It's all tradeoffs. Reflex cameras are pretty standard, also the electronics have been around for a longer time now. But there is a balance in getting things to
* have all the basic and possibly premium features
uh, canon DSLRs have been around for 20 years. I was rocking my entry level 400D until earlier this year. I got it as a high school graduation present in 2007. It's been to 10+ different countries, been dropped off a camel, stolen by a monkey, rained on, covered in mud, doused with beer, and so much more. And this was the cheapest DSLR they made, and it has no weather sealing and has a plastic body, while most of the higher end stuff is (was?) magnesium and sealed everywhere.
Canon makes REALLY fucking good cameras.
Edit: only reason I replaced it; I got a smaller, lighter camera (also a Canon). the 400D still works fine.
Well, I didn't mean that Canon products are particularly bad in quality.
I own a perfectly functioning 40D from 2007 myself, which I replaced by a Sony A7III just recently, as I hate the fact, that Canon tries to force their customers to buy their own expensive RF lenses.
Of course cameras are impressive pieces of technology. Still I understand the sentiment of the above commenter.
My last comment was an overstatement, still there is a substantial chance of a hardware failure.
And Sony forces you to buy their own expensive E-Mount lenses?
To be honest, Canon EF mount lenses are probably the best buy if you are looking for compatibility: there's adapters for Sony E-Mount, Canon RF-mount, etc.
The reason RF, Z, and E mount exist is because you can make the camera body much slimmer in MILC.
It's much easier building adapters for lenses going from DSLR -> MILC. It might not be possible to go the other way around.
Nitpick: there are third party lenses for the RF mount but they are all manual focus. As you stated Canon has not opened up the spec and so third parties have been unable or unwilling to violate the patents that would allow them to make use of the RF electronics required for auto-focus.
I real shame as I would love to use some of Sigma glass on there without use of the EF adapter.
In fact, Canon is going after third party lens manufacturers that are blatantly violating its patent [0].
One of the problems Canon has faced recently is a flooding of the market with super cheap lenses (we're talking 50-200 dollars for total junk). The people that are buying them are justifiably upset when the photos are crap because they incorrectly think its a camera problem. Hey, a lens is a lens, right?
Anyhow, there's wide speculation that Canon will license to the quality quality third-party makers at some point [1][2].
Do you have a link to the patents in question? Articles I've seen about this are not clear about what is patented and I'm suspicious about whether it would pass a novelty/obviousness test.
Bad products is not a reason close specs. Unless you are heavily vested into Canon’s lense ecosystem, or have no issues with money, it makes no sense to go with them; if we’re considering full frames. Glass prices are overly marked up by the body creators and quality is subjective when there’s Sigma.
A third-party, Viltrox did release autofocus lenses for RF mount. Canon threatened legal action. A quick web search did not find exactly what is patented.
Just buying some old Canon FD mount stuff off of eBay lately. You aren't kidding! That vintage glass really has some beautiful character, it's worth shooting all manual to me.
Agree! My favorite lens, not that it is used as an everyday walk around lens, is 300 f 4.5 manual focus Nikkor. Marvelous mechanical precision, incredible picture quality and works perfectly fine as a 900 mm equivalent with a 2x TC on a DX body.
Vintage glass is great, if you get it good condition.
Yeah, my Canon micro four thirds camera went through 8 years of canyoneering, caving, rock climbing, kayaking, falling out of my car, etc. By the end the screen was so scratched you could barely see it and the body so dented you had to pry the battery out but it was still trucking along - only replaced when I upgraded to something newer.
I've recently bought a nikon from 2005 to convert it to infrared and everything worked flawlessly
Anyways, we can't really live with fully mechanical cameras in this day and age, unless you want to shoot film in which case Leica has still three cameras that will work without electronics
My anecdata (owned 8-9 dSLRs) suggests they're pretty robust. I haven't had a dSLR fail on me yet. The oldest camera I have is 21 years old (no longer used, but still works). The oldest cameras I still occasionally use are 12-13 years old. My current main cameras are about 2-3 years old. And they are not being babied. I've dropped cameras several times, I regularly use them in pissing rain, and in the winter they are occasionally subject to arctic temperatures (record is a bit below -30C).
