The Online Photographer

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Focus* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)

And if you want to go deep on focus, here's how.

My old colleague Harold Merklinger's book The Ins and Outs of Focus is available as shareware. You can read it online or download it and look it over, and he asks for a voluntary donation of $5 if you like it and find it useful. It's a short manual, not quite 100 pages.

Harold was Chief Scientist of the Canadian Defence Research Establishment Atlantic and retired as that agency's Director-General. He lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

By the way, Harold's opinion is that manufacturers should just give us small, high-quality ƒ/4 lenses and we'd all be better off as far as recording sharpness and detail are concerned. (The reason they don't is that those don't sell.)

Mike
(Thanks to Viktor)

P.S. The title of the post is a reference to this 1969 book by California psychiatrist David Reuben, M.D., the first sex manual to enter mainstream culture in the USA and "among the top 20 all-time best sellers of the 20th century in the United States" (Wikipedia). Focusing isn't sexy, though.

P.S. I thought I might answer a few questions from the Comments to the previous post here:

Christer Almqvist: "All [Zeiss] Batis lenses have a display that can show d-o-f. It was of no relevance to me when I bought my Batises. The d-o-f shown on the Batis lenses is much narrower that the d-o-f shown on my old Leica M lenses or indeed in the Leitz printed d-o-f tables from the film days. These were based on circle-of-confusion measurements and calculations. In the film days the minimum shutter speed rule followed by many photographers was to shoot at a shutter speed of 1/n where n was the focal length in mm of the lens used. This is not really practicable today (unless you have IBIS) as sensors are much more unforgiving for camera shake than film was. The same (sensor unforgiveness) is even more true for d-o-f where IBIS does not lend a helping hand. Does this mean that my Batis lens display should take into account the number of pixels on the sensor? And of course, the distance at which the print in viewed. Please advise."

Mike replies: The allowable circle of confusion depends only on the photographer's judgement. It depends how sharp you want things to look and how much blur you can tolerate before you consider something to be unacceptably unsharp. However, it's true that the higher the resolution of the plane of best focus, the smaller the circle of confusion needs to be to come close to matching it. A mental exercise: consider a very grainy film of low resolution. In this case, quite a lot of the d-o-f might have the same resolution as the plane of best focus. If imaged objects 7, 10, and 15 feet from camera position are all recorded with the same resolution, such that you can't even distinguish where the plane of best focus was placed, then all of that is "in focus." The d-o-f appears large. With a very high-resolution camera system on the other hand, used with good technique, lowered resolution quite close to the plane of best focus can be detected. So the d-o-f is effectively less. It isn't imaginary. It's a real effect. So it makes perfect sense that your Batis lenses, made for digital cameras with high-resolution sensors, would advise a narrower zone of d-o-f for any given aperture than an old Leica rangefinder lens made for film.

Degree of enlargement also changes the d-o-f. We can see this easily on our own computers with our own files. Just take a large, high-resolution file with a lot of front-to-back information. At large sizes ("pixel peeping," in Michael Reichmann's memorable phrase), its easy to see exactly where the plane of best focus is and that objects near, but not on, that plane of focus are slightly unsharp. Now reduce that same image to small web sizes. So much information has to be "thrown away" that areas that were clearly unsharp at the larger magnification are now just as sharp as the plane of best focus. The viewer can't tell the difference. And I think everybody old enough to have worked in 35mm film can remember instances where he or she got excited about the prospects of an image on the contact sheet only to discover that too much

Printing might also change the d-o-f. The reason is that the printer resolution has entered the imaging system, and might become a limiting factor.

This is also why it's not necessarily bad to use very small apertures that lower overall resolution. Not only is the d-o-f increased because of the small aperture, it's also increased because of the lowered resolution of the plane of best focus. And some pictures work better if everything appears to be of roughly equivalent sharpness, rather than having some parts sharper and others noticeably out of the d-o-f. (There was a great illustration of this in an old Nikon manual years ago—I think it was Nikon—and I might even still have that somewhere out in the barn.)

Bob Johnston: "The decision on where to focus is, or should be, part of the artistic process. It seems to be assumed in all those YouTube videos that every landscape should have a near infinite depth of field. This just isn't so. It depends on the relative importance of the elements in the picture. If you have the most important subject in the foreground or middle ground it can sometimes look better if the background is a little soft. Therefore, sometimes the thing to do is to focus on the object that is the main subject and not on the hyperfocal distance."

Mike replies: Very true. The ultimate arbiter is what the photographer thinks looks best. An extreme example of what you're talking about might be some of Ray K. Metzker's pictures from his Aperture book Landscapes, many of which purposefully use radical out-of-focus to create visual elements in the compositions.

Book o' the Week

Fred Lyon, San Francisco Noir. "The version [of San Francisco] that Fred Lyon celebrates in his new book is a classic San Francisco full of smoky jazz clubs, neon lights in the fog and sharply dressed men and women stepping on and off of trolley cars. Made mostly during the 1950s and '60s, Lyon's images are big on atmosphere and style, and hit many parts of the city that visitors love." (PDN)

These book links are your portal to Amazon. Please use our links; they help support the site.

B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Steve Rosenblum: "Thanks for the links to Harold Merklinger's books. I haven't read his focus book in years, so it is great to have it again. I've always been impressed and amazed by the number of photographers with technical knowledge who have self-published helpful high-quality books like this through the years."

Same Old Problems! (More on Monochrome Sensor Cameras)

No surprise, I'm experiencing the same old problems as always in discussing this topic, the topic of the monochrome sensor.

Problems with explaining
First, it's not a question of output/results. Of course I can make B&W/monochrome files/pictures, and have done so a great many times in innumerable ways. It's an issue of mindset. (Thanks to Jeff for introducing that word in the comments.) It doesn't affect everyone, so not everyone gets it. This happens every time the topic comes up, and apparently, from what I find "out there" on the internet, it comes up everywhere else it's mentioned, too.

Secondly, what's needed isn't to see the B&W/monochrome image in the viewfinder or in the workflow. I have something like 90,000 B&W negatives that I shot mostly with SLRs with yellow filters on the lens—what you see in the viewfinder is a color image "stained" overall with yellow. I don't care what I see in the viewfinder. I have no problem visualizing the final results based on whatever materials I'm using. It's what the camera sees that counts, not what I see.

The problem is that I shoot with a different mindset when I'm shooting color. I take different pictures. I mentally translate the world differently. I look for different things. Do you see? And what happens with me is that I can't help looking for color pictures when I'm photographing if I know the camera is recording color. I'll always be looking at the world as if I'm looking for both B&W and color pictures. It's very unsatisfying.

...To me. I understand that if you don't experience this, then naturally you wouldn't see why it's a problem. But I'm telling you it's a problem for me, so it doesn't help if you simply say I shouldn't be having the problem.

It's not an inability, either. I actually did a project in art school for which I shot color negative film and made enlargements on Panalure B&W paper, to make B&W prints. It's just that I find that difficult to sustain over the long haul. If I know color is available, I gradually migrate into seeing color pictures again and making pictures that have to be in color. It's totally a mental thing. It's not a technical issue or a technical problem. It's about mindset.

Jeff wrote,

The reason my Leica Monochrom cameras (M9 Monochrom and M10 Monochrom) help with my black-and-white mindset is that I’m not distracted by looking for color pics, as I know the monochrome cameras can’t capture color [...]. I’ve found that it’s a different mindset than when I shoot with my color-based digital cameras, even when my intent is to take B&W pics. I didn’t think this would be the case before I actually bought a Monochrom, but I should have learned otherwise from my decades shooting B&W film.

There it is..."distracted by looking for color pics." When you look for B&W pictures you're looking for scenes that will render nicely with just luminances. When you look for color pictures you're often looking for colors that work together or against each other. It's a different mindset. I'm sure some people can simply "decide" they're shooting B&W, and only look for scenes that would render well as luminance-only, and God bless 'em. I find I can't do it. 

Aspect ratio
Stephen S. added,

"Re 'But what I've always found is that if the camera sees colors, then I'll see in color. Can't seem to help it. However the camera sees, that's how I'll look at the world.' I fully understand this, and how I relate may help others who can't figure out why you don't just set a colour camera to record B&W: I have many cameras where you can choose to photograph in a different aspect ratio than what the sensor physically is, but I can never bring myself to do it, as it seems like I'm just wasting potential. I want to use all of the sensor I've got. Why throw away perfectly pixels on the top and bottom of my frame, and perfectly good light from the lens, to crop a 4:3 or 3:2 sensor to 16:9? I know it's all in my head, but I have a hard time doing it. Using a sensor's full size and native aspect ratio just makes me feel better about it.

That's a good analogy. I've had different experiences with that. Once I tried to use a 28mm lens meaning to crop it down to a 35mm angle of view in post, and found I simply couldn't do it consistently—I found myself simply composing pictures with the entire 28mm field of view. (Duh, huh? It took all of one day to discover how dopey the idea was. Probably didn't even need to actually do that experiment.)

Oddly, when I once had the opposite problem, I had no trouble. I had an old medium-format SLR, 6x6cm, on which the viewfinder showed less than the negative would record. Worse, the overlap was offset:

And for some reason, in that case, I would often find myself calmly composing in the viewfinder with the top of the picture cut off! I knew the negative would get it, and I didn't worry about it.

And this is odd. With most square cameras, it doesn't matter if I mean to crop to a vertical or horizontal rectangle, I end up composing with the whole square. I just end up looking for square compositions and arranging to the square in the viewfinder. But in the case of that one camera with the offset viewfinder, from first to last I created vertical rectangles. It just felt natural, and that's the way I saw and that's what always worked.

