Top Camera of the Year? That would be a three way tie. The winner depends on your point of view...

The Nikon Df.

If high ISO image quality is the number one priority on your camera evaluation spreadsheet, and you are a Nikon shooter. This is your winner. It's also the perfect nostalgia booster for anyone who started photography with an SLR (no "D") in their hands.

Sony A7r.

If you are looking for an incredibly detailed sensor and the ability to use it with Canon, Nikon, Leica, etc. lenses, and you want all that at a reasonable price, then this should be at the top of your short list. It's the D.I.Y. fanatic's dream. Can I wedge a Nikon 43-86mm zoom on there? You bet!

Olympus OM-D EM-1

Looking for a camera that's so well stabilized that it takes five times as long to hit the ground when you accidentally drop it? How about the camera that's the most fun to use? Or the one with boxes full of cool lenses? So, what's a few fewer pixels between friends?

It's been an interesting year for cameras. Not that there was a record number of them introduced or that there were tremendous technical breakthroughs to celebrate. This year was like a maturing process for the main camera types. But there's enough going on to keep the enthusiasts clutching their checkbooks and trying to decide if now is the time to plunge in and buy......more cameras.

For full on marketing innovation you've got to hand it to Sony, they turn total product indecision into a plus, wipe out whole product categories and re-label stuff with reckless abandon. We'd call it the "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" methodology but so the consumer wall has proved to be more or less Teflon(tm) until now. 

But let's drop back a few years and look at where Sony has come from. Five years ago they introduced the rock hard (and heavy as a brick) ultra-traditional DSLR, the a900. They quickly followed with almost exactly the same camera in the form of the a850. These were both built like tanks and made very few concessions to the digital age. No live view. No video. Just full frame sensors (which were rare at the time) and lots of heavy metal. Popular with the Sony faithful (all 50 of them) and a good platform for using Zeiss primes and G series zooms. 

But by 2010 these two cameras were getting long in the tooth and the Sony-ites were screaming for a new full frame body. It came in the form of the a99 which was both loved and hated. Loved because it used a state of the art sensor and put Sony shooters in range of the Canon and Nikon faithful for high ISO performance. And it was optimized for best color. But it was also hated because Sony pulled a "Sony" and gave us yet another flash shoe standard. One that is anything but standard. Just ask anyone who tries to put a radio trigger on the new flash....

Rush Hour at the Pool.

Warm up lanes at USMS Indoor Short Course Nationals.

It was tough to get out of bed today. The temperature here in Austin was 27 degrees. I know that's a walk in the park for our northern neighbors but down here our blood gets thinned out by the relentless summer heat and the plethora of peppers we eat. It was still dark outside at 6:30 am but Ben and I hopped into the car and headed out to greet the day. First stop was the school and cross country practice for Ben. A bunch of really skinny guys, bundled up from head to toe, and ready to get some road miles under their proverbial belts. I headed down the road a mile to the Rollingwood Pool which was already full of my fellow masters swimmers when I got there. 

The hardest part of swimming outdoors in the winter is making the mental commitment to drag the suit on and head out of the locker room door. Once you're moving across the deck to your lane you have become committed. The plunge into the water just seals the deal. And then, after five or ten minutes of warm up you get the relaxing feeling of dropping into something you've done so often that it's nearly automatic. There's no thought of cutting a workout short. Your focus become about matching speed with your lane mates, executing efficient flip turns and making the challenging set of intervals. There's little time to talk and when it's really cold no one wants to keep their head out of the water for very long. 

There are two dangers in any endeavor. One is that you'll find an excuse to skip a day and that will lead you down the path toward finding more and more reasons to stay under the covers and skip practice. One day you wake up and find that it's been weeks since you've been and then you deal with the feeling that you're so far behind; that your fitness level has dropped so much, that it will be impossible to get back in and get back in shape. The second danger is that of making your swim (or photography or whatever) too routine and finding one day that you are just going through the motions but your passion has left the pool. That's easier to fix. You develop new goals and you find coaches that surprise you with the creativity and fun quotients of their workouts. Maybe it's time to challenge yourself by moving up into a faster lane. Or maybe you need to switch to a different time schedule and swim with a different crew for a while. 

One thing is certain. Being good at something requires commitment and practice. Being great at something requires the first two along with a liberal dose of passion. If you don't get a tingle of excitement when you head out the door for practice (swimming or photography) you might need to re-align your focus and revisit your goals. Bottom line for both practices? Swimming and Photography should be fun. 