My main one, a D700 on "extended loan" from my dad, was used in Iceland in winter (multiple times), in pouring rain, near the Atlantic shore during storms, in the Sahara during dust storms and 45 degrees C, used professionally for event documentation... And that's just from top of my head. Still shoots 10ish fps with the battery grip, has no sensor issues, is still weather sealed and just works.
Same for the old F4 sitting in a shelf, or the D750 that replaced the D700 for my dad. I have no reason to doubt Canon is any different (during a lot of those trips other people used Canon, and those held up just fine as well), nor do i have doubt the new mirrorless cameras will be any different. Unless you dump them for prolonged periods in salt water after having them run over by a truck and store them in a warm and humid environment without drying.
This. These things tend to be incredibly well built. Not indestructible (Unless you get say, a 7D), but people rely on them for their livelihood and they're built as such.
My previous DSLR was a Pentax K30. It started to malfunction (about 5 years into ownership).
Guess where? The physical aperture actuator. They're supposed to work for hundreds of thousands of uses, but this one got maybe 20,000 before it began to stick.
I don't worry about the mirrorless camera electronics so much, and even most digital SLRs are quite reliable (even the replacement Pentax K3-II has been flawless). This was a pretty remarkable failure because it stands in contrast to the typical reliability of digital SLRs.
The DSLR represents the end-point of an unbelievable period of hardware improvements in cameras, they contain a ton of amazing mechanisms some of which just exist to make the "SLR" feature possible. The big camera manufacturers learneed a lot over the past few decades and the hardware is all there because customers demanded it.
However, once LCD screens got good enough, the SLR aspect became a burden and if you look, most mirrorless pro cameras look very similar to their SLR counterparts.
I keep wanting to buy a new camera, but the old one rarely gets used any more. Pictures from my phone are good enough, which is annoying.
Plus I just dont have the time to even look at all the photos I've taken. I do miss the days when I used to take a few rolls of film on a vacation and throw out half those. Instead of tens (hundreds) of thousands on a nas.
But the technology and construction is so sweet... they're works of art.
This is pretty much exactly how I feel - the camera you have with you all the time is better than a better camera that may be sitting on the shelf at home when you want to take a picture. That said, for vacations and stuff is where I really miss having a really nice camera, and while the phone does ok, there are shots I have that I can see where a better camera would have made it that much better.
I'm still rocking a Canon 5D Mark II. About 15 years old. It has been to Canon service twice to have its shutter replaced. Wears out around 150K uses. With my 24-70mm and 100-200mm L series glass, I think I'm good forever.
I feel the same. Like: until USB of CF cards are phased out. I 'only' have a 40D, roughly same age, plus L lenses, always wanted a 5D or similar, but I just cannot honestly justify the cost beyond 'I want more' when seeing what picture quality I can get out of the current setup.
The glass is a key. I usually can't beat my iphone with bargain glass, but with wide aperture L series glass I trounce the phone handily.
Subject matter is another factor. A pretty view never runs away, and adults hold still for a picture, yet by contrast children & sports aren't going to wait for the phone to focus.
For me, my phone can cover almost most shooting situations. I think the areas where dedicated cameras can still handily trounce phones are low-light scenes (proper astro, shooting night events.. like sporting events or other parties with dim/poor lighting), sports/action/wildlife, studio photography with strobes, and extreme macro (4x, 10x objectives mated to a dedicated sensor).
I use my phone's camera almost every day for just documenting shit, like receipts, business cards or when I am disassembling something, or other random projects. I love the geo-tagging of photos, along with a date based bucketing and that allows me to easily go back and look shit up.
For me the benefits of getting newer gear has been about efficiency, not necessarily picture quality. Silent shooting w/ mirrorless cameras and electronic shutter helps a with wildlife because you can be more stealthy and not have the shutter noise distract a bird or deer or skittish animals. Advanced mirror-less cameras have a level of accuracy to the focusing that was not possible with previous systems. This allows you to rattle off picture after picture with perfect sharpness (5, 10, 15, 20 or even 30 frames-per-second bursts) - reducing time to redo shots - especially with kids who move a lot, or action shots where there is a perfect frame and sometimes with older tech, you have a couple of in-focus shots, and then a missed-focus shot. Modern high-megapixel sensors coupled with high-quality glass allows you to crop without loosing much detail. I can use a 24 or a 35mm lens and with a 50 mega-pixel sensor, I can crop to the same field-of-view as a 50mm/75mm lens and still get a ton of detail. Modern coatings in lenses eliminate internal reflections, allowing you to shoot into the sun without a huge drop in contrast (very common with older lenses, even L series).