Why was this? No idea. But it brings up a crucial point: you need to adjust to yourself. You're not seeing with a camera. You're not even seeing with your eyes, mostly. You're seeing with your brain. So you have to adjust to how your own brain likes to see things!

Problems with the product
People who are objecting that it makes no sense to pay a lot of money to cripple a perfectly good sensor sure got that right. People like me are trapped by the camera manufacturers. Apart from Leica, the cameramakers have no interest in making cameras with B&W-only sensors, I presume because they know the "take rate" would be minuscule and they'd make no money on the product. And they have no interest in giving random artists what the artists need—their purpose is to make money. Q.E.D.

But could they? If they wanted to? Of course they could. It would be easy as pie. If there were a market for it, the camera would be simpler to make and most likely cost less.

I honestly believed that once Leica did it, that some other more mainstream manufacturer would follow suit with a reasonably priced monochrome sensor camera. But no. Didn't happen. I'm sure the camera makers just don't see it as something that would be worth the hassle. It would be like a car maker building a sedan with a stick shift, manual windows, and no air conditioning.

So then I'm left with taking a $1,200 camera (what I paid for the A6600) and investing a further $1,200 in it, to make a camera that would have cost $900 if Sony offered it as a commercial product.

This would make sense two ways: 1.) if I wasn't price-sensitive about that extra $1,200 (I loved what Bruce Bordner said: "don't make a business decision on a toy"); 2.) if I knew I'd like it and would use it. But of course you can't try it before you buy it, so that makes the second proposition iffy. (You can't even find much about it online; there's doesn't appear to be a lot out there.) I don't really like the tonal rendition of the Leica Monochroms, for instance, so they're not really what I'd want. [UPDATE: I don't actually really know this...having not tried a Monochrom for myself. —MJ] What Sroyon said is very true: "What I'm wondering is, do you know for sure that you'll like the way the B&W-converted sensor renders colours? Because as you know, sensors have a spectral sensitivity curve, just like film. With a product like Tri-X, decades of research have gone into producing a curve which 'translates' colours to B&W in a pleasing way, both natively and with the typical filters." Richard Parkin seconded this, writing, "Why do you think the B&W from a converted camera will be the 'good' B&W you desire?" The answer is that I don't know if it will be.

Anyway, I've asked Daniel at Monochrome Imaging if he has a converted camera he'd be willing to let me try for a couple of weeks for the purposes of writing about it. We'll see what he says.

Maybe I could ask Roger Cicala if he has any interest in adding a few converted monochrome-sensor cameras to the rental fleet at LensRentals, just so people could try them out. He might not be, as they already rent Leica Monochroms. But I'll ask.

Thanks for all the comments! Very engaging, at least for me. I love B&W, and miss it a lot.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Chromes is an edit of more than 5,000 Kodachromes and Ektachromes taken from 10 chronologically ordered binders found in a safe in the Eggleston Artistic Trust. This archive was once used by John Szarkowski, who selected the 48 images printed in Eggleston’s seminal book William Eggleston’s Guide, while the rest of the archive has remained almost entirely unpublished. Three volumes, slipcased.

These book links are your portal to Amazon. Please use our links; they help support the site.

Go to B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Clyde Rogers: "I'm primarily a black and white photographer, a Pt/Pd printer, and have a Leica M10 Monochrom. It's easily the best camera I've ever owned, and I love the results I get from it. The primary technical advantage is not just absolute higher ISO capability, but how much better the noise looks is as it creeps in at middle ISOs—smooth and stochastic, never chunky or patterned.

"That said, the black and white camera hasn't changed my photos in any way I can notice. I get that better middle and high ISO, but won't carry a second camera, so lose color. I was hoping for but haven't noted any mindset advantage. Having used both extensively, I think an excellent black and white EVF is a more useful tool for me than the monochrome sensor. The ability to do filter effects after the fact is also worth more than the noise/ISO advantages. Is the monochrome sensor worth it? As the owner of a beautiful monochrome camera, I have to be honest and say not for me."

John Cornelius: "$2,400.00 would buy a lot of Tri-X; just saying. I still shoot it, develop it myself, scan it and print digitally. Silly, but I love it. With any luck the next house will have room for a darkroom and I can be even sillier. It is my hobby, I can be as silly as I want."

Pierre Charbonneau: "Mike, About your dislike of the Leica Monochrom’s tonal rendition, I would point out that the natives files coming out of the camera are on the flat side, without any pop. On the other hand, these are very rich (shadow details) and malleable, so you can play with it a lot, to your liking. After years of using the first and also the latest iteration of the Monochrom, I do not have yet any preset to apply universally to the files. Each picture that I spring for asks for a specific process, even if moderate, like for the curve, exposure, highlight and shadow and even graininess. In the end, it is less work than shooting and processing Tri-X, and the work is cleaner and safer than the chemical way. I still use a film Leica here and then, to reset my appreciation of film. I enjoy using the old non-automatic, manual winding and the beauty of the camera and even the distinctive click of the shutter. But the road to satisfying results is more complicated."

William Cook: "Depending on the day, it may or may not be natural to ‘see’ in B&W for me, but I fully understand what you’re getting at. I too yearned for a simpler camera and I also was a happy B&W film shooter, mostly in medium format. I get easily overwhelmed and the dearth of controls on current digital cameras is the opposite of what I want, well, except for IBIS, that’s mandatory! All that, coupled with the infinite ways to enhance a photo in Photoshop, was overwhelming—and not fun. Granted, most other photographers feel exactly the opposite that I do. I yearned for a simple B&W experience again. When the Leica Q2M was released, that was the answer to my dreams. I don’t even want to get into the angst over the price, but I bought one anyway. Instead of thinking of how I can fiddle the color sliders to produce a ‘filtered’ monochrome image, I do it the old fashioned way, with glass filters on the lens. In Photoshop, I adjust exposure, maybe some dodging and burning, add a touch of sharpening, and that’s about it. Rather than endless options, I love the constraints and discipline. The process now makes me think more when I’m behind the camera and I enjoy the entire photographic process again. I suppose those younger would consider me a dinosaur, but there should be room in the tent for all of us!"

Kirk W.: "C’mon Mike, just hurry up and do it. Then within a few months, I’ll be able to order one of those trick new Fuji X100Ms!"

Henning: "I get what you say, because I'm the same way. I started shooting mostly B&W film. In later years colour became more important. They definitely required a different mindset. I photographed professionally for 40+ years, and in the early years B&W was requested more than colour. By the 90s B&W had largely disappeared as a preference. In the transition decades I was often asked to shoot both B&W and colour, and I always asked the client which was more important, as I had to know going in. With large format in particular, it was easy enough to shoot both; just put in a different film holder, but my vision was right for one but not the other. I couldn't readily do both to my highest standard on the same job on the same day; it was either/or. If a client was particularly discerning I would suggest that I go on two different days (I did architectural photography) and use one medium the first day and the other on the next day. I probably did that about once a year.

"Now I have colour cameras, and I have an M10 Monochrom. I don't take both on the same day."

Frank Gorga: "Although I am,for much of my work, a black and white junkie, I doubt that I will ever buy a monochrome-only digital camera. The reason...flexibility. The control one has in converting colors to gray tones using modern software is much too important to me. The color channels sliders allow me to dial in exactly the right strength or a particular color 'filter' rather than having to rely on one or two strengths of a physical filter. Additionally, one can easily 'stack' virtual filters something that is not recommended and difficult to do with physical filters. Lastly, using layers and masks, one can apply different color filters to different parts of an image. This is not something I do often, but it is impossible to do with physical filters. To me, a monochrome digital camera is a big step backwards."

Inkphot: "Another analogy to think about. I have recently returned to shooting (now digital) with single focal length lenses, something I almost always did when using film (I haven't shot film since 2003). I find I select a focal length to use depending on a whim. A 35mm-e one day, 28mm-e another or an 85mm-e the next. It doesn't matter what the focal length of the lens is, after a few practice compositions I find I can now see and compose in my head the view the camera will record. Using a zoom lens these day throws me off balance. I feel very discombobulated. On the other hand I find the ability to show a black and white image (grey actually) in the EVF and on the LCD to be very useful for me to 'see' in B+W. Also I have a camera converted to infrared and the same thing happens when I am out shooting with it, I find I quickly adjust to seeing in IR (obviously not literally). So Mike I totally get where you're coming from on this."

V.I. Voltz (partial comment): "I don’t think you’d be happy with the tones from the Monochroms. They look like APX 100 in Rodinal—they lower the midtones and produce quite closed shadows. And, most of all, the tones are more resistant than you might imagine to opening them up—it is harder to do and image quality suffers more than I thought it would. In 2012 when I got the first Monochrom I noticed this markedly, thought about it a while and just decided to live with it and shift my look. Until then I used a lot of Plus-X in Xtol with a yellow filter. I thought about continuing with film as my main medium, but, as you put it, I’ve done enough of that work. These days when I use film I use Adox CHS 100 II to match the tones of my Monochrom."

Frank: "Re 'I love B&W, and miss it a lot.' I think you are missing black and white photographs that have been beautifully exposed and developed in the darkroom on fine paper. Digital monochrome photography is quite different, and is often very ugly. I have not yet seen a single beautiful black and white photo from digital that was beautifully printed. For that you need a 6-greys printer, another investment."

Jens Hauser: "I have more or less the same issue because I want to try a monochrome Sony before I decide to buy one, so renting one would be super. I have loved monochrome for a long time and edit many of my photos to B&W."

Bill Tyler: "I have to admit that a full monochrome camera has a strong but irrational appeal for me, even though I would likely not use it very much. What's stopping me is the price."