Gear notes: Today we did a few sets of kicking drills and we used our fins. My choice was a set of long Tyr fins. I was using Speedo Vanquisher 2 googles with reflective lenses. My swim suit was a classic jammer (just above the knees) from Speedo's Endurance line. On the pull sets I used green adult size StrokeMaker hand paddles, modified by removing the wrist band and adding an extra finger band. 

THE FIVE CAM SLAM.

Samsung Galaxy NX. Kit Lens.

I had a fun, raucous and loud assignment this past weekend. I was asked to photograph the opening of the new location for the Children's Museum (re-named, The Thinkery) on Saturday. I spent most of my day there and, capriciously, used five different cameras to take nearly 2,000 images. When I left my house at eight in the morning it was the coldest day we've had yet this year in Austin, with the temperature hovering aroun 27 degrees. I packed two Panasonic GH3s, one Panasonic G6 and a Sony a99 into my big Domke bag, along with a fun assortment of lenses. But wait, that's only four cameras... Oh, yeah, I also had a brand, spanking, new Samsung Galaxy NX body and a kit lens lingering on the passenger seat of the car. It had been there overnight for a routine "chill test."

When I got to the new museum location at the old Mueller Airport (now a trendy, cool and growing neighborhood) I grabbed the bag and left the Samsung in the trunk along with my swim bag and an extra tripod. The first stop was into the main museum building to check in and then across the street to the big, multi-level parking garage. The wind was whipping and their was moisture in the air. We would start in the parking garage and there would be a mariachi led parade over to the museum. I grabbed out the Sony a99 with the 24-105mm lens and a flash and started making images of kids and their parents enjoying hot chocolate and coffee. The light levels in the garage were very low and it was a difficult location in which to shoot. If I pointed the camera at the walls the outside lighting overwhelmed the interior light and burned to white, even with the flash. I tried to compose images without showing the outside but it wasn't always possible. 

We started the parade and I made images of the whole short procession. When we got into the museum there were a few speeches, a ribbon cutting and then the kids got to tear through a big paper barrier and enter the guts of the museum. I shot the speeches with a mixture of flash, fill flash and available light and figured I would sort out the right direction in post. The paper barrier shot was very much an on camera flash shot.

After the images that required flash were over with I dripped the Sony and the flash into the bag I left under the client's desk in the second floor warren of offices. I spent the rest of the morning shoot with three other cameras: A GH3 with the 14-42mm, a GH3 with the 45-140mm and the G6 with the 25mm 1.4. The cameras all focused quickly and accurately and the files from the GH3s are good and clean up to 3200 ISO. Occasionally I would switch the 25mm to one of the GH3s just to see how the cameras looked with that lens at higher ISOs. After a couple hours shooting available light with that combination I pulled out a 40mm 1.4 Olympus manual focus half frame lens and put in on the G6 in order to try out the focus peaking feature. It worked great, even at f2. 

Around one in the afternoon I decided to put all the rest of the cameras up and go out to my (refrigerated) car to get the Samsung Galaxy NX and use it for a while, just to mix things up. Rookie mistake here. As soon as I walked into the well heated museum space with the 27 degree camera and lens everything condensed over. Instant fog filter. I put the camera under a hand dryer in one of the restrooms and gave it twenty minutes or so to warm up. As soon as the moisture cleared the camera was up and ready. In the next few hours I shot nearly 800 images with the camera and the kit lens at every setting from ISO 400 to ISO 6400 and I decided that, now that I'm shooting with a full production version of the GNX instead of a series of prototypes and pre-prototypes, that the GNX is a pretty good shooting cameras with really good files. Now I regret sending all the super cool lenses back.... 

As the day wound down I finished up with the 25mm Pana/Leica lens on the G6 body and was very happy with how fast (very) and fluid the operation of that combination was. 

So, when I finish shooting a job like this I try to get into post production mode the very next day. I shoot large, super-fine jpgs in all of the cameras (this is to be interpreted to mean that I shot at the largest size setting and the lowest compression setting for each camera) and I am able to do a fair amount of Jpeg file tweaking in the Apple, Inc. program, Aperture 3. 

