For street photography I can take just about any camera and focus on easily. Street Photography often has the advantage of working with a defined well-lit subject that the camera can lock onto and make look good without having to worry about challenges of autofocus at extreme distances or extreme focal lengths.
With experience and a camera you are comfortable with it's easy to get great street photography shots with just about anything. There are other types of photography that are a lot more challenging and taxing to get right then street or events for me; one of which I have for now given up on (Astral Photography).
If you miss a shot doing Street Photography, another one that is going to be just as interesting will make itself appear. You are not waiting for a split second reaction of getting an Owl taking off from a branch where if you miss it there is a chance you won't see anything else worth taking photos of all day.
I've had very much a love and hate relationship with Nature Photography. There are far more terrible or "missed" photos of wildlife in my collection then there are ringers, and I tend to be a lot pickier on how sharp and detailed my Nature photography is when I decide to share it. I do a lot more "pixel peeping" then I do with my street photography which I can take with a lot less need for Technical Perfection as long as the photo tells a story or gives me a sense of place.
Nature photography that features mostly flora vs fauna is of course a lot easier. Both in the availability of the subject themselves and that you can take all day setting up a photo of a flower.
Wildlife on the other hand you have maybe a minute tops with a subject before it moves on if you get lucky with a few exceptions (namely an animal that is on a Nest). More often then not you only have a split second to raise the camera up, frame, focus and take the shot.
The need to be quick for Wildlife photography taxes equipment to the extreme. You have to have fast, accurate Autofocus since most of the time your subject will be gone before you get it in focus manually and a slower AF system will also make you miss the shot. You need as much reach as possible meaning long, heavy lenses and teleconverters; and even when you have these long lenses you will always find yourself "Wishing you had just a little more zoom".
Most people who are serious about Nature Photography will buy the most expensive Full Frame kit they can find and likewise the biggest lens they can buy as well, often still having to crop their photo in even more in spite of the massive 500mm prime they lugged with.
Some FF photographers will rely on a Teleconverter which is a tradeoff, because in order to get that extra optical reach they have to sacrifice Autofocus Speed and Accuracy, any semblance of a relatively fast aperture and will take a hit on the actual sharpness of the image itself.
There are those like me who know the secret to Wildlife Photography is not in Full Frame, regardless of what the mainstream will have you believe. This is the one time we can let our Crop sensors really shine.
What if, and hear me out, your "Full Bestest Full Frame Camera" had a built in Teleconverter that didn't darken the image, take a hit on autofocus or clarity of the image itself? What a concept! That 300mm lens becomes a 500mm. A 600mm lens becomes 900mm. This is the one time APS-C shooters can make Full Framers jealous of the places we can reach with our lenses...
Then comes Micro 43rds. The sensor format who looks at Full Frame, looks at APS-C and goes "Hold My Beer". The underdog power of a 2x crop factor being a powerful IYKYK secret among M43 Nature Photographers.
Before I swoon too much more over the "Secret magic" of Micro 43rds for Telephoto reach as a whole I should show off my own little secret weapon; the Ace in the sleeve in an incredibly demanding art of Wildlife Photography: The Panasonic G9
I started my journey into Micro 43rds back in 2011, where I bought a refurbished Olympus Pen EPL-2. It was also my first experience with a Mirrorless camera as well.
Originally I bought into m43 only for a smaller kit to take with when I travelled, leaving the DSLR at home to use for "more serious event photography".
The EM5 was my first serious M43 camera. It was well built with rock-solid weather sealing and two well placed control wheels. At this point I started taking Micro 43rds seriously and went from the system being a camera I only took out on vacation to my backup and alternative kit for more serious event photography as well.
When the next generation of 20mp M43 sensors came out, which would remain the defacto standard till just recently, I switched from Olympus to Panasonic (but kept mostly Olympus lenses; something that would only change after getting my latest M43 body). The Olympus Pen F's controls felt too cramped, and the OM-1 Mark II was well out of my budget.
