Flying into Zurich at dawn gave an alluring view of the Alps, but this was a work trip and in the course of a week I didn’t make it beyond the city limits (next time, where next is about a month!). The old city center is rather lacking in landmarks, but it’s generally very pretty.
On work trips like this, and even on vacations where photography is not the main goal, I almost always now go with the little Sony and leave the Canon 5D3 home alone. Therein of course lies the possibly existential challenge for Canon and Nikon’s camera divisions – why carry a DSLR, when a lighter mirrorless camera can most often capture a shot of good enough quality?
Part of Canon’s answer became clearer while I was away. They’d like to reset the bar for “good enough” quality into what was formerly medium format territory, and offer high resolution DSLRs to meet that need. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, a side-by-side comparison of 5D3 frames with images from my brother’s Nikon D800e showed the latter to be clearly better, even under normal shooting conditions. So I’ve no doubt that more pixels are useful, and eventually it’s inevitable that full frame cameras will all sport crazy resolutions. On the other, Canon’s specific implementation in the 5Ds feels less than fully compelling. The high resolution comes with an acknowledged step back in video (which I’ve come to enjoy experimenting with), and overall image quality that’s probably a wash with Nikon’s D810 (slightly higher resolution, probably slightly less dynamic range, though we’ll have to see about the latter). Certainly it’s a step forward in the Canon world, but if I’d really really wanted these capabilities I’d have switched to Nikon already.
More interesting, both personally and perhaps for the future of DSLRs, was the announcement of an 11-24mm f/4 lens. If Canon have been conservative on the camera front, they’ve been anything but when it comes to lenses, with a host of unusual recent offerings (a fisheye zoom, new tilt-shift and diffractive optics glass, the 200-400mm f/4 with converter