5D is such a classic, I'm jealous because I couldn't afford it the last time I bought a camera. Now with mirrorless it isn't so clear which one to get. Full frame glass is so big and heavy, but anything else feels like a compromise.
I got back into it recently after years of not wanting to carry a bulky camera around. I justified it after realizing that "wanting the shot" with my fancy camera drove me to be much more adventurous. If you're thinking seriously about it, I'd highly recommend just about any Fujifilm mirrorless. The XT-4 is kinda defined by film camera ergonomics - primarily meaning that is has the dials you expect from classic pro film cameras (exposure comp, shutter, iso).
The only way I've ever found to make this make sense is to make a profession, or at least a hobby, of photography.
For me that's wasps, most recently this European hornet [1] who graciously tolerated my close proximity and macro flashes for long enough to get almost a dozen keepers, while a lot of half-drunk baldfaced yellowjackets [2] buzzed unsteadily around occasionally landing on my head.
It helps that you can't just rip off a burst in continuous mode and expect to get anything. Your flashes have to recharge after every shot, and it's tough to nail macro focus when handholding. Too, wasps startle easily, and if suddenly shadowed will assume a predator is approaching. So you make every shot with care and deliberation, the way film buffs like to talk about, but there's still space for serendipity nonetheless. Sometimes you catch a perfect four-millisecond slice [3] out of the 100ms or so that a ringed paper wasp spends taking off upside-down from the underside of a rose leaf.
There's no way to get shots like this with a phone camera; a wasp will let you get closer than you might imagine, but she won't let you get that close unless she knows you pretty well. Alas, I just bought a house and so a Z9 is thus not in the cards for some while at least, but if we're honest it'd be as much for the sake of it; I suspect I could happily spend the balance of my life working with the same D850 I use now.
I definitely wouldn't have gotten one if weren't for the inspiration of my kid, however I've grown quite fond of using it and learning more about taking good photos. It's been a nice creative outlet outside of coding.
Nope! The last time I got stung was more than a decade ago now, long before I ever even got interested in photography as an adult, much less found in it an accidental avenue to almost entirely getting over what fear of wasps I had. (And in entire fairness, I should note that the yellowjacket who stung me that time had been blown into my lap through an open car window, and I dropped my hand on her before I knew she was there. Even then I considered her to have acted entirely within her rights - I was just glad she'd happened to fall on her back!)
Wasps have a reputation for being needlessly and boundlessly belligerent, but all I can say is that, over the course of several years now spending as much time in their close company as I'm able, I've found that reputation to be totally unjustified, and wasps themselves to be just trying to get through the day, same as anyone.
It might help that I'm not afraid of them, and thus don't reek of anger and fear hormones in their presence. It's unclear how extensive a theory of mind they have for mammals, but much of their communication and sensory experience is known to revolve around olfaction; given that many mammals will happily if hazardously raid wasp nests in search of nutritious brood, it would be no surprise to learn that wasps recognize the stink of human flop sweat as indicative of a kind of danger they will fight, heedless of risk, to deter.
That hornet was in many ways a special case, though - the first I've ever seen close enough to, and who spent long enough in one place, to even try for a shot. Paper wasps rarely seem to notice my presence, yellowjackets often do but rarely much care, but I could see that hornet was watching me and didn't entirely appreciate my attention. When she decided she'd had enough, she left the tree on a heading that led to a very close pass alongside my head, enough so that I could all but feel the breeze off her wings, and certainly enough to hear quite loudly the markedly deep hum of her flight. Wasps butt and ram as part of both defense and communication, and I took being buzzed as the latter - specifically, as a clear statement that, upon her return, she'd quite rather I be elsewhere. To be clear, I don't think she would have attacked me if I hadn't made myself scarce, but she probably wouldn't have come back to the fig tree with its bounty of both nutrition and ethanol, and it would've been rude of me to make her feel she had to skip it.