So along came the Panasonic GX8 a camera that would be my workhorse M43 camera from 2015 to 2023; the longest amount of time I would keep a main camera: a solid eight years. During this time my "main" system would shift several times from Canon to Sony A, Back to Canon and then to Nikon.
As I flipped back and forth between APS-C and Full Frame, my M43 kit remained in play as my control camera that I could fall back on at any time when I got frustrated with my Canon 6D. It came into play again as my fallback when I gave Full Frame a second chance with the Sony a99 and once more when I dumped Canon and switched over to Nikon as my "Primary" system.
When 2022 rolled around I picked up a Nikon Z50 to be my "main" most modern Mirrorless camera. For the $500 I paid for it it's still a really solid camera.
The Z50 is amazing for High ISO performance but in some ways it just has a lot of things stripped out of it that I have been used to having with my other Mirrorless cameras; namely having IBIS. I had to adapt my F mount lenses to it and some of those were a little too heavy for the body. It felt more like a sidearm camera then my "Main" camera and essentially replaced my Canon M3. In that niche, the Z50 excels.
Last year used prices on the Panasonic G9 crashed as the G9 Mark II was announced. The market was still strong for used Micro 43rds equipment so I was able to trade in my GX8 and only be $200 out of pocket to upgrade it to the "Flagship" Panasonic G9 and man does this thing have just about everything on it.
The GX8 itself was solid. There is a reason I held onto it for almost a decade, but the G9 felt like I took the best aspects of my Nikon DSLRs, the best aspects of the GX8 and merged them into one camera; and for me this makes shooting with this camera a joy even if there are some limitations I need to overcome in Post.
After struggling all year last year for trying to find a super telephoto reach lens I was happy with from the Tamron 18-400 all-in one which had great Autofocus but had issues with adding noise and distortion, to a Sigma 150-500 which was extremely heavy and very slow and inaccurate to AF and to a Nikon 80-400 (which I still have but am now once again having second thoughts on the quality of the optics even though the build quality; I decided to double down on Micro 43rds and along with the G9 bought the Panasonic 100-400mm lens.
The Panasonic Lens weighed half of what the 80-400 I settled on "compromising" with for Nikon and 75% lighter then the "Bigma" lenses (either the 150-500 or newer 150-600 that my friends all use). Handholding the Bigma made my wrists physically hurt, while I could shoot the G9 and 100-400 all day. It was perfectly balanced, and a match almost made in heaven.
When I say "almost perfect" I must admit there are some shortcomings to the G9 and by proxy the GX8 and anything older. The most noticeable place the G9 falls short is ISO noise. The newer generation of both Full Frame and APS-C sensors leave the sensor that is in the G9 in the dust.
The G9 is amazing SOOC when it is shot at ISO 200. You start to notice noise at 400 and it becomes "visible on the zoomed out "social media sharing" scale at around 1600. I would have been happy with this level of ISO performance in 2015. Nine years later however things change, especially realizing that when you have to shoot wildlife with high enough shutter speeds to get rid of motion blur (1/800-1/2000 of a second) that ISO gets bumped up quickly when your max apeture is F6.3.
On the flipside I use Adobe Lightroom, and Adobe's Noise Reduction software has gotten a lot better in the last two years with the addition of AI de-noise (one of the few good uses for AI IMHO but I already made an earlier rant about that topic so I am not going to delve into it again).
So the biggest shortcoming to the G9 is easily overcome in software. The other shortcoming is harder to "correct" for hower and that is AF Accuracy.
When you hear reviews about the G9 classic the biggest complaint is that "It lacks PDAF so the Autofocus system is Slow and Terrible!!!" which is a bit of a stretch.
In the field however the G9's Autofocus is actually extremely fast. Its faster then my D7200 and D610. It's faster then my Z50. Where it does struggle sometimes however is AF Accuracy.
