A Mirrorless Meteor

Game over.

Even dinosauric photographers like me, who started out with manual light meters, before the time of autofocus, and long before the time of digital, can see the meteor heading our way.

We all know it will smash our camera-mirrors to pieces.



And I, for one, cannot wait.

I have survived all the extinctions:

First it was the dark death of hand-held light meters. Spotmatic blinded them with the brilliance of TTL.

Then came the auto-focus revolution, arriving just as I perfected the art of manual focus. The peep of auto focus silenced all manual-focus-samurais. 

And finally came the biggest extinction of them all – digital doom, razor-sharp pixels spilling the colourful blood of Velvia. (Film was cold-blooded and wasn't perfect, but at least it had blood. At least it had a heart. Pixels have no heart and no mercy and caused the ice age for film – the end of a species.)

Game over.

I recently tried out the Canon R5. It took me exactly three seconds from the time I picked up the camera and photographed my children running in the back yard to know I needed one. This was the end. This was the next extinction.

Gone is the shake of the fist of the 1DX Mark 2. It is replaced by a whisper in the ear. A purr of a cat.

Gone is the need to be able to choose a focus point. The R5 will find the eye of anything and track it like science fiction.

Gone are the variety of cameras on my lap, one for detail, one for action and one for low light. The R5 does it all.

Game. Over. 

And the only survivor in my camera bag is the Canon R5.

Story and images by Heinrich van den Berg. Photographed at The Bush House and Jaci's Lodges at Madikwe with a Canon R5 and 200-400mm Canon lens.

www.heinrichvandenberg.com