I've had many similar experiences - ask me some time how I first learned that fig tree was a highly popular spot with late-season foragers! So I think the problem most people have with wasps has really nothing at all to do with wasps themselves, who don't like to fight any more than anyone else does. But it takes more than one person to not have a fight, and I think humans mostly just can't be bothered to learn not to start one.
Looking at those photos, they're not terrible but it's clear you're using a flash.
Here's what I would do (have done) instead: build a small box with bait, light the entire area using multiple diffuse lights, and point the camera (mounted on a sturdy tripod) at the bait, put a green wall right beehind the far depth of field. Disable autofocus, focus on bait, and set the ISO to the highest level you can tolerate.
Sitting nearby, watch the camera's LCD or use USB cable to do live view on a computer. Wait for the subject to come into view, then do bursts. This approach frees you from focus, you're not close to the photo volume, and gives you far more options with ISO and DOF because you're lighting the whole volume.
I haven't upgraded from my T4i since it does pretty much everything I need here.
Of course it's still fun to get into a the flow state while doing photography, controlling everything by hand in real time, but the above technique makes it much easier to produce large numbers of good images. I have used a similar technique to photograph hummingbirds in their first flights.
This is macro, working with a Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 VR II from at most a couple feet away and usually half that or less, and I need all the shutter speed I can get to even come anywhere close to freezing motion. Even at f/11, of course I'm using flash! You'd be seeing solid black frames if I didn't, or else so much noise that a solid black frame might be preferable. And to your point about depth of field, again, this is macro - at any aperture wide enough to avoid noticeable diffraction, I have at best a few millimeters of DoF to work with. That's why professionals who shoot insects usually kill their subjects so they'll hold still long enough for focus stacking, and that's why I'm glad this is a hobby for me. That frees me to pursue it in whatever manner I see fit, and because of that I'm under no constraint to do other than take the shots they'll let me have, which is in any case what I'm really after.
I also don't think a setup like the one you describe would be very effective for the kind of shooting I do. For one thing, there'd be no way to control how a given wasp would choose to approach the bait. That might not be insurmountable if autofocus worked well in macro, or at least in macro for me, which it never has with any camera I've tried; it hunts a lot and usually fails to find focus. This seems reasonable enough given what such a use case demands of the AF system, but also means there's no such thing as being "free of focus".
Too, as I mentioned in a sibling comment, neither wasps nor I generally find anything to be dismayed about in being close to one another, so there's no real benefit I can see in physical separation. (The hornet's attention seemed drawn by my flashes much more than by me; it took a while for her and me both to find spots to work, and she only seemed to notice me once I started shooting.)
And if I can already get good exposure levels at f/11 and the sensor's native ISO 64, where's the appeal in being able to add noise or diffraction? If anything I'd want to open the aperture further to take advantage of no longer being limited by sync speed, but even that would come at the cost of precious DoF.
In theory an approach like the one you describe might yield better illumination of (relatively) distant background, and there may be some appeal in that. Fermenting figs are unusually attractive, and in their absence I tend to spend at least as much time following wasps around as I do shooting, so fixed lighting isn't a very feasible option. But with three flash heads I have light to spare, and pivoting one of them to throw light behind the subject instead of on her might work well enough; I just haven't really bothered, because the background being as dim as it is defocused seems to me to help keep the viewer's eye where I want it. But it's at least worth a try to see how a brighter background works out.
I have also thought on occasion about going out with the diffusers that mount to my flash heads, but I never seem to remember to actually put them on when I have time, and I'm never inclined to take the time when I think waiting around might cost me a shot. I do actually like the effect produced by the reflections off wasps' compound eyes from bare flash heads, but again I think it's worth finding out if I like something else better.
Fortunately, I've got all winter to experiment with both techniques, so as to have some idea of what I'm doing by the time next year's foundresses emerge from hibernation and start building.
It makes sense as the linked author describes it, which is nice. Those are fine shots he takes with it, too. They're not the kind of shots I want to take.
