I’m going to be lazy here and repost exactly what I posted to Instagram, because I’m not so secretly just a hack. But because I have reserved a special place in my heart for people that still read blogs, you get some extra context (waffle).
It’s late 2007, maybe it’s early 2008. I’m sitting in my kitchen, almost catatonic with excitement that my first full frame digital camera is about to be delivered. If I remember correctly (hell, I could just look back at old blog posts to confirm it but I’m not that concerned about absolute perfection in the detail) I had a 20D and a 30D at the time. I had the 30D because the 20D was out of service due to a careless person forcing a compact flash card into the camera backwards. That hurt, a lot. The 20D was my first DSLR.
Fast forward to today and I now know grown adults that are younger than this camera. But the batteries got charged, the CF card was nudged into place (the right way around) and it fired up as if it hasn’t been sitting in a cupboard for the last 7 years. The 5D slapped it’s shutter one last time back when I bought a Fuji X-T3 in 2019. It had a solid 11 years of service, back in the days when I shot a lot more for the hobby and also professionally. The Fuji called me and I absolutely loved the X-T3 from day one.
But as it tends to happen every now and then, I got a visit from the nostalgia demon which coincided nicely with the visit from the patron saint of unnecessary camera purchases. So while I was digging up various old EF lenses and Fuji equipment to see what I could trade in for a potential new gear purchase, I did what I’ve been threatening to do for the last couple of years. I got the 5D out and actually brought it outside.
Despite the lack of sunshine (Irish summer), it produced some very nice results. Nice or maybe just nice because of the inherent nostalgia. Picking it up again was just as much like riding a bike as I hoped it’d be. No bells or whistles like the mirrorless cameras I’ve become used to. A far more film camera experience than I’ve had since I switched to APS-C back in 2019. Including the sensory delight that was the shutter sound. I had entirely forgotten how damn good that sound is.
Not wanting to leave a story hanging and to continue the thought from above, I’ve been mulling over returning to full frame from APS-C and moving to a faster (better/faster autofocus) camera than the Fuji X-H2 I’m currently using. I’m on the standard middle-aged arc of finding small birds absolutely fascinating and I want to be able to take better pictures of them.
