Every now and then a guest comes on The Camera Life and makes us look at the gear around our necks completely differently. Wayne Rogers was one of those guests.
Wayne runs Imaging by Design, the conversion and engineering arm of Melbourne's legendary Camera Clinic, and he has spent 35 years with cameras in pieces on his bench. He has been trained by Leica in Germany more times than he can count, he builds everything from speed cameras to helicopter LiDAR rigs, and he is exactly the sort of bloke you want to sit down with for three hours and just keep asking "but why?". So we did.
By the end, a fair bit of received wisdom we had been carrying around for years was lying on the workshop floor. Here are the camera myths Wayne happily busted for us.
Myth 1: More megapixels means a better camera
Ask Wayne what makes a great image and he won't point at the sensor. He points at the glass.
"We don't want more pixels, we just want better pixels. The camera that yields the better image is the one with the best lens on it, because the optics matter more than the sensor itself."
It is a lovely way to look at it. The sensor only has to be good enough to keep up with the lens, and right now the best lenses are already a step ahead of the bodies chasing them. So that big number on the box matters far less than the marketing would have us believe.
He took it further later in the chat, and this one even caught Justin off guard. Given the choice, Wayne would take a cracking 24-megapixel full frame sensor over a crammed 60-megapixel one every time, because the thing that really makes an image sing is dynamic range, and that comes down to the size of the pixels. Bigger pixels drink in more light, and more light means more detail surviving in your brightest highlights and deepest shadows.
"Once your highlights blow out, they're gone forever. You can usually pull shadow detail back, but the whites you just don't have."
So before you go chasing pixels, chase a lens you love and a sensor with a bit of room to breathe. Your photos will thank you for it.
Myth 2: A pricey filter makes your photos better
Wayne cuts broken filters off the front of lenses two or three times a week, so he has well and truly earned his opinion on them. And on the expensive ones, he is blunt. Spend up big and you will struggle to spot any difference at all.
"You're taking vitamins you don't need and you just have an expensive pee. Put a filter on for protection, not for image quality."
We had a good laugh at that one. It does not make filters pointless though. A filter is cheap insurance for the front element of an expensive lens, and if you are a bit clumsy with your gear (Justin has smashed a couple of filters mountain biking that would otherwise have been the front of a four thousand dollar lens), that alone is reason enough to leave one on.
Watch the full interview on YouTube, or search for it on all good podcast platforms.
The catch is the long lenses. Once you get past about 180mm, a filter and the lens can start arguing with each other and throw a faint ghost into your shot, and it is the particular pairing that causes it rather than a dud filter. If you shoot a tele and you want to know for certain, pop the camera on a tripod, take the same frame wide open with the filter on and then off, and compare the two. The answer is usually staring right back at you.
Myth 3: You set your micro-focus once and forget it
This is the one that had Justin nodding sheepishly. For years he fine-tuned his Nikon primes on a tripod in the office, under the LED tubes, got them dialled in, then headed out to a wedding and watched the focus quietly drift. Wayne knew the punchline before Justin even reached it. Get those lenses outside and they would be back-focusing.
The culprit is the colour of the light. Focus sensors react to the frequency of whatever is hitting them, so warm, red-heavy light nudges focus one way and cold, blue light nudges it the other. It is the reason Wayne's own calibration rigs run multi-spectrum lighting with a touch of near infrared mixed in, because plain white LEDs simply do not behave like daylight.
"Just white light alone, particularly LEDs, doesn't cut it. You focus inside and then you go outside and you get a different result."
So if you are going to fine-tune your focus, do it in the kind of light you actually shoot in. The office is about the worst place for it.
Myth 4: A bad copy of a lens is just a lemon
We have all heard the good copy, bad copy stories, and they are real, but the cause turns out to be more interesting than a factory dud. Every lens and every body carries a tiny built-in focus correction, and each one sits somewhere inside a plus or minus tolerance. Put a lens that leans one way on a body that leans the same way, and the two little errors stack up, so the pair reads as soft even though neither part is faulty on its own.