Personally, I love my Pentax K1, but I do hope that you don't let yourself not using your "real" camera keep you from taking photos in general. A lot of great work has been done with phones. I will admit that the process of working with an SD card (or film) has a very specific feel to it, compared to the way processing cellphone photos are, but there is merit in each. You shouldn't feel guilt in using one over the other, if that's what works for you.
I try to think of my phone as my "just in case" camera, and my DSLR camera as my "purpose-focused" camera. I take cellphone pictures for the unexpected or casual moments. I take DSLR photos for specific reasons, to get myself out of the house and into the environment, or at a pretty location, or just out in public walking around. I haven't really had the motivation to use my DSLR in probably a full year at this point, and, although I would love to do so, it's not a purchase that I regret. It will wait until I'm ready, and I'm okay with that.
Similarly, it's entirely reasonable to buy a camera just to have it. Some people in the hobby just like to collect the equipment. If people can do it with dolls, shoes, guns, or comic books, there's no reason you can't do it with cameras, provided you can afford it and it doesn't strain your relationship with your spouse.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] thread* have all the basic and possibly premium features
* be rather compact and portable
* have the right weight
* possibly be weather/waterproof
* process images fast (including video)...
* ...don't drain battery in minutes...
* ...but also don't overheat in users' hands
* etc
Canon makes REALLY fucking good cameras.
Edit: only reason I replaced it; I got a smaller, lighter camera (also a Canon). the 400D still works fine.
I own a perfectly functioning 40D from 2007 myself, which I replaced by a Sony A7III just recently, as I hate the fact, that Canon tries to force their customers to buy their own expensive RF lenses.
Of course cameras are impressive pieces of technology. Still I understand the sentiment of the above commenter. My last comment was an overstatement, still there is a substantial chance of a hardware failure.
To be honest, Canon EF mount lenses are probably the best buy if you are looking for compatibility: there's adapters for Sony E-Mount, Canon RF-mount, etc.
The reason RF, Z, and E mount exist is because you can make the camera body much slimmer in MILC.
It's much easier building adapters for lenses going from DSLR -> MILC. It might not be possible to go the other way around.
As a result, there is a wide range of third party lenses evailable for Sony FE, none for Canon RF.
I real shame as I would love to use some of Sigma glass on there without use of the EF adapter.
One of the problems Canon has faced recently is a flooding of the market with super cheap lenses (we're talking 50-200 dollars for total junk). The people that are buying them are justifiably upset when the photos are crap because they incorrectly think its a camera problem. Hey, a lens is a lens, right?
Anyhow, there's wide speculation that Canon will license to the quality quality third-party makers at some point [1][2].
[0] https://petapixel.com/2022/09/06/canon-confirms-its-going-af... [1] https://www.canonrumors.com/forum/threads/sigma-to-make-a-ma... [2] https://www.canonrumors.com/forum/threads/the-state-of-third...
https://fstoppers.com/gear/canon-breaks-silence-viltrox-lens...
Vintage glass is great, if you get it good condition.
Anyways, we can't really live with fully mechanical cameras in this day and age, unless you want to shoot film in which case Leica has still three cameras that will work without electronics
Same for the old F4 sitting in a shelf, or the D750 that replaced the D700 for my dad. I have no reason to doubt Canon is any different (during a lot of those trips other people used Canon, and those held up just fine as well), nor do i have doubt the new mirrorless cameras will be any different. Unless you dump them for prolonged periods in salt water after having them run over by a truck and store them in a warm and humid environment without drying.
Then again, the D4 has a skeleton underneath the plastic and rubber surface that looks like the skull of a killer robot: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2012_Nikon_D4_magnes...
Guess where? The physical aperture actuator. They're supposed to work for hundreds of thousands of uses, but this one got maybe 20,000 before it began to stick.
https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/topic/the-dreaded-k30-apert...
I don't worry about the mirrorless camera electronics so much, and even most digital SLRs are quite reliable (even the replacement Pentax K3-II has been flawless). This was a pretty remarkable failure because it stands in contrast to the typical reliability of digital SLRs.
View finder, sensor, control surfaces, motherboard, heatsink, chassis+case. What exactly do you think is excessive complexity here?
