses whilst I got used to the new bodies and their wildly unfamiliar viewfinders. Eventually I will swap out all of the lenses too but there really is no hurry. The converters aren’t perfect but, looking back over the last few weeks, they have been such a help in making the transition.

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