Joe Holmes: "The mindset is powerful. More than once I've lifted the camera to my eye and felt a kind of reeling vertigo as I discover that my mind's lens, with which I'd been I scanning the world, is not the lens I've got on my camera."

Josh Hawkins: "It is all mindset. I shoot my mirrorless camera in the B&W setting but with raw files. I’m seeing the image on the LCD as B&W. I’m composing for B&W. But I’ve got all the color data. I almost never use the image in color though. It looks wrong. Off. I just can’t. It’s a B&W image, in my mind. Thanks for the read. As always."

The Pinchpenny's Dilemma

Thanks for all the good camera talk on Friday and yesterday. I always enjoy that, as superfluous as it may be. I enjoy cameras and talking about gear.

What I've decided to do is enlist the help of Monochrome Imaging Services (MIS) and have a Sony camera converted to B&W-only. (I actually started talking to them about this briefly right before the pandemic, but let it drop amid the concern of those early days.)

I have several candidates to be the donor camera. And I have three E-mount lenses hanging around the camera closet: a Sony 16mm, the Sigma 30mm Contemporary, and an older Sigma DN 60mm ƒ/2.8. (Actually for some reason I have two of those. Not sure why.) That's enough to play with. If I like the camera, I'll eventually need a lens with an aperture ring, but there are several possibilities for that: the Viltrox 23mm (also available in a cosmetically slightly differentiated mount as a Tokina for those who feel an urge to pay more), the Sony FE 24mm ƒ/2.8, or the Sigma I-series 24mm ƒ/3.5. Both the latter are FF lenses but will work on APS-C Sonys.

What to do, what to do
The only problem is that I have to raise $1,200 for the conversion. The camera budget is dry as a bone at the moment. Have to figure out some way to raise a bit o' cash.

Looming behind that problem is a pinchpenny's dilemma: I can have either my old Sony NEX-6 or my new Sony A6600 converted. The conversion costs $1,200, which is a significant investment. So do I invest in the older, less valuable camera, with its smaller (16-MP) sensor? Or do I convert the sleek new 24-MP A6600, which I like better and is much newer...and has that great big battery that lasts forever...but which will presumably be worth much less on the resale market after conversion? NEX-6's go for less than $250 these days. But minty A6600's go for $1,100–$1,300. It's like if you want to hot-rod a car, which do you choose: do you invest more than the car is worth in an old clunker, or do you void the warranty and hurt the resale on a perfectly good late-model vehicle? Which is more cost-effective? Which is less risk? Thinking about this is prob'ly gonna make my brain hurt tonight.  :-) 

Home at last
I hope my "cheap gene" doesn't derail the project. I really do want to experience a camera that shoots only B&W again. I had a lot of experience shooting B&W, and I have no trouble seeing in B&W if that's how the camera sees. But what I've always found is that if the camera sees colors, then I'll see in color. Can't seem to help it. However the camera sees, that's how I'll look at the world. (Not everyone is like that.) I think it will be very interesting to be "forced" to see in B&W again. I'm working on an article for the big mag about B&W right now, so at the very least, it'll be grist for the mill.

From what I can see, the process has a lot of advantages. First of all, the camera becomes about one stop more sensitive because of the removal of the CFA (color filter array). You don't actually lose the ability to affect the image with color filters—you just have to do it the old-fashioned way, with color filters on the lens! That won't be a drawback to me. Furthermore, there's very little difference between ISOs...for instance, ISO 100 and ISO 3200. Even though you can see a slight difference when you pixel-peep at 100%, the higher ISO image is still very clean and quite pleasing. Finally, the image from the converted camera is markedly sharper than a color image converted in software. All this is discussed on Monochrome Imaging's website.

A small detail from the above. This will be 100% after you click on it. TOP's blog software softens images slightly.

I downloaded the above sample image (made with a converted a7R II) from MIS's website and worked on it in Photoshop. Raw files from converted cameras do need to be run through specialized raw converters (this one's just the JPEG, not the raw file), so that the standard demosaicing that would be done on color files isn't applied. After that, though, the images open as monochrome files in Photoshop and are easy and natural to work on. I fiddled with this one a bit, which was fun.

A converted Sony might be a "poor man's" Q2M, but I have a good feeling about this. I do know most people don't understand—you don't have to tell me yet again—however, I've always wanted a B&W digital camera. I just can't pay Leica's prices, is all.

More to come in this topic, I'm sure. (Unless I lose momentum. That sometimes happens. We'll see.)

Mike

Book o' the Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma.

These book links are a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Gordon Lewis: "Re '...what I've always found is that if the camera sees colors, then I'll see in color.'

"I'm sorry, but this makes no sense, either in logic or fact. All cameras with optical viewfinders, including film cameras, display color. This means you are and have always been fully capable of imagining an image in B&W even though you are seeing color through the viewfinder. The only difference in the film days was that you had to commit to a full roll or sheet of B&W film.

"Mirrorless cameras or DSLRs with 'live view' however, are capable of displaying live images in B&W if you set the camera to B&W JPEG or RAW+JPEG. You don't have to 'see in B&W' because the camera can do it for you. Some would see this as a simple, cost-effective way to achieve your goal. Apparently you do not.

"I'm sure you're well aware of these facts, as are your readers. Whether or not you choose to take advantage of this feature is entirely your prerogative, but if you're trying to build a case for the merits of spending $1,200 to convert one of your Sonys to a monochrome sensor, this is one of your least convincing bits of evidence."

Mike replies: Hi Gordon. (For those who don't know, Gordon and I are friends and have been fellow photo-writers since the early '90s; he's been a houseguest here at TOP Rural World HQ.)

I can easily believe that it makes no sense to you (in logic or in fact), because you would not be that way, and indeed most people are not that way, but my visual brain works the way it works and I have to work with that. I get a pretty acute sense of how any camera is "seeing" and then, when I'm using that camera, I find I can "previsualize" (to use Ansel's term) the way the camera is going to translate any given scene. It's that way for me with all cameras. I had no difficulty at all seeing color in SLR viewfinders and previsualizing the look of Tri-X or HP-5 Plus or whatever I had loaded in the camera. (The viewfinder image of SLRs was yellow for me, actually, because of the K2 filters on my lenses.) In fact, seeing "bad" B&W in a digital viewfinder is a hindrance, not a help, when I'm visualizing my own B&W conversion which would be much different. I have yet to find a "B&W mode" in any digital camera that's halfway decent as B&W. Most of it simply looks like color desaturated—a look a colleague, John McIntosh, once called "student grays"—which is very different from good B&W. There's not one "B&W." There are many.

I have the look of the result in mind when I shoot. I was actually a little surprised when I first learned that most people don't. I suppose this the reason, or part of the reason, why I was a good B&W photographer.

And I am certainly not rationalizing a purchase! I have felt this way about B&W since I gave up film around 2000, and I have struggled with it since then. Have I not been complaining about the lack of dedicated B&W digital cameras since that time? The record will show that I have been. For example, this post from 11 years ago. It is not the only one—I wrote about the issue on the old Blogspot blog, and in my column in Black & White Photography magazine, and on The Luminous-Landscape. Or this from 2020. Here's another one from when the Leica Monochrom came out, which began with the words "Regular readers will know that I've been calling for a monochrome digital camera since forever...." And that was ten years ago.

If I get a camera converted, it will be only the last in a long series of tries. I bought the "Big Dragoon" (Nikon D800) meaning to use it for B&W. (Note the illustrations at that link.) I tried a Sigma DP2 with the same intentions. I tried firmly resolving to convert everything from the X-T1 in Silver Efex 2 (result? Fail, because I kept seeing in color because the camera sees in color). I tried going back to film several times, unsuccessfully because it's so much more work and so expensive. Why? To get back to B&W. The logical question is probably not whether I ought to try a converted camera so much as why I've waited so long to try a converted camera....

Moose (partial comment): Re 'I have a good feeling about this': Petty sure I've heard this before, likely more than once, about an enthusiasm that has fallen by the wayside. (I have those, too.)"

Mike replies: Yeah, that's why I'll probably resist this in the end. Because I'd have $2,400 invested in a camera that would be worth almost nothing and my enthusiasm would inevitably ebb, leaving me with naught but a big loss and a rueful feeling. It's why I've never had a camera converted.

I would sure love to "demystify" it, though. You never really know about something until you try it for yourself.

Thomas Rink: "Assuming that 1.) you bought the A6600 for making photographs, and not for reselling it, and 2.) your thing is B&W photography, I think the conclusion is simple: just have the camera converted! Then use it until it is worn down beyond repair, and you don't have to worry about resale value."

Bruce Bordner: "Why should you worry about resale value? Pick the one that feels better—the body and controls aren't going to change. Your value lies in how much you will enjoy it. Don't make a business decision on a toy."

Kye Wood (partial comment): "OK. I'm very late to this party. But—Mike. Buddy. You're no spring chicken. I think you should jump on this idea, ASAP."

Bill Bresler: "Ye Gods, man! It sounds like a really good idea, but I just can't get past the $1,200 price."

Roger: "That NEX-6 is likely approaching its 'recycle by' date—look for its recycle symbol. It probably has a 10 in the center. That’s 10 years of expected life. Not much point in paying to convert a camera whose lead-free solder could turn on it at any moment.

"I own a Typ 246 Monochrom and an A7III. I get what you’re saying about how the camera in use affects how you see. It’s a different experience."

Mike replies: The NEX-6 recycle symbol does say 10. However, according to the information I found about this, the number refers to the type of polycarbonate plastic the camera is made of, and isn't a prediction of longevity in years. However, the camera is 9 1/2 years old.

Roger replies: "Well we’re both wrong. That symbol with the 10 in it is a RoHS compliance symbol. The plastic recycle symbol tops out at 7.

