Camera Comparison

Although I've been feeling quite lousy since being home from Manhattan...  so for the past month...  due to having COVID and some secondary infections and now awaiting results of some more serious tests, I've been a little bit bored at times too.  Most of the time, I've been feeling too lousy too be bored but, sometimes, I feel just well enough to want to accomplish something.

I don't have much energy and my health problems seem to continually get worse in waves, but I still hope to accomplish something small each day with a very short burst of energy.  "Burst of energy"...  that is a bad joke so let me rephrase that.  I push myself for a few minutes at a time when I'm feeling a little better than I have previously and then need to rest.  Sometimes I sit at the piano briefly, sometimes I read, sometimes I watch a movie (or listen to a movie with my eyes closed), sometimes I pick up a camera and shoot some still objects in the living room.

I had a few very different cameras at my side one morning so I decided to shoot photos of the same exact scene with each camera to compare the images.  All of my cameras are rather old so these three cameras are each about ten years old which is quite old for a digital camera.  I purchase older gear on the used market from a reputable dealer to keep my photography costs down.  This means that my best cameras are always a bit long in the tooth by current standards.

Part of this mundane exercise was to see how close I could get the coloring each image from each camera to match all the others from the other cameras.  Different cameras have completely different color profiles so they render colors differently.  For example, in its default settings, one of my cameras leans slightly toward a green at times while another camera leans heavily toward magenta.  Sometimes, the colors can be a very stark neutral but the hues of blues, greens and reds can still vary slightly.  Different brands of different sensors behave differently.  Consequently, when I use two different cameras from different manufacturers for the same event or outing, it can be difficult to get the photos to look cohesive.

I prefer rather warm colors in my scenes...  I typically lean toward contrasty and rather moody too...  so getting these three very different cameras to come relatively close to each other in color is something that requires quite a bit of experience and understanding of light and color.  Most people, honestly, simply can't see the nuances of color just like most people can't hear the nuances of pitch in sound.  You must train your eye and you must train your ear which are big parts of photography and music.

Part of this little exercise was to see the difference in these images due to the different palettes made by different manufacturers as well as the differences simply due to sensor size.  Generally speaking, the larger the sensor, the better the image quality.  The tonal qualities and dynamic range are affected by sensor size and these two characteristics are huge in image quality.  There is a reason why medium format and even large format photography has a quality look and even a feel to it.  My sensors all happen to be far smaller than medium format though.  One of these sensors I tested below is actually like the size of a thumbnail when compared to medium format!  

This first image was shot using my largest sensor, a full-frame sensor (full frame is the size below medium format).  This was shot with my Sony a7 camera using a very cheap and very old manual focus lens.  Because of this very large sensor, the depth of field...  the parts of the image that are actually in focus...  are just a narrow slice across the image.  I wanted the front of the twin lens reflex camera in focus and I wanted the background as out of focus as possible.  With a sensor this size, this is very easy to do.  

Next, I dropped down to a camera with a smaller 4/3" sensor which is in my Panasonic GX8 camera body.  The obvious difference is that the background is a bit more in focus than the above image.  The background here is still quite out of focus and rather smooth but it is not as smooth as the background nor as out of focus as in the image above...

Next, I shot the same scene using my newest little compact camera with the smallest sensor of the three I tested.  This Fuji X30 has a small 2/3" sensor but it is actually quite the nice little sensor.  What becomes obvious is that I couldn't throw the background out of focus nearly as much as I did with the previous two cameras.  This is simply due to the physics that comes into play with different sized sensors.  The smaller the sensor, the more of the depth into the scene will be in focus.  The smaller the sensor, the more difficult it is to separate your subject from the foreground and background.  

Usually, for landscape photos, you want a deep depth of field.  You'll want as much of the image in focus as possible.  This isn't always the case but, generally speaking, you want the whole landscape to be in focus.  However, in portraiture, whether it be a portrait of a person, animal, place or thing...  in those situations when you want the eye to go directly to your subject...  you will try your best to separate the subject from the background as we see in the above photos.  In these situations, identifying the background is less important or doesn't matter at all.  Only the subject matters.

I like that I managed to get the settings in the cameras to match quite closely to render nice warm tones.  All three have some nice sharpness although the top photo where I used an old cheap lens isn't the greatest so it is obvious that the lens plays a part in the overall quality of an image.  This old lens has some "character" that was common for old film lenses and I like it for that.  Honestly, at wide apertures as in the top photo, it could be sharper and have less light blooming and flaring.  

I know it is hard, if not impossible, to see in this blog but the top photo shot with the largest sensor has the smoothest tonal qualities.  It also allows for the most latitude in post-processing although these images have no post-processing done other than a bit of sharpening for web.  

Different lenses also affect color.  Some lenses are known to render images on the cooler side.  Other lenses are known to render images on the warmer side.  So, even the same camera with different lenses could render a scene's colors slightly differently.

This little exercise was to see if I could match colors between cameras straight out of the cameras as they were shot and I believe I succeeded.  

What I did find in this exercise is that my best camera has a bit of a hole in lineup of available lenses.  I could have used a good lens in the 75-85mm range.  This lens should have had a fairly close minimum focusing distance too because my scene was tight.  I had to compromise when using my Sony a7 hence the reason for using an old cheap film lens.  

Color matching worked out fairly well though.