However, once LCD screens got good enough, the SLR aspect became a burden and if you look, most mirrorless pro cameras look very similar to their SLR counterparts.
Plus I just dont have the time to even look at all the photos I've taken. I do miss the days when I used to take a few rolls of film on a vacation and throw out half those. Instead of tens (hundreds) of thousands on a nas.
But the technology and construction is so sweet... they're works of art.
I feel the same. Like: until USB of CF cards are phased out. I 'only' have a 40D, roughly same age, plus L lenses, always wanted a 5D or similar, but I just cannot honestly justify the cost beyond 'I want more' when seeing what picture quality I can get out of the current setup.
Subject matter is another factor. A pretty view never runs away, and adults hold still for a picture, yet by contrast children & sports aren't going to wait for the phone to focus.
I use my phone's camera almost every day for just documenting shit, like receipts, business cards or when I am disassembling something, or other random projects. I love the geo-tagging of photos, along with a date based bucketing and that allows me to easily go back and look shit up.
For me that's wasps, most recently this European hornet [1] who graciously tolerated my close proximity and macro flashes for long enough to get almost a dozen keepers, while a lot of half-drunk baldfaced yellowjackets [2] buzzed unsteadily around occasionally landing on my head.
It helps that you can't just rip off a burst in continuous mode and expect to get anything. Your flashes have to recharge after every shot, and it's tough to nail macro focus when handholding. Too, wasps startle easily, and if suddenly shadowed will assume a predator is approaching. So you make every shot with care and deliberation, the way film buffs like to talk about, but there's still space for serendipity nonetheless. Sometimes you catch a perfect four-millisecond slice [3] out of the 100ms or so that a ringed paper wasp spends taking off upside-down from the underside of a rose leaf.
There's no way to get shots like this with a phone camera; a wasp will let you get closer than you might imagine, but she won't let you get that close unless she knows you pretty well. Alas, I just bought a house and so a Z9 is thus not in the cards for some while at least, but if we're honest it'd be as much for the sake of it; I suspect I could happily spend the balance of my life working with the same D850 I use now.
[1] https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/img_0826.jpg
[2] https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/img_0821.jpg
[3] https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/img_9967-2.jp...
> The only way I've ever found to make this make sense is to make a profession, or at least a hobby, of photography.
I recently got my first "real" camera to take better pictures of my family inspired by this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33104618#33123207
I definitely wouldn't have gotten one if weren't for the inspiration of my kid, however I've grown quite fond of using it and learning more about taking good photos. It's been a nice creative outlet outside of coding.
Nope! The last time I got stung was more than a decade ago now, long before I ever even got interested in photography as an adult, much less found in it an accidental avenue to almost entirely getting over what fear of wasps I had. (And in entire fairness, I should note that the yellowjacket who stung me that time had been blown into my lap through an open car window, and I dropped my hand on her before I knew she was there. Even then I considered her to have acted entirely within her rights - I was just glad she'd happened to fall on her back!)
Wasps have a reputation for being needlessly and boundlessly belligerent, but all I can say is that, over the course of several years now spending as much time in their close company as I'm able, I've found that reputation to be totally unjustified, and wasps themselves to be just trying to get through the day, same as anyone.
It might help that I'm not afraid of them, and thus don't reek of anger and fear hormones in their presence. It's unclear how extensive a theory of mind they have for mammals, but much of their communication and sensory experience is known to revolve around olfaction; given that many mammals will happily if hazardously raid wasp nests in search of nutritious brood, it would be no surprise to learn that wasps recognize the stink of human flop sweat as indicative of a kind of danger they will fight, heedless of risk, to deter.
That hornet was in many ways a special case, though - the first I've ever seen close enough to, and who spent long enough in one place, to even try for a shot. Paper wasps rarely seem to notice my presence, yellowjackets often do but rarely much care, but I could see that hornet was watching me and didn't entirely appreciate my attention. When she decided she'd had enough, she left the tree on a heading that led to a very close pass alongside my head, enough so that I could all but feel the breeze off her wings, and certainly enough to hear quite loudly the markedly deep hum of her flight. Wasps butt and ram as part of both defense and communication, and I took being buzzed as the latter - specifically, as a clear statement that, upon her return, she'd quite rather I be elsewhere. To be clear, I don't think she would have attacked me if I hadn't made myself scarce, but she probably wouldn't have come back to the fig tree with its bounty of both nutrition and ethanol, and it would've been rude of me to make her feel she had to skip it.