"At 9 1/2 years old I’d be very leery of that camera’s lead-free solder causing a short circuit."

Mark Sampson: "If Leica (of all manufacturers) can't make a B&W camera with tonality you like, what are the odds that some conversion company will? It's your business to understand these things and then write about them—modifying a camera is just part of the cost of doing business. Convert the older camera, you'll get your answer, at a lower cost."

Sorting Out the iPhone 13's Tricks and Treats

Any time you get a new camera of any sort, you have to get a handle on it. It's an especially fun adventure with a phone, because the many engineers responsible for it are baking in all sorts of tricks and treats that are supposed to remain behind the scenes for most folks. Of course we're not satisfied with that, and will eventually want to know what's going on. 

Here's an iPhone 13 Pro shot from yesterday:

This little one is a juvenile, and she seems not to have grokked the whole "run and hide" thing yet—she's let me take her picture several times now. (Of course I have no idea if it's a male or a female, I'm just assigning arbitrarily.) I was trying some into-the-sun shots, to see how the camera system behaves in those situations. (Quite well, is the answer.) I like the way her ears are backlit. It seems to me the iPhone 13 Pro is automatically correcting for loss of contrast due to flare—the setting sun was shining on the lens here—but I could be mistaken. I'll get a handle on it sooner or later.

Here's another thing the iPhone 13 Pro seems to be doing:

This woman on Seneca Lake setting off for a paddle with her two doggies aboard was very far from me, so I started with the 77mm-e "tele" lens on the iPhone 13 Pro and used a large amount of digital zoom—to access the control, you just hold your finger on the "3" spot (the three lens choices are given as .5, 1x, and 3), and the dial appears. Here I had a whopping 350mm-e dialed in (15x, 406mm-e, is the max). It appears that the iPhone 13 Pro compensates for the lack of detail by automatically applying processing to the image similar to the old "Paint Daubs" filter in Photoshop (it might still be in Photoshop somewhere, I dunno), which breaks up the areas of color into broad areas similar to "impressionistic" brushstrokes. The detail below will be 100% after you click on it, assuming you're seeing it 800 pixels wide:

It's a neat trick. I personally always kinda liked that filter, although I seldom used it. And by the way, it's a fine demonstration  of contrast vs. resolution: the dog paddler is a picture with lots of contrast but very little resolution.

This effect seems fine. You can't expect to dial in so much digital zoom and not lose something, and this solution looks quite good on the phone screen. Again, it helps if you stay in context: this is a "supertelephoto" shot with a phone, comma, fer Pete's sake. Quite a magic trick. When I was shooting Tri-X, I never owned a 300mm lens, much less a 350mm. (The youngster-bunny shot also has a bit of digital zoom added to the "3" 77mm-e lens, but much less than the paddler.)

Here's another digital zoom shot with the iPhone 13 Pro, this one at 158mm-e. I was happy to see robins nesting on the back deck again; it's been a couple of years. This mother built her nest on top of an old nest, which is why it looks so tall. In the picture, there are actually two young robins—the second one is in front of mother's red breast, and is difficult to pick out. This is  the second brood in this nest this year—there was another earlier in the summer. Robin hatchlings only stay in the nest about two weeks, and these are big, so they'll be off and on their own soon. Oh, and the apparent distortion seen in the gutter downspout isn't distortion, it's actually that way in real life.

If you click on this to see it a little larger, again you can see the effect of good contrast and low resolution in the nest area. And again it makes sense: Kodak research in the 1930s showed that people actually prefer contrast to resolution. I'd say the only problem with the iPhone is that it doesn't apply the effect consistently—it looks like you'll get it heavily if you use lots of digital zoom, but not otherwise. Oh well—just something you need to know, so you can take it into account.

Have a great Monday. I hope you'll come back again.

Mike

Book o' the Week

The Mindful Photographer by Sophie Howarth. I only know of Sophie Howarth from her time as a curator at the Tate Modern in London, but my impression then was positive. Her brand new book (it only came out a few days ago) is about slowing down as a means of enjoying photographing more. It's said to contain a curated collection of photographs along with anecdotes and explanation.

The book link is your portal to Amazon from TOP, should you wish to support this site.

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Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ed Hawco: "I continue to be amazed and impressed by the abilities of the newer iPhone cameras. What still blocks me, however, is the workflow. I just can’t get my head around what the workflow is. iPhone photos go into the Apple Photos app, which makes them available on all your devices (if you use iCloud), which is nice. But they’re all just piled in there. You can sort into 'Albums,' but that’s pretty tedious. Whereas in Lightroom, my images are sorted by date (via the folders where they natively live) and by various tags, and the notable ones are typically grouped into collections. I have the original DNGs, plus multiple virtual copies. They’re all easy to find.

"But in Photos (the app) all I get is Albums. No metadata editing, no tagging, etc. How do I find images that are older than what I can tolerate scrolling through?

"Is there a way to manage iPhone photos in Lightroom, short of exporting selected ones? I haven’t found it."

Stephen Scharf replies to Ed: "Just some info for Ed Hawco's comment about workflow. I simply use AirDrop to send the photos from my iPhone to my MacBook Pro, curate and do high level edits in Capture 1 Pro 22, and final touches in Photoshop. I just put the files Air Dropped to the MBP into a folder, and access them there from C1. Easy-peasy."

[See also Adrian Malloch's and psu's replies in the full Comments Section. —Ed.]

Hank: "Carrying an iPhone 13 and my Leica IIIa would be an interesting bookended history of small format photography."

Mike replies: Wow, I'd stop you on the street if I saw that. I appreciate the way you think.

Cult Camera (Or: We're Just Talking)

[Comments have been added]

I guess what strikes me the most about camera complexification is this: I've loved cameras my whole life. Enthusiasm to the point of obsessiveness. Well, okay, past the point, probably. I've spent money on them right along; I've bought way, way more of them that I ever needed to. I do like pictures and prints more, but I enjoy cameras for their own sake.

And yet somehow the current state of wretched excess has managed to take the joy out of many cameras for me. I think I first realized this with the original OM-D EM-5. That thing just blocked me—it felt like it actively prevented me from doing what I wanted to do, again and again. And it was the first time that, rather than thinking, "I'll master this," I thought, "I'll just get rid of this."

I think that if they've taken the joy out of cameras for me, then there's a problem. I'm the low-hanging fruit among the target audience, the easy sale, the constantly returning customer, the neverending market. The guy who will buy a new camera when he already has a new camera.

I'm reminded of what Gordon Lewis wrote about complex features in 2016: "Bear in mind that I’m a Harvard graduate with over 40 years of photographic experience. I do instructional design and technical training for a living. It’s therefore reasonable to suspect that if I find it a challenge to figure these things out, others will too. More to the point, just because someone can perform an unnecessarily difficult task doesn’t mean they like to."

The inescapable insight is that this has got to be one thing driving the acceptance of smartphone cameras and the migration away from big rigs (by which I mean ILC's). Smartphone cameras are radically simple and they get out of the way, enabling people to simply enjoy photography. As we've seen from the comments here, even some TOP readers feel that way! And we're the mavens, the enthusiasts, the deep end of the pool.

Don't oversimplify
Of course, oversimplification can also frustrate people by preventing them from doing what they want to do. But what that means is that an understanding of the balance between the two is required, so that an intelligent balance can be achieved. It's something Steve Jobs understood very well—it was part of his genius, really, and generally speaking I think the world is grateful for the way he changed the culture in the whole universe of computing devices. There's an optimum point between not enough flexibility and configurability on one hand, and feature overload and needless complexity on the other. It should be different for different cameras, but a deep understanding of that basic tradeoff has to be a given. And it isn't.

It's useless to hope that the mainstream camera manufacturers will suddenly change, because I don't think they even understand the goal. Or the reason for the goal.

It's characterological
It's partly a matter of aptitude among the people involved. People who have a strong aptitude for geeky features and endless complexity simply don't see why they should be denied every possible option. And people who don't like endless features and complexity are shamed, in a sense, into accepting what the geeks are happy with, the assumption being that if they don't learn all the ins-and-outs of their cameras then it's their own fault.

They, meanwhile, leave the D537D Mark XIII in the closet and just go shoot with their phones. And when the Mark XIV comes out, they take a pass.

By the way, there should be a name for the business strategy of blaming bad product design on the consumer, or adding complexity until the objective can't be reached. If you didn't read that you have to fill your tires with nitrogen then it's your fault when your pressure sensors don't work. Ever tried to apply for an insurance reimbursement from the Post Office? Doing so successfully will be your part-time job for three or four months. I tried to see it through and still failed. That's by design, I'm sure.

Have you ever watched Doug DeMuro's automotive channel? That guy is such a geek that he can understand virtually every feature on a car and every item in its manual within probably a few hours. He'll point out esoteric features on the car and small anomalies in the manual with delight. Meanwhile, there are features on my simple sedan which I will die without ever knowing about.

The Doug types are the ones designing cameras. There is no such thing as too much complexity; no such thing as too many features. These are the folks who love Word and Photoshop. "Did you see that in the latest version there are now 16 ways to do this one simple task rather than just 11? That's an improvement!"

Cult camera
I once wrote a detailed letter to the CEO of eBay suggesting the company should market a cheap camera specifically designed for taking eBay product pictures. I put a lot of thought into the description and still think I did a great job (he said modestly). I thought it would be a win-win; not only would they make money selling the camera, but they'd radically improve the quality of the average product photo for items posted for sale. Never heard a peep back, of course. I'm sure my letter found the round file. But I'll tell you what. Some camera company or other should let me design a People's Camera for its product lineup. The SS, for Super Simple. I'd do a hell of a job. I'd make a camera so radical that everyone from veteran street photographers to new parents to fine artists would love. You could pick it up and use it without a manual. It'd become a cult camera, with fanatical followings. This might sound immodest, but I've been on the front lines and in the trenches for 40 years; I know what the people want even though they don't know they want it.

