I attended the Lehigh University graduation over the weekend. My cousin John and his wife Heather (John and I grew up seeing each other often, so he's like part cousin and part brother) invited me to join their family for their son Ted's graduation. Heather, by the way, is one of the few relatives of mine who regularly reads TOP! Hi, Heather. She says she skips over the bits about cameras, so she can skip the middle of this post.
It was a sweet weekend, tinged with a hint of bitter only because it made me wish I had shared more of their kids' growing-up years and seen all of them more often. (They live in Los Angeles.) I had a great time, and it was great to see all of them, including Heather's niece Caitlin who lives in NYC.
Lehigh, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is regularly named among the most beautiful college campuses in America. Part of it is on a mountainside, and this time of year there is lush foliage everywhere. And it was a beautiful day. Downtown Bethlehem is very pleasant too, although we were probably in the best part of it—quaint Americana and characterful old buildings everywhere, the good restaurants typical of a college town, and yet a relaxed, laid-back vibe. It was a fun weekend and I'm grateful I got to be a part of it.
iPhone angst
I ended up thinking that I need a new camera, though. I've been trying to say that the iPhone is my "color camera" for a few years now. It's fantastic for the things it's meant for and designed to do, but it's mainly a communication device. It can be exasperating as a camera. The screen is hard to see in daylight, it isn't fast, and it has a mind of its own. I got a shot of Ted on the jumbotron by being prepared, but I was all set to get a picture of the graduates tossing their mortarboards in the air and missed it because the phone had turned itself off while I was waiting.
Yeah, I know, there's probably something I could have done to avoid that. But it's only a small part of the slowness problem. My most basic requirement for a camera has always been for it to go when I press the go button. On the iPhone I can sometimes hit the white dot and nothing at all happens—touchscreens being okay but hardly infallible. My old Leica M4 and M6 had an extremely short shutter lag and, as long as they were cocked, they would trip the shutter instantly no matter what else was going on. For years years now, though, I've feel we've been moved incrementally further and further from that ideal. It's amazing that a smartphone is as good a camera as it is. And I don't use the latest one. My overall experience this weekend, though, was that there's always that undercurrent of trying to get the phone to do something it's a bit slow to do.
I have the same trouble with the files. They look fantastic on the phone screen; they do fine on larger screens as long as you're not asking too much of the camera; but they fall far enough short of the best "real" cameras that ultimately they're just not terribly satisfying.
Random crowd shot. Nobody in this picture is family.
I don't quite know what to do about this. A graduation is tough to cover from the stands, and I don't go to two per decade, so it's not like I need to be perfectly outfitted to shoot a graduation. At the same time, my overall feeling is that the phone isn't quite cutting it for the things I need a casual camera to do. A 1"-sensor camera? Micro 4/3? And of course there's that problem that smaller cameras are usually built to lower standards. A few buck this correspondence, but for the most part, the cameramakers are locked into good=big and big=good, and small=cheap and cheap=small.
By the way, I took a total of 72 images over the weekend, plus two videos.
The road to success is always under construction*
Lehigh is historically an engineering school—the main speaker was Scott Willoughby, Lehigh '89, who led NASA's James Webb Telescope program for Northrop Grumman—and I'm newly of the opinion that engineers should be put in charge of all graduations. In an event like this there must be so many things that could go wrong. But the whole experience at Lehigh this weekend was crisp. The sit-down brunch beforehand, in a giant tent (tablecloths, no less); the speakers minimizing that "droning on and on" quality that most such events consider mandatory for some unknown reason. There were two photographers working it hard to make portraits of each graduate on the way to the podium, two very professional announcers expertly reading some difficult names, and each graduate paused for two seconds in front of the video camera for the jumbotron while their names appeared in on the screen in perfect synchrony. A lot of moving parts. Tough to pull off for most organizations. But not for engineering types, apparently. It went like clockwork.
Teddy graduated with the highest honors and a prestigious math award, although he wasn't advertising it. His father had to tell the table that night. Ted said something really interesting in passing at a family meal—he said, "I turned my stubbornness as a teenager into discipline." I liked that. I thought it shows a lot of insight, not to mention practicality. He's going on to graduate school, and I have a feeling he's going to continue to do well.
Mike
* —Lily Tomlin
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Featured Comments from:
Sroyon: "Do you still have any Fuji bodies lying around? I find it such a versatile system, and now there are so many third-party options as well. I'm a fan! Actually if you find Fuji unsuitable for this purpose, I'd be interested to know why (not to argue or convince you otherwise, just out of interest). Perhaps it could be material for a new post too."