First thing in the morning, before coffee, I head to the office to ingest every file into Aperture, renaming them with a different code for each camera. I also append metadata and caption info. Once I have them ingested and I've had some coffee I make a quick pass through the whole folder looking for obvious trash (blinks, wildly bad exposure or pegged color) and I dump those files.  Then I go through files with lots of versions and try to find the best versions from each group while dumping all the lesser versions. Once this is done I get down to the work of post processing. Nearly every file is touched; either in a  batch mode or individually and it can be as time consuming as the post processing that wedding photographers do. 

I start with color correction because doing exposure first and then color correcting will shift the first exposure correction and require a second pass. After the color correction I move to exposure  and brightness settings, then on to contrast, then to definition and clarity, then to saturation (most cameras need a slight decrease, the GH3s need a tiny increase...) and finally on to sharpening. I try not to sharpen much as the camera Jpeg engines are already tweaked with my preferred sharpen settings.

Once everything is tweaked I go through one more time to see if there is anything I can throw away. That done I burn three sets of DVDs. One for the client and two for my archives. I know DVDs aren't archival but I also know that some jobs have lifespans that are measured in a few years, even months and not everything I shoot is so amazing that I need it to outlive me. I also have the originals backed up on two hard drives. A final fallback is my written disclaimer to clients advising them that once I have delivered a set of final files they are responsible for archiving their copy. We have no legal obligation after 30 days to maintain the files or provide replacements. In practice we keep them for as long as we can but it moves clients to at least think about safeguarding the IP they've paid for and will need to use in the future. 

How do I like the cameras? The Sony has the best files of all but the worst exposure consistency and the worst auto white balance. I'm starting to think of these full frame, DSLR cameras as more studio cameras or cameras to shoot when you can tether them and take your time to assess the shot closely. The Samsung has the second best files in terms of depth, resolution and low noise. The AWB is somewhere between the Sony a99 and the m4:3 cameras. The best compromise (and all cameras are compromises) is the GH3.  The files from those two cameras stand up well to scrutiny even at 3200 ISO at 100%, if you shoot them bright enough. Underexpose and you'll get back high ISO files from just about all cameras. For sheer joy of shooting the G6 is the best of the bunch. It is so small and light that it becomes almost invisible in actual use. I love it with the 25mm Pana/Leica on it. It weighs next to nothing but the EVF is good and the files, though not as noise free as the GH3 are very good and sharpen up nicely in post. It's a least a full stop noisier than the GH3 but with a fast lens you go right back into the whole compromise thing.

Next time I shoot a day long event I'm leaving the Sony stuff at home and shooting exclusively with my trinity of Panasonics. I love pre-chimping with the EVFs and I love carrying around three cameras with different lenses that, in total, weigh less than the one DSLR with a zoom and a flash. 

Your mileage may vary and you may have emotional reasons or nostalgia to deal with in selecting your gear. It's all a compromise so everyone gets to make the compromises that work best for them. That's the way the photo world works. That's my story from the weekend.

I will say one more thing. I was familiar with the menus and the operation of the cameras and had shot all of them pretty extensively before but if you really want to know how a camera handles then use it for a fast paced, all day assignment. I guarantee that by the end of the day you'll find out what bothers the hell out of you and what makes you smile. Saturday reinforced my feeling that the G6 is a wonderful and well thought out camera for the money. Its only flaw is that there is no "constant preview" (or setting effect, in Sony language) in the manual mode and I think there should be. Even if we can never fix this one thing in firmware I'm happy with the camera.  Too plastic?  No, that's just silly.

A life in balance.

It's important to balance work and play. Especially when your work is play. The relentless people in life are painful to be around and the lazy ones are worse. Business and pleasure should be like two sides of a sinusoidal wavelength on a graph. A symmetrical balance of achievement and fun. Too much of one dulls the senses. Too much of the other dulls the thrill.

We shoot for fun. We shoot for business. And then we do other stuff like read books and take naps. Swim and go out for lunches. Too much of anything affects the balance. Too many obligations affect the balance. Not enough fun is just as bad.

So, when I think about photography I wonder how to maintain the balance and resist the temptation to overindulge. How much gear is too much and how much is too little. How long to hang on to tradition and when is it time to create new traditions.  A life in balance is smoother, easier, more efficient and more effective. I think it's a more comfortable way to live.  A life in the arts should alway have room for something mundane and necessary to balance out those feelings of intensity that come bundled with creativity. For every super model shoot done with priceless cameras there should be a balance of rinsing the dinner dishes and doing the taxes. One side is fun while the other side keeps everything in the right perspective.

And don't forget to make mistakes now and then. They can lead you in very interesting directions.