A belated "HAPPY NEW YEAR!" to you all, grapple fans.

Right. Now that's done...

I watched a very interesting short video on You Tube t'other day - and you can watch it if you like, below.

There may be a few people reading this who will know more than a little about photography and You Tube and therefore also Tony and Chelsea Northrup (who are the You Tubers in the clip above) - but there may be a few more who don't.

Both Chelsea and Tony Northrup are quite "famous" (at least online) Photographers on You Tube, and they regularly have clips on the site which are worth watching, if you're into your 'togs.

With this clip though they have surpassed even their (pretty) high standards.

I think they're SPOT ON with all they say regarding megapixels and why aren't the big (two) camera companies (that'd be Canon and Nikon) doing more regarding computational power for their new cameras, instead of relying on the old, megapixel and sensor size race.

I use four (soon to be five?) cameras still.

My 12 year old 10MP Panasonic Lumix FZ50. For telephoto snaps.

My 12 year old, 10 MP Canon 40D. For wide angle stuff quite often (with its 10-22 mm lens)

My 7 year old, 20MP Canon 6D (for most things that don't move quickly)

My 5 year old, 20MP Canon 7d mkii. (for fast-moving subjects).

And my next camera (if I get it) will almost certainly be a 3 year old 20MP Panasonic Lumix LX15 (to be with me constantly).

I KNOW I don't need more than 20MP - to be honest, 12 is often enough - and I DO regularly make large prints (for the walls of our house).

But all my camera are SO slow.

I don't mean in their ability to take a photo - I mean in terms of the work flow.

I need an SD card and a buffer and tether the camera to my laptop and then upload (slowly) my RAW images and then edit (develop) them slowly in lightroom and then save them slowly on a massive hard drive and periodically (INCREDIBLY slowly) back them all up etc... etc...

All I want to be doing really is taking photos. Not sitting on my cute little tush messing around with laptops, hard drives, cables and bits and bobs of different software.

Canon and Nikon (in particular) and Sony and Olympus and Panasonic and Fujifilm all need to get with the programme now and start to COMPETE with Apple and Google (in particular) who, with their smart phones, are quickly demonstrating that "traditional cameras" are fast becoming obsolete. And by "traditional cameras", I'm not just talking DSLRs. I'm talking mirrorless cameras too.

The future of photography must surely be...

Automated uploading of images.

Automated Focus stacking.

Automated Interval stacking.

Automated Panoramic shots.

Automated video processing.

Automated editing, developing and enlarging etc.

All done on a super computer in the cloud, rather than our constantly outdated desk and laptops.

We don't need an 80MP expensive, heavy camera with a £5000 lens if we can take a flurry of photos with average glass on a reasonably-priced 16MP camera with a fast autofocus system - and do magic on them in the cloud - converting them to a 100MP detailed image, with a correct focus point and a removal of haze and blur.

We need a return to dumb camera bodies but with fast sensor readouts, with some onboard cache and a USB-C tethered smartphone.

We need 5G wireless connectivity, full, seamless wifi usability (and not just to transfer images to our phones), to connect to the web and the cloud.

Look... we do already have this technology.

It's just that Nikon and Canon (et al) consistently REFUSE to embrace it. Unlike Apple and Google (et al) with their smartphones.

I guarantee you this... whichever camera manufacturer does start looking properly to the future by using technology from the present (not the past, after all), will CLEAN UP in the long term.

I thought Samsung would do this first (until they took themselves out of the camera market a few years ago) - so I can only assume it will be another electronics company (like Sony?) who take this all on - and in doing so, they'll leave the old dinosaurs behind.

You heard it here first, grapple fans...