That is why Wayne calibrates a lens and a body together, to the manufacturer's standard, rather than judging either one on its own. And it is also why a knock is such a big deal.
"A movement of one hundredth of a millimetre between the lens mount and the sensor can give you a noticeable focus error. I watched a big bloke at the Grand Prix rest his arm on the front of his lens on a monopod, and that pressure was enough to separate the mount and throw his focus out."
So if you ever drop a lens, do not just get the lens looked at. The mount on the body cops a lot of these hits, and your focus is what ends up paying for it.
Myth 5: Touching your sensor will wreck it
Cleaning your own sensor scares a lot of us off, and Wayne completely understands why, but he reckons most of us can handle the easy end of it. First, a bit of relief. The surface you would actually touch is a cover glass sitting over the sensor, not the precious pixels themselves, so even a fingerprint near the mount usually cleans up just fine. And that annoying speck you can see at f22 but not at f5.6 is only the shadow of a bit of dust, not damage.
For loose dust, lock the shutter open, turn the camera face down and give it a few puffs with a rocket blower, ideally one you keep in a sealed bag so it is not spitting its own dust straight back in. If something is really stuck, a dry microfibre swab will lift it, as long as you go gently.
"If you run the swab on your skin and you can just feel it, that's it. Any harder and you risk a scratch."
Where it gets risky is wet cleaning, and that is exactly where Wayne sees most of the damage walk through his door. That is the moment to down tools and let a service centre take over.
Myth 6: Infrared conversion is some exotic, risky thing
This was the part Justin had been itching to get to, and the science behind it is wonderfully simple. A camera sensor is silicon, and silicon sees infrared just as happily as it sees visible light. The only reason your photos look normal is a filter sitting over the sensor that blocks the infrared out. Swap that filter for clear quartz, or a piece of glass tuned to a particular frequency, and your camera starts seeing light your eyes never will.
"You've got an infrared camera taking a picture of something you just can't see. It's madness, and it's really cool."
Justin's plan is to convert one of his current Canons to full spectrum and run clip-in filters, so it can still pull double duty as a backup body, and Wayne reckoned that was a perfectly sensible way to go about it. A good conversion does not hurt image quality, and in their workshop it does not void the warranty either. A full frame conversion runs about $625 including GST.
His one tip was about where to start. If infrared has got its hooks into you, it usually makes more sense to convert a camera and lenses you already own than to go hunting down an old body just to muck about with.
Myth 7: The Leica look - Is 3D pop real?
Wayne has been trained by Leica in Germany more than once, so he is allowed to be honest about where the money goes, and plenty of it is very real. High-carbon steel, bodies milled from a solid block of aluminium instead of cast in a mould, and a workshop culture that treats the person designing a rangefinder like a true craftsman. But some of the language around it is just that, language.
"3D pop is a catchphrase, a click word really. What it actually means is tonal range and resolution together, so you get detail but a nice smooth tone. The M series lenses do it, and that's what you're buying, the look that Leica wants, not just the red dot."
So the build and the optics genuinely are special. It is the buzzwords that do far more work in the marketing than they ever do in the physics.
What we took away
What stuck with us most was not any single tip, though there were plenty. It was the way Wayne talked about the humble camera. He called it the single most complicated thing most of us will ever own, a beautiful mash of electronics, mechanics and optics that sits quietly in a bag until we pick it up to catch a moment that will never come around again. Spend a few hours with someone who knows them inside out and you walk away wanting to use yours more, look after it a little better, and worry about the spec sheet a little less.
Huge thanks to Wayne Rogers and the team at Imaging by Design for the generosity and the gold. You can watch or listen to the full conversation with Wayne Rogers on The Camera Life, on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The Camera Life is proudly supported by Lucky Straps, makers of premium handmade leather camera straps in Bendigo, Australia, and the reason we get to have chats like this one. Find us at luckystraps.com.
