It’s pretty common for photographers to be constantly in search of the perfect kit.
This reaches oftentimes heights that only a medieval knight in search of the Holy Grail could have understood, with hours and hours spent agonizing on pros and cons lists and watching DPReview, Imaging-Resource, PhotographyBlog and Pixel-Peeper samples until one’s eyes start to bleed…
Now, if you really pursue just one single genre of photography indeed a “perfect” kit might exist – perfect for you, that is.
But if like most of us you enjoy shooting different things you need to flip this kind of reasoning. There is no perfect kit. You will have either make do with what you choose – it will be perfect for something but mediocre for other stuff – or do the smart thing. Choose to apply the “horses for courses” rule.
Let’s say you enjoy hiking, biking and shooting landscapes, with a bit of street photography and family pictures on the side – yes, I’m talking about me.
The obvious choice for hiking and biking – remember, you’re not lugging the kit in your car but on your back using muscle power – will be a mirrorless option. And given you like shooting landscapes, and probably you will like to print them fairly big – a Sony A7r might fit the bill quite nicely.
But at the same time the AF on the original version sucks quite a bit, at least for events and street. So you should either go for the mark II – at an outrageous premium, at the moment – or just add a different piece of kit.
In my case, for example, I’ve added a minimalistic Olympus E-M10 kit for when I’m out with the bike. The lenses are so small that I can cover from 28 to 200mm (equivalent) and not having to carry an additional bag because the entire kit fits nicely in my saddlebag.
For events, street and family pictures, instead, you might use the Olympus (the AF is pretty darn fast). But for a nicer behavior at high Iso a Fuji will be possibly a better choice, and it will autofocus just as fast providing you choose one of the latest models (X-T1, X-T10 or the X-E2 with the latest firmware).
Don’t worry about having different gear: muscle memory will settle in just fine, as long as you use the different cameras fairly often and not just once a year. But again this is something you should do anyway, after all hopefully we like photography because we like to take pictures, not because we like staring at computer screens with images blown up at 800% 😉
