It has long been my motto, or mantra now that I’m a Californian, that you either ‘Change or Die’. It is instructive to consider this in the light of the equipment change my landscape photography has undergone during the past year:

Before:

Rollei 6003 + 45 degree prism
40mm, 80mm and 150mm Rollei lenses
Rolls of 120 Kodak Portra VC160 film
A Crown Graphic 4″ x 5″ camera with 90mm, 135mm and 210mm lenses
Several film holders for the above
A dark cloth and loupe to focus the bloody thing
A cable release
My old Linhof tripod
My even older Weston Master V exposure meter
A bad back from carrying all that stuff

After:

Canon EOS 5D
Canon 15mm fisheye lens
King Pano panoramic head
A two axis bubble level
A spare 1 gB CF card
An overpriced Canon ‘cable’ release
My old Linhof tripod
A headache from trying to remember to do everything right (strictly a hardware problem, I assure you)
And, shortly, an iPod-sized digital sound recorder

The software change has been no less dramatic.

Before:

Silverfast Ai for scanning the negatives
Photoshop CS2

After:

Aperture
Photoshop CS2
Photmatix Pro (for HDR rendition)
Photomatix Photoshop plug-in
Panagea Photoshop plug-in
PT Mac (to stitch panoramas)
ImageAlign Photoshop plug-in (to defish zenith and nadir images)
Cubic Converter (to adjust QT defaults)
Cubic Connector (to add sound)
QuickTime (free from Apple for Macs or PCs)
And probably some other things I cannot recall

I don’t think my mantra would be disappointed.

Back-end hardware remains unchanged – the superb Apple iMac G5

And, yes, you can do QTVR panoramas with film gear, but that’s about as sane as driving a Hummer with $4 gas on the horizon.