My fiancée is a photographer, among her many talents, and I also make a lot of use of cameras for some reason. When the cameras in question are not flying, 360-degree or very compact, then my camera of choice – on my salary, anyway – is a Sony A7 III.
Honestly, I love this camera, and make a lot of use of the kit zoom (I know deep down I should invest more, but for web use it’s hard to justify the extra spends) and my much meatier Sony 70-200mm f/4. Again, I didn’t have the big bucks for the f/2.8, but the f/4 still manages some amazing shots in difficult conditions thanks to the image stabilization tech.
Moreover, this is my second Sony A7 – I still have an old A7 Mark 1 as my ‘backup’ body, which usually plays host to my Sony 50mm f/1.8 prime.
That leaves me pretty well-equipped in terms of the Sony ecosystem, capped off with an excellent TTL bounce flash so I can get candid shots at events with a reasonable level of confidence with my setup.
All well and good, but my fiancée shoots professionally more often than I do, and does so with her Canon EOS 90D.
She uses her innate ability more than depending on the tech, but if we were to harmonize on the same brand we could work together and swap lenses – rather than my telling her she needs to spend thousands to fill her bag with a Canon mirrorless of at least my Sony’s standard (I’m thinking the R6 Mark II) as well as the RF 70-200 f/4.
Why don’t I share my gear? After all, I’m the camera nerd and I clearly have the pricier (and so better?) gear right now?
Well, here’s the thing – before I was a Sony shooter, I was a Canon shooter. I started with a Canon EOS 350D (or ‘Digital Rebel’) and graduated to a 7D when the time came to make decent video. (I wanted the 5D Mark II but my clients at the time didn’t have very deep pockets!)
I liked the Canon system, but video was a part of my work and Sony won hands down with the mirrorless gear. As a consumer, Canon just didn’t look that interested – so I changed systems. It wasn’t that hard at the time, because my investment wasn’t that deep.
Sony was an underdog and reached out to impress with 4K video at a price I could afford. It won me fair and square.
Now it is a bit harder to do.
But I suspect it’s easier for me to switch systems as she has only ever shot Canon – and I regularly test cameras from all kinds of brands.
Still, the big question I face is: will I gain anything by switching to the kind of Canon I can afford? Obviously I’d get a bit of money back for my, ahem, well-used Sony gear, but possibly not a lot.
I know that Canon has now embraced mirrorless systems, and perhaps this is my chance to get 10-bit video with an R6 (the R5 Mark II is asking for a lot of cash – and I’m not convinced I need 8K video). I’ll still get in-body image stabilization with that – I wouldn’t give that up.
What about things like eye-tracking AF? I read people on Reddit complaining about tendencies for AF to choose the nearest object.
But is there anything to be gained from a couple working together and delivering images from different camera systems? Sure, we can’t save money by sharing lenses, but then we wouldn’t be ‘saving’ a lot of money at first by ditching one or the other system.
The other advantage is that we’d probably only need one spare body to work together on a job. Things go wrong, but one spare body should cover two shooters (mind you, it’s always handy not to have to swap lenses too often). Not that my A7 Mark 1 is going to get a lot on the used market – probably not enough to cover a new Canon flash!
Changing systems is always a worry, but I don’t feel Sony has the same lead it had when I first changed. Leaving aside the love and harmony, these are the questions I think I need to ask myself before changing:
How embedded am I in the ‘Sony way’ of doing things (and how hard will it be to learn the ‘Canon way’)?
Will there be any surprises? You’ve thought of lenses, camera bodies and flashes, but what about camera bags, spare batteries, filters and other accessories?
Will your archived Sony video mix with the Canon video?
Can anyone think of any more? I’ll definitely read the comments.
Author: Adam Juniper
Source: DigitalCameraWorld
Reviewed By: Editorial Team