Never happen in a million years, of course. But hey, we're just talking here.

Mike

MARILYN NANCE: "Thank you. I have felt somewhat guilty for years for not using very much and giving away my OM-D E-M5. It was a bit too small for my fingers and the menu system was chaotic and too different from the Nikons I also used. I have stuck with Nikons since then. "

Alan: "Quote from Albert Einstein: 'Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem–in my opinion–to characterize our age. I fear the day technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.'"

Mike the Ed. replies: In the formerly United States at least, spurious quotations are most commonly attributed to William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, or Albert Einstein. So whenever I see "Albert Einstein" as the source of a quote I get suspicious! Sometimes what those individuals said is twisted or augmented, sometimes a real quotation from someone else is attributed to them for the purpose of giving it more authority, and sometimes it's all just bull poop. In any event, whenever a quotation attributed to Einstein, Lincoln, Twain or the bard crops up, a citation becomes all the more important.

So I did a bit of digging. In this case, the first part of the quotation appears to be genuine and the second part spurious. Einstein did say "Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem–in my opinion–to characterize our age." Here's the quote in context, with citations, courtesy of a site called entersection:

Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem—in my opinion—to characterize our age. If we desire sincerely and passionately the safety, the welfare and the free development of the talents of all men, we shall not be in want of the means to approach such a state. Even if only a small part of mankind strives for such goals, their superiority will prove itself in the long run.

—Albert Einstein in his speech "The Common Language of Science," a broadcast-recording for the Science Conference in London on September 28th, 1941. First published in "The Advancement of Science," Volume 2, Number 5 (London: British Association for the Advancement of Science). Available in The Theory of Relativity, and Other Essays (Secaucus, New Jersey: Carol Publishing Group, 1996), p. 67. Audio recording available on "Albert Einstein: Historic Recordings, 1930-1947," (London: The British Library, Sound Archive, 2005), Track 6.

I haven't checked those citations—this isn't The New Yorker—but they appear pretty stout prima facie.

The second bit has been on the internet at least since 2012 and seems to be commonly used as a critique of cellphone culture, as explained here by Quote Investigator. A site called Full Fact notes: "Both PolitiFact and fellow fact checking service Snopes have pointed out that a quote bearing some resemblance to [this one] appears in the 1995 film Powder, with a character played by Jeff Goldblum saying: 'It’s become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity.' Another character, played by Sean Patrick Flanery, responds, 'Albert Einstein.'"

My experience doing seat-of-the-pants research on the web for the past 16+ years is that quotes found on the internet are disreputable and should be considered dubious by default. Some are correct, of course, but many illustrate the caution "don't believe everything you read online." What happens is that an incorrect quotation gets copied from one source to another until anyone searching it will discover numerous hits for it. 

Sorry to pick on you Alan! None of this diminishes the relevance of the legitimate Einstein quote, "Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem—in my opinion—to characterize our age," which is no doubt the part that led you to comment. It strikes me as similar in spirit to the familiar Ansel Adams quote, "There is nothing worse than a sharp image [perfection of means] of a fuzzy concept [confusion of goals]." 

Patrick Perez adds: "Mike's response to Alan's post quoting the internet mis-quote of Albert Einstein brought up a couple thoughts. Mike describes the people most frequently mis-attributed in the U.S. I'd add that in the U.K. the honor probably goes mostly to Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill. I do not have documentation for this assertion of mine.

"When I mis-attribute, I am always careful. Example: 'As I always say Mark Twain always said, "Man is the only animal that accessorizes...or needs to."'"

Alan adds: "Hi Mike. Alan here. Thanks for your response to my Einstein quote(s) comment. It would appear the second quote in my comment may not have direct provenance to Einstein after I researched more deeply as you did. I wonder who actually did come up with that quote. There must have been a genesis of the quote at some point in time.

"It would also appear that many actual books have been published with this quote. I just searched for google books with that quote. See here. Seems pretty widespread now. Interesting in that if you say it enough times it almost seems to become true...perfect example is in politics nowadays.  :-)  ."

Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): "Re 'I think I first realized this with the original OM-D EM-5. That thing just blocked me....' Oy! Your reference induced a moment to PTSD! I owned an Olympus E-M[x] camera (don't recall the specific model) briefly one summer long ago. 'Blocked' is a perfect description for how I felt, too. It was unquestionably the worst user interface I have ever encountered. I wanted to throw the thing in the lake. (Interestingly, I have no such recollection about the first Oly Pen model. Just that it was clunky. But, yeah, for me that Oly was the poster child for malevolent user interface design!"

Mike Marcus: "You got that right about the Oly OM-D E-M5. Since I always liked the film Olys and still have an XA, I picked up a used E-M5. Then I spent much of its first weekend, considerable parts of the following week, plus much of the next weekend before I started to understand how to set it up the way I wanted for still photos. I did very much like the photos it was finally able to produce for me. But I later sold it, which I should have done that first weekend.

"Later, because I had spent so much time learning the Oly menu 'system' I bought their E-M1 that also produced nice photos. But the menu still sucked. Later, for reasons that I still shake my head over, I got a Sony A7 Mark II. The Sony menus are actually worse than Oly's. Then, I said to myself, I can't deal with two unknowable menu systems. That ended my time with another sold Oly and that Sony is now sold too. I have a Pany GX1, GX8, and G9, which have complex menus that I have had much less problem using.

"Here I should note that I am a retired Ph.D. science type with a minor in statistics who has had many different cameras since age 10. So one would think that complex menus should not be a problem for me. Not true. They are not fun. (While I still have an a7R Mark II it will be gone sometime this year and I will not buy another Sony or Oly.)"

Michael Bade: "I keep wondering how a camera would look and function if the fundamental properties of smartphone camera OS that make a smartphone transparent to use and which make photos easy to share were adapted to a rethought ILC format camera. I have to believe that if digital camera processors were as powerful as smartphone processors the controls on the camera could be radically simplified and rethought, dramatically simplifying the process of making photographs with no loss of output quality—not by making the camera dumber bt by making it smarter and more able to correctly adapt to conditions in the visual environment in real time.

"Smartphones are doing this—applying AI and sophisticated algorithms in real time, for better photos. I compare my Apple iPhone 11 and my Fuji X-H1 by using both together. I hate the number of controls I have to manage on the Fuji compared to the iPhone, but love the Fuji's sensor and glass. I love the way the iPhone automatically uploads my photos to the cloud.

"I know, this is Them Hogan's longtime rant, and I fully understand how Apple can amortize the development of such sophisticated software in the iPhone across vastly more units sold than are sold by ILC camera makers. But Thom's right! Instead of phones with cameras stuck on them, we could have had cameras that incorporated a phone!"

Gordon Lewis: "For what it's worth, I now shoot primarily with a Fuji X-T3. The main reason is because it still has the standard analog interface (shutter dial, aperture dial, ISO dial) I'm used to and comfortable with. It also has a handy 'lock' feature that prevents me from accidentally changing specific features and settings once I've locked them in. I really don't mind all the extra features being available, as long as I don't have to use them if I don't want to."

Dave Pawson: "Solid, logical points. You have my sympathy and support. I've a camera here that takes a pic every time I touch the rear screen. Darned if I can find where to switch it off. I think it's menu 23, submenu 48...but I'm not sure."

Joe. Kashi: "Da Vinci, I believe, posited that 'Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.'" 

Mike replies: You sure about that attribution?  :-)

Homing In On 'Simple' Cameras

[Comments have been added.]

About the Leica T, Doug Reilly wrote: "I think the camera of which you speak might be the Leica T. It is fabulously stripped down. One button in addition to the shutter release. Two dials. A very responsive and pretty touch screen for everything else, and by everything I mean very little, and you fit most of the functions relevant to stills photography on their version of the quick menu. In A mode, the right dial adjusts the aperture and the left dial can be set to one of six functions, including exposure comp, which is where I leave it. It’s got autofocus and an add-on EVF, and tweakable auto-ISO. I think it’s brilliant, and bravo to them for bucking the trend. (...The T was released prematurely with a very poor firmware, so it received a lot of negative press. They upgraded the firmware and created a sleeper camera that, if it shines for you, is a heck of a deal.)"

About the original Canon 5D, Rich Reusser wrote: "I recently bought a Canon 5D classic, as it was dirt cheap and I fondly remembered my first one years ago. I'll be darned if my memory isn't spot on. The 2006 state of the art was refreshingly basic. A real joy to shoot without the camera getting in my way."

About the Hasselblad X1D, Gordon wrote: "Menus can be done well. Camera companies...just don't. Hasselblad's X1D interface is sublime. They take full advantage of the touchscreen to make accessing most things incredibly easy and intuitive. If you understand the basics of photography there's no need to read the manual at all."

About the original Leica SL, Kirk wrote: "I bought a Leica SL, the original version, specifically because of the simplified controls and simplified menus. Four unmarked buttons and a power switch on the back. One hour to learn the menu. Very limited complexity for things like JPEGg settings or video. A five line section in the menu for video. It's exactly the camera you are describing as a great photo camera. And it's well built, feels great and takes a complete system of lenses from three alliance partners and a growing base of other makers. They are available all over the used market at about $2,200 in great shape. There's the solution to all the 'deep dive' menus and complexity."

About the Fuji X-T1, John Krumm wrote: "You have a 'stripper model' of a camera, sort of, the Fuji X-T1."

