I'd like to write a little about my Sony RX1 camera. This website is certainly not intended to be a gear review site. There are thousands of others doing this and I am not the right person to follow them suit. But I'd like to tell my story with this camera and why I am using it now again.
The RX1 was the first camera that I bought after I had re-discovered photography some two years ago. Steve Huff (http://www.stevehuffphoto.com) had written enthusiastic reviews on this camera and I found the concept appealing. Small, light, full frame, versatile and with a real good Zeiss f2.0 lens. So I bought it. And tried it. And kind of failed.
A 35mm lens is very universal. And I wanted to use it for multiple purposes. I was particularly keen on trying it as a street photography camera. And honestly - as such it sucks. AF is much too slow, screen reflections are awful in bright sunlight, you can't turn off magnification on the screen when you focus manually. It is a disaster. And Sony are bold enough not to update the firmware to allow us simple and normal manual focussing. I was flabbergasted. This thing was really expensive and it fails in such details.
For landscape 35mm often is not wide enough. So I found the camera not very fit for that purpose either. And portraits with a 35mm lens - hm, you can do that, but there are certainly better ways of pointing out the beauty of your models' facial lines.
After all I didn't know what to do with this camera after some months and so it ended up in a drawer very much to my annoyance.
Until - well until I had this camera with me when I went out for a night photoshoot some few weeks ago. Winter is coming in New Zealand and the days are much shorter now. So it's night photography season again.
And all of a sudden I realised what a beautiful night shot camera this is. You can bump up ISO to 6400 or even 12500 and shoot it hand-held. It creates an interesting grain that you can easily work with in processing. Colour rendering is nice and interesting in the dark. And the lens gives amazing details that you can use very nicely when you process the shots.
So after all it turned out that Steve was right when he praised the night shooting qualities of this camera in his reviews. (http://www.stevehuffphoto.com/2012/10/09/night-time-street-shooting-with-the-sony-rx1-amazing-high-iso-samples/) It took me only two years to find that out.... :-) You can certainly call it luxury to have a "night-shot only camera" available. And I would certainly not buy this expensive thing for that purpose only. But as I am having it anyway I will use it and enjoy taking pictures in the dark.
Please take a look at my recent colour night shots on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisrsouthland/) and in the "urban" section of this site. They are all taken with the RX1.