Gear is, of course, an integral part of the photographic process.
There is no silver bullet for all kinds of photography and all situations, so
luckily there are a plethora of available options out there, in all price ranges.
Many people ask me what camera they should get. My first questions back at them are always:
What is your budget? And how often do you want to be using it?
Nowadays, it is almost difficult to buy a "bad" camera. But it is easy to
buy a camera that is hard to learn how to use. What I have
learned over the years is this :
The cheaper the camera, more buttons it has.
Points in case : My Leicas and my Hasselblad X2D, only have a few buttons. Just
the basics that you need to operate the camera for 99% of the photos I take.
Cheap cameras have a LOT of bells and whistles, that will only be used 1% of the time, maybe never. These buttons, dials and
features compete for attention with the
real features that you actually want in a camera.
The problem with having a lot off buttons, dials and features on a camera, is that it is
a struggle to learn how to use it. A
friend of mine bought a pretty nice camera some year back,
but he stopped using it for a while because it was "stuck in black and white mode" somehow. That can happen.
Sometimes you inadvertently turn on macro-mode, movie-mode, soft-focus-mode, aperture-priority, night-vision,
super-slow-movie-mode, time-lapse-mode, manual-focus-mode, or some other artsy mode with colours meant
to simulate some long dead analog film style. And it is easier to do that by chance in a cheap camera, than
on an expensive camera. Go figure!
Lens and picture quality is _almost_ always great, no matter the price of the camera.
If you want advice on which camera or brand to choose, or if you bought a camera
that is too complex for those first shots, maybe I can help? I do simple photography
courses from time to time. Even one-on-one if you want to learn how to use a camera or a
photographic technique (that I know or master). Just
contact me on sayhi@andreasoverland.no
and let's see what we can do.
Anyway this was supposed to be an intro about EXIF. That is the information that digital cameras store on the photos like
lens type, camera type, location, exposure time, iso and more.
On this page I have listed the most important pieces from the EXIF that are available on my photos, so that I, and others,
can use that axis to navigate through my library.
Andreas Øverland, April 2026.
Camera Manufacturers