=   +   =   +   =   +   =   +   =

Mike's comments: First of all, after we play pool on Monday we go to lunch, and on the way to lunch I saw a red fox in the snow. They're lovely animals, and as cold as it's been, his coat was thick and luxurious. I screeched on the brakes and backed up! He was like, what's this now? I watched him skedaddle through the open trees. Beautiful. I got a great view of him (or her). I don't see many foxes.

Re simple cameras, two things to get out of the way first. One is that I don't need a simple camera. I'm not looking for help. It's not like I can't operate any camera, even a very complicated one. I've been reviewing cameras literally half my life. I can take pictures with anything, from an oatmeal carton with a pinhole on up. Second, I'm not advising any manufacturers from a business/marketing standpoint. Yes, I do think they've painted themselves into a corner by making their products unappealing to normal people because of excessive complexification; but I'm not saying that one product that went against the grain would be a hit in the marketplace. Of course it should be a hint that both Leica and Hasselblad lead the way in purposeful, pared-down devices that aren't gummed up with endless options and 750-page manuals. If it's not "What do I know?" Then maybe it's "What do they know?"

The other thing about this is that I'm not suggesting all cameras need to be simple. Just a few. Well, a few that don't cost five grand or more.

And third—um, did I say two things? There's a third—which is that I'm not even sure "simple" is the right word. Purposeful is more like it. Focused, if you'll pardon the eternal pun. This is more like what I mean:

1. Purposeful
2. Pared down
3. Able to be mastered
4. Built to do one thing really well rather than all things just in case

I'm at a disadvantage making these arguments, though...I haven't used as many high-end cameras as Ken and Kirk and I'm sure many others have. In recent years I haven't used a lot of cameras. Maybe what I need is to expand my familiarity with the options more....

Mike

Book o' the Week

In Search of Elsewhere: Unseen Images by Steve McCurry. The two Steve McCurry books I own—Looking East and The Unguarded Moment—are oversized (but not too oversized) and have some of the very best color photographic reproduction I've seen. I hope this will be the same, although it has a different publisher. Steve McCurry, although his career is not without blemishes, is a superb and accomplished photographer whose work is a joy to own and revisit. Note that he's a "visual storyteller," not a photojournalist.

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Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Thomas Rink: "Isn't it funny how all attempts to simplify photography result in increased complexity? For example, automatic exposure—the user has to know how the exposure meter works to dial in the right amount of compensation. To make matters worse, if the camera uses matrix metering, the user has to second guess how the machine would compensate exposure to eventually compensate that. Or autofocus which requires the user to know how the related algorithm works to get the most out of it. These are 'leaky' abstractions; the user has to know about the underlying mechanism and how the abstraction works in order to use the feature. Smartphone cameras show us that this can be done better."

Jack Mac: "The Leica M11 is the most simple of all the Leica M’s film or digital! A film Leica M had a very challenging way of taking a baseplate off to then thread the film across the camera back. Leica retained that baseplate for the M8, M9, M 240, and M10 even though threading film was unnecessary. Finally in 2022, Leica has dropped the removable baseplate from the camera so that users themselves no longer accidentally drop the removable baseplate when changing batteries or SD cards."

Bear.: "Now that you mention it, I’ve realised I’ve got a Leica Q2, three Sigma Merrills (28mm, 40mm and 75mm FF equivalents) plus a soon to be retired Sony RX1. They are all purposeful, pared down, create fantastic images within their design parameters, and don’t do much else especially well. I am obviously limited in the types of images I am able to make with each of them but find those limitations to be quite inspiring in their own right, as I have to see the world in a way that enable me to take photographs that are within their capabilities.

"Having said that, I’m a 'fine art' photograph with the freedom to choose my own subject matter for my photography—if I were a professional photograph meeting clients’ requirements for a living, I suspect those limitations would be (um) precisely the opposite of inspiring—and I that would much prefer a Nikon Z9 or Sony A1 or two with a bag of zoom lenses and lighting gear."

Dogman: "It's ironic and baffling to me that we were told computerization was going to make things easier and our lives more simple. Instead those who design and build computerized devices have made our lives more frustrating and they have complicated many previously simple tasks. Makes one wonder. Are the machines serving us or are we serving the machines?"

Geoff Wittig: "I have really come to love the pared-down interface of the Fuji XT series in actual use. Yes, Fuji's menu structure is a kludge, there are too many redundant buttons, and the X-H1's exposure compensation is God-awful, pressing a tiny little button while turning a clumsy squishy wheel. But the X-T2/3/4 series is just about perfect. Big simple knobs for exposure compensation and basic controls, with no need to dive into the menu swamp at all. And a nice aperture ring on the lenses. They could leave off all the other stuff as far as I'm concerned."

Dave Millier: "Interesting that living out in the wilds you don't see foxes very often. I live in London and I see about 50 foxes every day. There are several living next door and they screech spookily every night. They sleep on my shed roof during the day. Today, on the school run, I saw a fox happily trotting down the pavement (sidewalk) of a busy commuter route in broad daylight without a care in the world. It's odd that there are more foxes in the heart of the city than in the countryside. Beautiful looking animals and easy to photograph but I was not so pleased with them when they ate my backyard chickens.  :-(  "

Traffic Lights and Taillights

[Comments have been added.]

I've tried several shooting experiments recently. One was shooting square. I think I liked it, but unfortunately I didn't try it for long enough to really start seeing that way.

Or, I kept grabbing different cameras. Always the problem with owning more than one.

Another has been that I'm keeping a camera with an 84-305mm-equivalent lens on it in the car, so I can take pictures of faraway subjects as I wander the highways and byways of Western New York State (as I've discussed a time or two, I find a lot more pictures are far away here than other places I've lived). That's going well too, but, again, it's too early to know if it's a good way of working for the long term.

I think I just enjoy shooting, and I'm not sufficiently devoted to any particular parameters.

I haven't started experimenting with the A6600 yet. But it's been, you know, Winter.

Here's a question for the collective brain trust. Does anyone know why digital has such trouble rendering red taillights and traffic signals? Is it because digital has some particular kind of problem with LEDs and most taillights and traffic signals are LEDs these days? Or are they just much brighter than they seem to the eye, such that they're always blown out at anything like the proper exposure for the scene?

Several friends and I have been in a rather intense conversation about this over the past few days. Or rather, they're conversing and I'm looking on from the sidelines—they're much better technically than I am. Two of them have 100-MP Fujis, so we've been trying to determine if one of those does a better job with red traffic lights than, say, a G9 or an X-H1. (The consensus seems to be...a little better). One of them won't shoot scenes with a traffic signal in them because the abysmal rendering irritates him so much.

It didn't seem to be a problem with film. Although aside from several Pete Turners (such as this one—scroll down a bit) and Ernst Haas's "Route 66 Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1969," I'm not aware of any famous photographs with red lights in them.

Anyone know more about this?

Mike

Book o' the Week
Eye and Brain by Richard Gregory, Fifth Edition. "As far as I know nothing in the past 50 years is a better explanation of how humans see." —Hugh Crawford

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Alex Mercado: "It is due to the photon absorption rates of the sensor’s photodiodes. The red sensitive photodiodes are more efficient than those of the blue and green. Also those red photodiodes are also sensitive to infrared. If you point a remote control at your phone camera and press any of the remote’s buttons, you’ll likely see the IR light emitted from the remote as a false-colored flickering dot on your phone’s screen.

"A good read about CMOS sensors can be found here."

Mike replies: That link is way over my head, but I bet some readers will be able to read it.

John Camp: "Judging by what LED headlights do to my eyes at night, I'd say that they're way brighter than old-fashioned bulbs. They're absolutely dazzling. That Ernst Haas photo is terrific."

Mike replies: Isn't it? Always loved that one.

Peter Komar: "I recall reading a photography magazine from many years ago when Pete Turner was all the rage that he duplicated his original 35mm slides to achieve those classic reds, blues and oranges. It’s true if you duplicate your original slide on either duplicating film or same film stock as the original, contrast and color saturation increase. I tried it myself and it does work and of course this was long before Photoshop and digital. I also recall Pete Turner may have also duplicated the duplicate to further get those vivid colors. I also think that digital sensors just have inherent challenges with red in general, I always was disappointed in deep red color flowers and the results from digital was somewhat disappointing."

John Krumm: "All I know is that red is problematic with a lot of digital cameras. It easily blows out and loses detail. You still get red, just a very uniform red. I think some of the changes in the K-1 Mark II were supposed to address this problem. I've done experiments with red in bright light, and it's surprising how much you have to underexpose before the red channel is OK sometimes. "

Bill Bresler: "I must say that I appreciate snow much more now that I'm semi-retired.

"In regards to square photos: The first real camera I ever held was my uncle's Rolleiflex F. When I was in high school I worked for a mom and pop photo studio. They liked their 6x7 Graflex XLs, and that's what I learned on, but there was a beat-up Rolleiflex C on the shelf and I'd use that whenever I could. As soon as I could scrape up the money, I bought a Mamiya C-330. Sold that to buy 35mm gear for newspaper work. Regretted selling it. Finally bought my own Rolleiflex E2 from a retiring photographer in 1985. He had used that same camera to photograph our wedding in 1978. I still run at least a half-dozen rolls of Tri-X 400 through it each year. Traded a Leica for a Hasselblad 500cm. Liked it, but liked the Rollei better. Had a five or six year flirtation with the Holga. When I got my first iPhone I downloaded a camera app called 6x6.

"Yeah, I like the square, but I can't really say why. All I know is that in nearly fifty years of being a working photographer, using all kinds of formats, 35mm, 6x6, 6x7, 4x5, 8x10, digital everything, my favorite images, and the ones that I consider my best, and hang on my walls, are mostly 6x6. I always come back to it.

