Three cameras for the price of one
A cheaper alternative to a DSLR for nature enthusiasts
When my bridge camera accumulated too many hardware issues to be worth fixing after 3 years of hardcore use, I considered an interchangeable lens camera. My budget possibly could have stretched to cover a basic DSLR with a zoom lens and a macro lens, but I decided to stick to my current hack.
Would my system work for you? Who knows! Keep reading to assess.
My workhorse camera is a Nikon P1100 (almost unchanged from the Nikon P1000 it replaced, which took all of the photos above; the ones in the very last collage in this post are by the P1100).
What I love about this camera is the amazing zoom, which gives me closer-up shots than all but the most pricey DSLR lenses. I use it in place of binoculars, with the bonus that I can snap shots for ID. I’ve become so much more intimate with the lives of birds since beginning to take the Nikon out in the field!
The price tag is significant, but is low enough that I’m willing to bring my Nikon paddling on level 1 rivers without a dry bag. (A camera in a dry bag is dead weight — not many photos are going to happen that way.) I’ve only capsized once, and my instinct was to grab the camera and hold it above my head. On the other hand, I have let the Nikon get wetter than I should have during a downpour and had to wait a week for the damp to stop fogging up the inside of the lens. (Oops.)
What I don’t love:
The downside of the ultra-zoom is that it only produces non-grainy shots (especially in “bird”/burst mode) in excellent light. If I had one of those huge lenses I see on hardcore birders’ cameras, I’d get better shots…but fewer of them since I’d more frequently leave my camera at home. It’s all a tradeoff.
As you can see in the photos above, the Nikon manages moderate-scale macro pretty well. But it didn’t let me zoom in as close as I wanted to on teensy-tiny things. Which brings me to…
Macro hack:
Two years ago when I had to send my Nikon P1000 in for a repair that took months, I splurged on a second camera. The Olympus TG-6 has a “microscope mode” that lets me see much closer up, and its in-camera focus-stacking deals with the macro issue of blurring everything that’s not on the focal plane. Just like with the Nikon, the Olympus opened my eyes to a different sort of wonder, this time about the complexity of invertebrate life.
Pros and cons:
At the level of water droplets on flowers or faces on toads, the Olympus is excellent. But at the jumping-spider level it starts to lose a bit of acuity. Also, even with the in-camera LED on, I almost always need a supplemental light. Luckily, it’s cheap and simple to provide backup illumination for small, closeup things.
On the downside, the Olympus’s focus-stacking only works if absolutely nothing moves, which isn’t very realistic in the real world. A tiny bit of breeze and you get odd artifacts when you zoom in. That said, the camera makes one unstacked and one stacked photo each you push the shutter button. So even if the focus-stacking fails and your critter hops or flies away, you still have something to remember it by.
Another negative: Images tend to come out dull, so I always have to boost the colors manually afterwards. (Not a big deal, but worth knowing if you don’t post-process. Honestly, I often boost colors with my Nikon’s images too.)
The biggest downside of this camera, though, is that it’s usually in my bag, not in my hand. No wonder I have far fewer “I love this!” photos from the Olympus compared to the Nikon.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the obvious — your phone! After getting hooked on iNaturalist and Merlin, I started keeping my phone accessible in the field. Then, after upgrading to a Google Pixel 7 Pro six months ago, I really tried out that always-on-hand item to see where it excels.
Landscapes are where the Pixel usually wins over my other cameras, with an occasional good semi-macro shot. The phone also seems to be able to manage images with strong contrast of dark and light and to capture the bright colors I see better than my other cameras, which means less editing.
Finally, the Pixel zooms just well enough to snap an ID-able shot of a perched dragonfly when I’ve purposely left my camera at home so I wouldn’t get sidetracked during short exercise breaks (that cut into my writing hours more now. Oops…).
Cons: I mean, this is a phone, so don’t expect too much. Especially in the resolution department — the stats say Pixel image files are huge (and they are), but when you zoom in on the image in the computer there’s far less detail than in photos taken with a “real” camera. And that’s sticking to the 1x an 5x sizes that don’t require a digital zoom.
To sum it all up: When folks ask what camera I use and I share the information above, they usually look at me funny. But all three cameras (refurbished) cost less than the price of a very basic interchangeable lens setup. And I have backups if one fails.
One bridge, one mini, and one phone. It works for me. Maybe for you too?
Note on links: all links in this post are affiliate links, which means I get a few pennies if you click then buy. But my honest opinions above are entirely my own.