If left to autofocus using face or animal tracking modes, a mode I once thought was a "gimmick" but am now finding to be more useful especially for Birds in Flight the Autofocus does occasionally misfocus. But it is manageable and still has a higher hit rate overall then my DSLR cameras which are the defacto I compare my own metrics to. So yes, something like a Canon R7 or Sony A9 which have incredibly fast and accurate Autofocus are going to bury a first generation Panasonic G9. But I own neither of those cameras so I can just compare it to a DSLR from 2015, which the G9 still outperforms.
This said, when the G9 doesn't misfocus the AF is a lot more accurate and sharper then any of my Nikon equipment. The same kind of birds at the same distance under very similar lighting conditions that looked blurred with my D7200 and 80-400 at the pixel level are tact sharp where you can see individual plumes in feathers of songbirds instead.
Yes the G9 has more noise but more detail, and at the end of the day you can correct noise especially when it is very fine grain noise as is the case with the G9. It is much more difficult to recover detail from a photo that is a smidge out of focus, which seems to be the case with my 80-400 lens at anything taken at infinity focus. So in the end "Less High ISO Noise" means very little when the photo is out of focus.
Nikon, once one of the companies best known for their APS-C powerhouses (See Nikon D7200 and Nikon D500) has been very wishy washy and non committal to the format compared to Fuji, Canon and even Sony. With Nikon's insistence that "Full Frame is the Future for Everyone" and seeming to mostly turn a blind eye to the APS-C enthusiasts who flock to Fuji in droves, it leaves me in a tight spot.
Crop on the Nikon platform is very much in its Swansong unless Nikon does a complete 180. While the Z50 is solid, there is no upgrade path for that camera, just a dead-end and a wishy washy non-comittal response from Nikon. Forcing people to either "Get Good and Go Full Frame" (which is what Nikon wants you to do) or ditch Nikon and either go to Fuji or buy a Sony A6400 or Canon R7.
Meanwhile the OM-1 and Panasonic G9 II breathed new life into the Micro 43rd; so while Nikon may be wanting to drop APS-C like a wet sock there's a definite future and upgrade path for the Prosumer/Hobbiest photographer in M43 who doesn't need "The Best" but still wants a solid camera that corners weren't cut on to make it more appealing to Bloggers or encourage people to "Just buy a Full Frame Camera" in 3-6 months as both Canon and now Nikon have been guilty of doing.
M43 photographers have access to some amazing quality lenses by both Olympus/OM and Panasonic but are constantly belittled by others for not shooting Full Frame, yet they still carry on and keep this underdog camera system alive to this day, a system some of the other big camera brands tried many times to kill and failed.
Every time I see a Micro 43rds shooter show up surrounded by a sea of Nikon, Canon and Sony Full Frame photographers sporting massive, stupidly overpriced lenses I get a nice warm feeling inside.
Recently I've come to enlightenment that maybe, just maybe Micro 43rds has been my Main System for a decade now. While I have the least amount of lenses for Micro 43rds; I have everything I really need and I haven't once dropped the system to "go to something else" as I had done with Canon, Sony A and Nikon F.
I have a camera I can aspire to save up for and eventually "upgrade" to with M43, whereas I'm at a dead-end currently with Z50. It's always nice to be able to see that "next step" even if you currently have no reason or no means to take it.
In the end, maybe saying I main Micro 43rds and dabble in other formats is the ultimate truth. I'm not the type that ever felt they needed "the best Full Frame Camera to be the best!!!". Micro 43rds shooters are their own breed, and among all the camera communities I've been a part of they seem the most interested in just talking with each other, and appreciating that they met another fellow Micro 43rds enthusiast instead of competing with each other.
I still plan on shooting APS-C, my small sensor pocket cameras and yes even Full Frame from time to time. For the longest time I had believed that my "Anchor" format was APS-C but the more I think about it the more I realize it was MFT all this time instead. I'm happy to consider the G9 my main Wildlife Photography camera at this point.
So with another long post of my ramblings about the Photography industry done, enjoy a few photos I've taken from the Panasonic G9 in the six months I've had it so far; as I look onwards to my journey with Micro 43rds for another decade to come:
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