Small is the New Large: Guest post by William Innes

Intro by Skip Cohen

At the New York show, PPE in October, I had a chance to talk a little with William Innes, one of Panasonic's Luminaries. Following New York, William did a podcast with me and later a guest post. It's interesting how William has so much in common with so many of you - a huge career change to photography just a few years ago.

Learn more about William and Check out his website.  As I've said before, you won't be disappointed. Listen to his podcast too - there's a lot of helpful information William shares, especially about his transition from the aerospace industry to photography.

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We live in a world that is slanted towards size. We’ve all heard the expression “Go big or go home”. We are bombarded with the message that large equals better. Just look at some of the references we see everyday about large size:

-       Monster pickup trucks motoring down the highway.

-       Texas – where everything is bigger!

-       Food – where we all want it super sized.

The list could go on - yet my wife of many years (don’t want to get too detailed here and date myself) always tried telling me good things come in small packages. Now I am sure she was referring to diamonds and such, but it turns out she was very perceptive when it came to the future of photographic equipment. Smaller has arrived and it’s fantastic.

I’m talking about micro four-thirds cameras. The size and weight of these cameras and lenses is about half that of a regular DSLR, yet the image quality is astounding. The future is here now!

As a working professional that shoots mostly weddings – I suffer on a regular basis from from “wedding hangover” (the day after aching feeling from lugging around a million pounds of gear). These new smaller mirrorless cameras are going to make shooting weddings fun and pain free again. It is so easy to move around with all my gear in one bag and capture awesome images and video. 

Another great example is travel. I am embarking on a trip to Morocco and will be taking my Lumix GM1 and a Lumix GX7 along with four lens. This will all fit into a  backpack with room leftover. Large camera bags that looked like you were on a National Geographic expedition are no longer required and your back will thank you.  I will definitely write a future post about my trip and post some photos.

While on the subject of backpacks and camera bags - I have found the perfect bag for my gear. I confess to be being a bagaholic. I love camera bags. So I was on a mission at the recent PhotoPlus show in NYC to find the perfect bag for my wedding day micro 4/3 set up which consists of a Lumix GH3 and six lens. I found it in the Vanguard Up-Rise II Messenger Bag. This bag holds everything including a laptop, iPad or in my case a Camtrol video stabilizer. The bag even has access to all your gear from the top and is expandable.  I hope to explore Morocco with one of their  Adapter series backpacks.

 All of the images in this post were shot with my GH3 at a Christmas wedding a few weeks ago.

Let me leave you with a final thought – “Small is the new large”.

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All images copyright William Innes. All rights reserved.