Life isn’t easy these days for enthusiastic photographers. Especially when you’re looking for the gear that perfectly fits you and your needs or wishes and try and keep the compromises as small as possible.
My name is Wolfgang Spekner and I’m a “the perfect gear addict”.

In analog times, the camera I did everything with and held dear for a decade (I still like it today), was the Nikon F90x (N90s). I started to do real photography, when I was 7, with an old Praktica and a 50mm f1.8 lens. Later, when AF-times dawned, I got myself a cheap Yashica AF200 with 35-70/3.5-4.5 and the 70-210/4.5 (I think). After using this camera for about ten years or so, the shutter broke and I bought my first Nikon, an F50. A couple of months later I upgraded to the older F-601 (N6006). Again a couple of months later I added a F90x. That was in 1996. I have used these two cameras until 2004 for almost everything I shot (I had also some compact cameras like the Yashica T5, Leica’s Minin III and two Olympus Mju coming and going.) My F-601 was gone in 2004, but I kept the F90x and still have it and maybe will never sell it, for it was my affordable dream camera at the time.

All that changed in 2004. (Read on after the break.)Nikon introduced their D70 and I bought it. I wasn’t happy with the output, so I tried a Canon 300D. After a couple of months I went back to the D70, then the D80, then a D40, a D40x, then – eventually a milestone: a Canon 5D. A couple of months later I was tricked into thinking “new is better” and I got myself a Nikon D300. Didn’t make me happy, so I went back to the 5D – luckily! A friend of mine gave to me a Nikon D700 and I used the two camera systems side by side for a while – the D700 mostly for low-light, the 5D for everything else, because I was so hooked on its sharpness.
In January 2009 I traded my 5d in for the 5D Mark II. Everything was better in that camera compared to the “old” 5D. Everything BUT sharpness. I constantly missed the crisp look of the 5D images and never got really to love the new 5DII. So eventually I swent back to the D700 to combine very good low-light performance with good everyday performance. Lately I’ve been using a D3s, which really is an awesome camera and a workhorse. But I have never seen the crispness of 5D photos again after selling my second one, except for the Leica M8, the M9 (the M9 is way to expensive for me and the M8 only fun between ISO 160 and 320) and the Olympus E-p1 (but its micro four thirds sensor isn’t great in low-light and is too small to provide the shallow depth of field, which I love). So in just 6 years I had 10 different cameras, not to speak of the mirrorless cameras I tried and owned in the past 12 months.

Now I’m thinking of maybe going back to the 5D and a couple of small lenses to produce images I really love. I know all this sounds pretty silly, but maybe there are others out there, who feel the same way – who knows.

In the course of contemplating over a possible 5D again, I post-processed some images in Lightroom to enjoy its looks and crispness. I chose a rather strange look to the pictures, because I have a different feeling to every trip I do.
All these images were shot with a cheap Canon EF 35/2 lens during a trip to Paris with my wife and my two nieces in Summer 2008. Click on the images to enlarge.

Thanks for reading!

Wolfgang