Twenty years, they have gone by fast. I can remember the first time I saw a camera with a screen on the back of it at a sporting venue, and now a camera without one is considered vintage. However, the look of modern cameras is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to changes. Spending time with the Nikon D1 to create the piece on it really opened my eyes to what it was to take a photo in 1999, and how different it is now. I recently took out a number of different cameras from multiple manufacturers to see if I could put into pictures and words the difference among them.

Using a modern camera is like walking a tightrope that is 10 feet wide and has three layers of safety nets below it to catch you as you fall. I’m not trying to say that creating an incredible image is easy but am saying that creating a bad image is harder. It is a development growth mirrored by that of popular social media platforms, where getting a photo that is “good enough” and then piling filters on top of it has become commonplace. It doesn’t mean that the resulting image is bad, it just says that the effort to create it was less than it took photographers 10 to 20 years ago. The difference between the output in creativity isn’t a new concept. Just look at the many that have critiqued images from Bresson without knowing how hard they were to create at the time he lived, even by a master of his caliber. All too often we take for granted the luxuries we have gained or never knew we were once without.

In an effort to discover what has changed, I headed back to the train tracks of northern Arizona. I wanted to create a piece that would make it easy to measure before and after, so photographing freight trains with modern camera platforms was the best way I could try to keep the comparison accurate. Not to mention that there is something relaxing to me about being in a forest where you can hear an approaching train echo as it rumbles towards me miles before it appears around a bend.

If you read the first piece in this series (featuring the Nikon D1) then you know that every photo was taken during the daytime. This was not by accident, but rather a necessity, as cameras 20 years ago did not have good (or any) low light performance whatsoever. Even thinking about photographing at dusk was out of the picture as anything higher than ISO 400 was a confusing mess of noise that looked more like an abstract painting than a photograph. This is not the case with modern cameras.

As coincidence would have it, the first day I was looking to test the newer cameras, I was delayed by a photoshoot that ran long. By the time I had wrapped and driven up to Flagstaff, the sun was down and there was a mix of snow and rain coming down. Not to fear as I had a Sony A7R III with me and low light wasn’t a problem… although sitting in bad weather for hours waiting for the right train to come by was annoying. If I had been shooting with the D1, I would have never driven to the tracks that evening, as it would have been a waste to photograph a train knowing there was zero chance the resulting image would go into my portfolio.