"About a year ago, I heard that Costco was shutting down their photo labs in local stores. I had used my local Costco for years. The gentleman who ran that lab for over 10 years knew what he was doing and trained those who worked for him how to make great prints. I started editing my 6x6 photos, scanned the negs and ordered about 30 15x15 on 16x20 B&W prints. I went to pick them up a couple of days before the lab closed. I spent many years in darkrooms but these prints were superb. He thanked me for having his lab print such beautiful work in their final days. It was kind of emotional, and probably the most meaningful validation of my photography.

"Sorry for the long and rambling post but you hit a nerve. The square works for me."

Mike replies: Great comment, thank you.

Dan Hillier: "With your traffic light question, I found this video interesting. From about 22 min., the presenter talks about how traffic light colours were chosen. But when you look at the graph that is developed, it is a bit of an Ah ha!! moment. I'm sure we've all seen that graph before."

Mike replies: Wow, what a fantastic presentation. He doesn't mince about, does he. Thanks for that, I really enjoyed it.

Joel Wolford: "Not a comment on the problem, but on the book containing the Pete Turner photo that you referenced: The Contact Sheet from Ammo Books. I recently purchased this book (it is available on Amazon now!) and it was just as informative and interesting as you stated. A nice addition to any photobook collection, IMHO."

Mike replies: IMHO too.

An Ideal Format

[TOP publishes on Mon./Wed./Fri. Comments are posted the following day.]

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It's difficult to say when the "birth moment" of the 4/3 format happened. An Olympus engineer named Katsuhiro Takada chose the size and shape of the format in 1999; Kodak and Olympus announced their intention to cooperate in 2001; and the 4/3 website (it was more often written "Four Thirds" then) launched in 2003. That was the year of the first SLR designed from the ground up for digital, the Olympus E-1. As of PMA 2006, the Four Thirds Consortium consisted of Olympus, Panasonic, Leica, Kodak, Sigma, Sanyo, and Fujifilm(!)—although, notably, membership in the consortium did not constitute a commitment on the part of each of those companies to produce commercial products in the format. Fujifilm never did. Micro 4/3, the world's first system of interchangeable-lens cameras in what eventually became known as "mirrorless," launched in 2008.

The 4/3 format was almost identical in size to the 110 film format introduced by Kodak in 1972: an imaging area of 13 x 17.3mm compared to 13 x 17mm for 110.

Of course, in the early days there was a pitched battle between the 4/3 format and what became known as APS-C, a slightly larger format size chosen by both Nikon and Canon. (Canon's exact standard was slightly smaller than Nikon's.) APS-C, which stands for "Advanced Photo System—Classic," was one of the three sizes of the ill-fated APS film format. The Advanced Photo System had been launched as a consortium spearheaded by Kodak in 1996. Kind of interesting that the first major format battle in digital was between two contenders that were so close in size to two film format sizes, both developed by Eastman Kodak.

Same as it ever was
I was an early booster and supporter of the 4/3 format. It seemed about right to me. It offered the best balance of all factors—greater d.o.f. than 35mm film and the larger formats; more efficient usage of the image circle of lenses; greater effective telephoto "reach," which had been greatly prized by 35mm photographers*; and the possibility of convenient compactness in both cameras and lenses. All with enough area and "room for pixels" to ensure good image quality.

Of course, the vagaries of the format's journey through the world was up and down, and 4/3 encountered a number of obstacles along the way, some real, some perceived. I won't go into all of those issues here, as it would constitute a long history lesson, much of which is known to this site's core readership anyway. Mostly, of course, 4/3's big problem was that it was always opposing more powerful interests and market forces.

Surisingly, given all the water that has flowed under the bridge since then, I still consider 4/3—now Micro 4/3—as probably the ideal digital format when considered objectively and logically. Considered, that is, from a sort of "ivory tower" perspective, divorced from status-and-prestige and marketing issues and market perception—but not exactly as it is, only as it might have been. Imagine if a.) sensor development had been logical and b.) Micro 4/3 was the main focus of sensor development for still photography. (Right now there's a new Micro 4/3 sensor in development, but it's almost completely aimed at hybrid cameras and really won't have much effect on still photography at all, at least as far as I can tell.) If things had proceeded logically, no phone camera would have more than six or eight megapixels at the most and we'd mostly be using cameras with 4/3 Foveon sensors right now! Well, that's a future that never was. Being sensible and logical isn't the most important factor in sensor and camera design and development—it might rank fifth or sixth on the list.

But enough of my opinion. What's the ideal format to you?

Mike

P.S. Related reading: "The Remarkable Persistence of 24x36"

*I was fooled there, however—many 35mm film photographers prized long teles not so much because they needed them (which was what I always assumed) but because they were big and cool and expensive and hence, displayed status.

Book o' the Week

Our National Monuments: America's Hidden Gems by Q.T. Luong. Just out! Brand new. Publishing isn't easy. Our friend QT (Tuan) Luong tells me that his new book will have to sell 6,200 copies out of a print run of 7,500 just to break even! And that's not including the labor and time it took to make the photographs. Fortunately, the predecessor book, Treasured Lands, has done exceedingly well. It has won 12 international awards and is now in its 6th printing.

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Veiling Glare

[TOP publishes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Comments are added the following day.]

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Saturday I happened to find perfect conditions for illustrating veiling glare. Here the sun is just out of the frame. The air was exceptionally clear and the morning sun almost preternaturally bright. The dew was glinting like myriad diamonds on the grass and I was wondering if the phone could catch it (it didn't, at all. I've always wondered how much camera you need to resolve back-lit dew. I guess it depends how close you are). The above picture is one with no shading of the lens.

Here's very nearly the identical scene, taken just moments later but with my hand shading the lens. Pretty big difference. Enlarge the pictures by clicking on them, set them side by side, and let your eyes go back and forth, noting the differences.

It's worth noting that, as with many properties considered defects in photographs, flare is often present in pictures in amounts too small to consciously register unless you're good at spotting it. The same is true for misfocus, color cast, motion blur, and many other defects. I think it's interesting and instructive every so often to create a picture that has no defects at all, just to "calibrate" your brain and eye. I've done a number of such exercises over the years.

"Flare" is the general name for non-image-forming light reaching the sensor. There are various types. I can actually see three types of flare in the top picture (see if you can spot them), but the predominant one is veiling glare—that overall flare that lightens the scene, cuts contrast, and "washes out" the colors.

Flare is often caused by light sources in the frame or just out of it that are way brighter than the camera is set to record. Lens hoods are useful in controlling it, but only incompletely—you can't shade the lens from a picture that contains the bright light source in the picture, and there are many situations where, even with a shade, direct sunlight can still strike the lens directly. 

Historically, the "Eagle Eye" of Zeiss—the 1902 Tessar designed by German physicist Paul Rudolph and his assistant Ernst Wandersleb—had remarkably little flare for its day because it only had six air-to glass surfaces. (Copied in 1926 by Leitz in the fixed Elmar for the Leica 1A.) Today, modern coatings have made great strides in eliminating flare even in much more complex lenses, however, so it's not something we have to think about too much any more. Not like it used to be, anyway.

Flare was especially undesirable in spotmeters with lenses, because it could throw the readings off.

The most important thing a lens hood can do on a normal or wide lens is shade acutely impinging light (light striking the lens from an angle more toward 90 degrees). So a short hood is often nearly as good as an optimized one, and a recessed front element, like you find on some macro lenses, serves as well. (I've always liked lenses with recessed front elements.)

Bear in mind, though, that the many effects of flare are only properties of lens imaging. Flare is generally considered undesirable, but it isn't necessarily—many pictures have incorporated flare successfully.

For instance:

The Dalai Butta receiving doggie enlightenment. ("Make me One with the tennis ball....") It can be fun to play with flare! Didn't I post an example just the other day? (This was taken with my old iPad.)

And don't forget that our friend Juan Buhler (street photographer extraordinaire) and his colleagues at Pixar actually added CGI lens flare, focus, and bokeh effects to the animation for the 2007 movie Ratatouille....

Mike

Book o' the Week

Photography, The Definitive Visual History by Tom Ang. This is a book that can't exist—it's too much work to put it together, like several others I know of (I'm looking at you, Q.T. Luong). Amazingly, it exists anyway. A brightly-lit shop window for the attractions of photography—a whirlwind tour of people, cameras, and pictures. The author still has time to be an accomplished travel photographer, although I don't know how.

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Featured Comments from:

Ken Bennett: "My Fuji 35mm ƒ/1.4 is very good at showing this sort of veiling flare or glare with a light source that is in or just outside the frame. Most of the time I think it's a feature, but there are times when I need to correct it in post (the Dehaze slider works at minimizing it.) I shot a lot of photos at a late afternoon gala reception inside a fancy tent yesterday (the tent was the size of a couple of football fields, with clear plastic roof and sides. And heat.) Lots of late afternoon backlighting, which looked great, but I got that glare all over the frames from the 35mm. The 16mm ƒ/1.4 and the 56mm ƒ/1.2 had none. "

Ken later adds: "Followup to my original comment, Mike. I just received the new Fujifilm 33mm ƒ/1.4 lens, and shot it side by side with the original 35mm, wide open, with a bright light in one corner. The difference is amazing—the new lens shows none of the veiling glare/flare of the old one."

David L.: "Long ago I had a Leica 90mm Tele-Elmarit, the slim version with 39mm filter size. I shot a roll with it on a cloudy day, and every frame had excess veiling flare. Sunny days were worse. Seemed like every circumstance caused flare. I studied the geometry of the tapered barrel and saw that any light reflected off the inside would bounce toward the film plane. I was very glad to sell it."

