Quandary

You may not know me enough to know of my interest in photography. I began taking pictures and learning to take seriously good pictures in 1969. Not that I took seriously good pictures then, but I was interested in taking seriously good pictures. I wanted my photography to pop and please the viewer. I began with color slide film because my dad had shot literally thousands of color slides during my young years. We had slide shows of about everything the family did that would put an insomniac into a comma.


I soon switched to black and white for most of the photography I did for my own amusement because I was always more impressed with a great b&w photo than a great color photo. It depended on the subject, of course.


After I got married I turned a half bath in our apartment into a dark room for b&w developing. I had poor to mediocre results until I began to get the formula right.


When the children began to show up (and I still wonder how that happened) I again switched film formats and was shooting mostly color print film, with an occasional print/slide film.


I went through a long spell of not shooting pictures much at all until the digital age came along. I wanted a good camera, and for reasons I won't go into here I decided to stick with the 35mm platform and chose a Nikon. It has the look and feel of a great camera, and it took incredible pictures. It is capable of taking better pictures than I am capable of seeing in the view finder.


But the Nikon is big and heavy and quite conspicuous. You can not be stealthy with it. It dominates the scene. Because of it's bulk I find it a burden to carry, use quickly or unobtrusively. It is impossible to use while biking. At least it would most likely crush a hole in my chest while riding, and at worse be violently killed itself in a crash. I'm not saying I ever crash, but in the extremely unlikely event I did crash my bike the camera would suffer to the point of demise I am sure. And a painful death it would be for me, considering the outlay of cash it took to obtain it.


All of that to say I am looking at some seriously small cameras with serious technology on board. Two that have my attention now are these:













They have similar features and one that my Nikon, at 5 times the cost, does not have, native b&w. I am trying to decide whether to buy one at all, to buy one and then decide to keep it or stick with my Nikon, or sell the Nikon.


My Nikon is only 6 MP. The Olympus is 10MP and the Canon is 10.1MP. It would most likely be over kill to shoot normally in the higher resolution. The pics would take too much room and time to upload. But if I really wanted the detail for a large format print it would be available.