I've had many similar experiences - ask me some time how I first learned that fig tree was a highly popular spot with late-season foragers! So I think the problem most people have with wasps has really nothing at all to do with wasps themselves, who don't like to fight any more than anyone else does. But it takes more than one person to not have a fight, and I think humans mostly just can't be bothered to learn not to start one.
Here's what I would do (have done) instead: build a small box with bait, light the entire area using multiple diffuse lights, and point the camera (mounted on a sturdy tripod) at the bait, put a green wall right beehind the far depth of field. Disable autofocus, focus on bait, and set the ISO to the highest level you can tolerate.
Sitting nearby, watch the camera's LCD or use USB cable to do live view on a computer. Wait for the subject to come into view, then do bursts. This approach frees you from focus, you're not close to the photo volume, and gives you far more options with ISO and DOF because you're lighting the whole volume.
I haven't upgraded from my T4i since it does pretty much everything I need here.
Of course it's still fun to get into a the flow state while doing photography, controlling everything by hand in real time, but the above technique makes it much easier to produce large numbers of good images. I have used a similar technique to photograph hummingbirds in their first flights.
I also don't think a setup like the one you describe would be very effective for the kind of shooting I do. For one thing, there'd be no way to control how a given wasp would choose to approach the bait. That might not be insurmountable if autofocus worked well in macro, or at least in macro for me, which it never has with any camera I've tried; it hunts a lot and usually fails to find focus. This seems reasonable enough given what such a use case demands of the AF system, but also means there's no such thing as being "free of focus".
Too, as I mentioned in a sibling comment, neither wasps nor I generally find anything to be dismayed about in being close to one another, so there's no real benefit I can see in physical separation. (The hornet's attention seemed drawn by my flashes much more than by me; it took a while for her and me both to find spots to work, and she only seemed to notice me once I started shooting.)
And if I can already get good exposure levels at f/11 and the sensor's native ISO 64, where's the appeal in being able to add noise or diffraction? If anything I'd want to open the aperture further to take advantage of no longer being limited by sync speed, but even that would come at the cost of precious DoF.
In theory an approach like the one you describe might yield better illumination of (relatively) distant background, and there may be some appeal in that. Fermenting figs are unusually attractive, and in their absence I tend to spend at least as much time following wasps around as I do shooting, so fixed lighting isn't a very feasible option. But with three flash heads I have light to spare, and pivoting one of them to throw light behind the subject instead of on her might work well enough; I just haven't really bothered, because the background being as dim as it is defocused seems to me to help keep the viewer's eye where I want it. But it's at least worth a try to see how a brighter background works out.
I have also thought on occasion about going out with the diffusers that mount to my flash heads, but I never seem to remember to actually put them on when I have time, and I'm never inclined to take the time when I think waiting around might cost me a shot. I do actually like the effect produced by the reflections off wasps' compound eyes from bare flash heads, but again I think it's worth finding out if I like something else better.
Fortunately, I've got all winter to experiment with both techniques, so as to have some idea of what I'm doing by the time next year's foundresses emerge from hibernation and start building.
I try to think of my phone as my "just in case" camera, and my DSLR camera as my "purpose-focused" camera. I take cellphone pictures for the unexpected or casual moments. I take DSLR photos for specific reasons, to get myself out of the house and into the environment, or at a pretty location, or just out in public walking around. I haven't really had the motivation to use my DSLR in probably a full year at this point, and, although I would love to do so, it's not a purchase that I regret. It will wait until I'm ready, and I'm okay with that.
Similarly, it's entirely reasonable to buy a camera just to have it. Some people in the hobby just like to collect the equipment. If people can do it with dolls, shoes, guns, or comic books, there's no reason you can't do it with cameras, provided you can afford it and it doesn't strain your relationship with your spouse.
Sony makes it easy for us with the same boxy design on most of their full-frame cameras.
"It's the same camera I've had for years, honey! I swear!" :P