Mike replies: With a little more time to think about it, I think I just took the wrong camera for the weekend, as Dave Jenkins and Stan B. suggested. I should have taken the Fuji but I had the other two with me instead. One problem with the Fuji is that I traded a guy for a 55–200mm lens, and it stopped working right. But if I'd had a 35mm (~50mm angle-of-view equivalent) and that long zoom, and the body, I would have been fine; so, my mistake.
Paul Bass: "Congratulations to Ted. Young people like this give me hope for the future."
John Hufnagel: "For the things you 'need a casual camera to do,' Consider the 1"-sensor Sony RX-100. I've had one of the original models for over 11 years now, and it has never disappointed me. The 28mm ƒ/1.8 setting, with image stabilization, is great for indoor shooting, and the image quality and responsiveness blows the doors off any camera phone made to date. Does it match my EOS cameras with L lenses? Of course not, but they don't fit in my pocket."
Robert Roaldi (partial comment): "There are many used Nikon 1 bodies and lenses around, dirt cheap, that are perfectly good cameras. They just failed to click (no pun intended) because of the current 'full-frame' fetish. They're better and probably smaller than a lot of phones."
[Ed. note: The complete text of partial comments can be found in the full Comments Section, accessible by clicking on the link in the footer or by clicking on the title of this post and scrolling down.]
Stephen S. replies to Robert: "Robert Roaldi is right that the Nikon 1 bodies are perfectly good cameras, but the lenses are downright horrifically terrible. A design defect in the aperture mechanism renders most of them unusable. Nikon had a service advisory for the 10–30mm and would fix it for free, but that has since expired, and they ignored all the other lenses that shared the problem. Nearly two-thirds of my Nikon 1 lenses failed that way, including my 10–30mm after it was repaired, then again after the second repair! When my 30–110mm and 10–100mm met the same fate, I gave up on the system. Nikon won't repair them now even if you offer to pay, so the only options are DIY or sending it to a guy in Taiwan who is willing to repair them."
Sebastian: "My solution to the compact 'real' camera requirement is a Ricoh GRD IIIx. I also used the III (without 'x') for a while, but that only confirmed my preference of the 26mm lens over the 18mm. Sensor is of APS-C size. The only 'ouch' moment with the GRD is the moment when you pay for it. Cheers!"
Stephen J.: "My daughter went to Cannes last week for the film festival; she is the photo editor for the Press Association. Her job is not to make photographs, but rather to marshal the professional photographers and get them to be in the right places at the right times, and then crop or edit the pro’s work for publication across the world. If you pick up a magazine or newspaper and look along the edge of a picture, it will usually state which library the photo came from, the two biggest libraries being PA first and then (Balthazar) Getty. She just thought that if she had time, she would take a few snaps. Anyway, she took my Leica Q2 with her, as she has done for the last couple of years. The camera got a lot of love from the pro photographers too, when they were hanging about. There is a lot of hanging about at this event, since acting types have their own agendas, so there was time to play.
"I have seen what she and some of the pros shot and it is a lot better than usually comes out of it. I think I said last week in a comment that I am not a natural shooter. I know that you regard this company’s products as 'Veblen goods,' however this camera, or, if you must have the latest, the Q3, might well be something to look at. An interesting feature is that you can set the JPEG so that what you see through the viewfinder is what you get (wysiwyg), but the raw covers the full scope of the 28mm lens, i.e. you can go back to the raw and have another go, if you are not happy with your JPEG.
"I believe there are some good deals on the Q2; with the advent of the Q3, stocks of the former are still being offered new, but at good discounts. From my point of view, I am happy with the flexibility that this camera offers, but if you are particularly nerdy, there is a monochromatic version available too."
John Boney: "I’m sure you’ll get more suggestions than you could possibly want, so I’ll go ahead and throw one in—take a look at the Sony RX10 series, a DSLR-like but-more-compact with a permanent 24–200mm (or now 24–600mm, which seems excessive unless you’re into wildlife…) nice Zeiss lens, reasonable 20MP sensor, and I think is native 4:3 aspect ratio (but selectable to others), and shake-reduction. It’s a highly portable 'feels like a camera' tool now on at least it’s fourth generation so a good used one anywhere in the middle should fit. I still have the seemingly ancient second gen and I'm very satisfied with it. It does a nice job of covering most anything. I remember Kirk Tuck even saying he could do some professional work with it—it’s that versatile…."