Mike replies: Yet if memory serves, that's the lens Alice Springs (a pseudonym of June Newton, Helmut's wife) used for her wonderful book of portraits, long a personal favorite. I could be wrong about that.

Viewfinders Revisited

[Comments have been added.]

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Let me ask you kind of a weird question. At this point in time, this late date, how are you feeling about EVF vs. OVF?

EVF, of course, is electronic viewfinder, which Wikipedia describes thusly: "a camera viewfinder where the image captured by the lens is projected electronically onto a miniature display. [...] The sensor records the view through the lens, the view is processed, and finally projected on a miniature display which is viewable through the eyepiece." EVFs are found only on digital cameras.

OVF is optical viewfinder. Wikipedia's article "Viewfinder" helpfully runs down many of the main types. I'll paraphrase: Single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras view the scene through the taking lens. A mechanism flips the mirror out of the way when the shutter button is pressed, followed immediately by the shutter opening. A prism is used to allow the camera to be held to the eye. OVFs are found on film and digital cameras.

In an automobile, in my opinion, the steering does the most to impart or embody the character or feel of the driving experience, and, in a camera, the viewfinder (VF) has the most influence on the character or experience of using the camera. Makes some sense; steering is how the car interacts with the road, and the VF is how you interact with the visual world using a camera. A camera's viewfinder is a discrete optical device, if you will, by which you direct how the camera aligns with what you see.

I've always been kind of a connoisseur, or, let's say, an appreciator of viewfinders. I'm not picky, though; I honestly think I'm very adaptable. I'll use whatever the camera offers for the most part.

The screen of a phone can be a pretty nice viewfinder, if you're
in the shade. Taken at 7:08 today. Butters and I go outside
first thing every morning.

The most trouble I've ever had with viewfinders is that, for a number of years, my dominant right eye, which I prefer to use when I photograph, used to need about –2 diopter correction, and during those years I wanted to use older film cameras I purchased used. Many of the add-on diopter correction lenses, originally sold separately, were scarce or impossible to find. I had to get rid of a beautiful Agfa Super Isolette once because the only way to add diopter correction would have been to glue a correction lens to the viewfinder window, and I refused to vandalize the camera that way.

(This is the reason I now believe that all cameras should have diopter correction built in, so they'll never be without it. In fact I'm not a big fan of cameras that need or use any dedicated add-on accessories for essential functions—because in the future the camera will be discontinued and those accessories might become impossible to locate. A camera should go through its life with all that it needs built-in, and have normal, ordinary attachment points for things that are commonly added, like straps and flashes. How many camera do you know of that have quirky, offbeat strap attachments? I can think of a lot. And I can think of a few cameras that have offbeat flash attachments. Bad idea.)

Interior walls
Viewfinders, of course, are troublesome for manufacturers because they don't pay their way. An analogy is interior finishing in houses. You might have noticed that virtually all houses are "open plan" these days. Open plan was either invented or popularized by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), the brilliant but autocratic American architect. In Wright's able hands, the concept was subtle and sophisticated. Not any more. In all but high-end contemporary house design, it's almost entirely a means for builders to avoid the cost of interior finishing. Interior walls and doorways, never mind the creative built-ins so beloved of the Victorians, are expensive to build but they don't add to the builder's profits. A three-bedroom house with lavish partitioning and thoughtful built-ins can't be sold for any more than a three-bedroom house with an interior that's all one big room like a barn with the kitchen just tacked on in one corner*. It's billed as a "feature" for the buyer, of course, but it's mainly for the convenience and profit of the builder.

Same with viewfinders. Great viewfinders typically cost a lot of money to make well, and are touchy to manufacture, requiring a great deal of precision. But the cost is just not generally perceived as added value by camera buyers. To their credit, the manufacturers keep trying. Many times I've watched manufacturers provide lavish, well-made viewfinders for a camera model, only to replace it with a model that has a more ordinary, humdrum VF later. The recent Fuji 50s to 50s II progression is a perfect illustration: the VF got cheapened on the latter. There were reasons for that, yes, but still, it's a thing that happened. And until I'm convinced otherwise, I'll go on believing that the excellent VF on the Panasonic GX8 is the reason Panasonic stubbornly refuses to make a Mark II version of that camera. The GX8's viewfinder was expensive to make and buyers didn't appreciate it; it didn't help sales of the camera. The GX9 reverts to a simpler and frankly inferior viewfinder. Most buyers don't mind. Hell, most buyers don't even notice.

The look of the light
But, back to the question. I'm sure the EVF vs. OVF decision is one you made for yourself long ago, and it's probably a settled thing for you. But personally, I find I'm either a.) getting contrarian now that EVFs are established as the mainstream choice, or b.) rethinking my own acceptance of EVFs for practical reasons. Yes, they have a lot of advantages, and the new ones are very good, but they don't report the light very well. It can be like the view is painted on, and the subtlety of the real light is crushed. Light is one of the things I've always responded to. It's one of the reasons I like pictures in the first place. So I'm wondering how I'd feel if I used an old-style SLR-type OVF for a while again. Anyway, I find myself missing them.

Also, the change to the 50s II has made me want to try the older, original camera, so I can experience its VF.

Of course I can't afford any new camera at the moment, so these issues are moot anyway, grumble grumble.

Mike

*Disclosure: I hate "open plan" houses with a smoldering passion—I need walls to put bookcases against and to hang pictures on, so in my opinion the more interior walls the better. I disclose this so you can cheerfully ignore my bias if you're of the opposite opinion.

Book o' the Week

  Friedlander First Fifty. A very fun little book that gives a tour of the first fifty of Lee Friedlander's books—extra copies of which are apparently stashed all over every floor of his house. By his grandson, who is trying to sell full, signed sets on eBay. This is very enjoyable, but also might be the most unique book about photobooks ever. Who else has published fifty photobooks?

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

David Dyer-Bennet: "Since my first SLR in 1969, I've been in conflict with SLR viewfinders. On the one hand, they let you use any lens that mounts (not just the ones the viewfinder has a frame line for), and accessories like extension tubes for macro work. And, on the other hand, they were dim (I shoot in the dark a lot, did from the very beginning) and not very smooth, and the mechanisms that made them possible were noisy and jarred the camera at the worst possible time.

"The ground glass on a view camera is even worse—it's dark, both because the light is being spread over a larger area than in an SLR viewfinder, and because the taking lens is generally vastly slower than on an SLR. Also inverted, which complicates a lot of things. At least it doesn't jar the camera.

"For me, EVF, either eye-level or bigger flat screens, are a big step forward. (On the very rare occasions I shoot outdoors, yeah, the sun at my back can overwhelm a flat screen; but that's very rare, and I have workarounds.)

"They show me the actual image as captured by the sensors, rather than the raw light being directed to the sensor; this is a huge advantage, compared to everything I used last century. (The path from the light to the final image is complicated in both cases, but it's more direct, based on less drastic translations, than it was with film and the darkroom.)

"They also provide great features like zooming in for precise manual focusing, without getting dimmer, which makes focusing possible in situations where it pretty much wasn't before."

Steven Palmer: "I hate EVFs. I just hate them. Yes, they have their advantages but what I lose is far greater to me than what I gain. The closer a viewfinder presents the world as I see it the more I like it and the more I personally find it improves my photographs, i.e. my subject and compositional choices. I am a black-and-white film photographer but recently purchased a Fuji X-E4 to take a few colour shots of my wife. My standard for viewfinders is my Nikon F3 and FM3a and I found I disliked the EVF in the X-E4 so much that I was kicking myself for the buying the rotten thing in the first place. And that camera has a supposedly good EVF—OLED display, 2.36M dots. I know my words are quiet strong but I think the EVF in that camera is garbage. I would rather view the world through the dinky little viewfinder of my Contax G1 than any EVF. Just as you suggested, Mike, manufacturers install EVFs because they are easier and cheaper for them. Not because they are better for photographers."

John Robison: "Amen to built-in eyepiece diopter correction. Never understood why more (or any) 35mm SLR’s of the 60-70’s didn’t have them. Although not published anywhere that I could ever find it seems the typical SLR viewfinder came from the factory set to –1 (1 meter) and I think the assumption was that most people can focus on an image at 1 meter. A bad assumption, they can’t. When working at Altman’s I sold four times as many auxiliary diopters than the other salesmen. When I sold a SLR to customer who wore glasses I’d always ask to look at his spectacles. Before they left the store made doggone sure they could focus accurately. Okay, rant off. But that was my particular hot button issue."

Mike replies: I believe the first built-in diopter correction was on the Olympus OM-4, developed by Maitani's team. I'm not a maven of tech history, though, so take that with a chunk of salt.

Kodachromeguy: "I despise open concept houses also for several reasons: 1.) They are trendy with the giggly house-buyer set who claim they will entertain a lot. 2.) There is no place to temporarily conceal dirty dishes and pots after a meal/party. 3.) You hear the noise of dishwasher and laundry machines. 4.) Cooking film and grease will get all over the 'open concept' regardless of how much the seller will claim that the vent hood will eliminate fumes. 5.) So many 'open concept' houses look like cheap sh*t McMansions built to minimize price. What else was cheap? 6.) Where are convenient electric outlets?"

Edward Taylor: "Given the choice of several large spacious rooms vs. just one ridiculously humongous room, I would choose the former. But given the choice of several small, cramped, claustrophobic rooms vs. a large comfortable room, I'd choose the latter any day. I have never seen the need for a den and a living room, for example. Some people have nice living rooms that no one is allowed in so as to keep them nice, and dining rooms that are used once or twice a week at most. Seems like a waste. I think the space one has should be comfortable, and used. In short, I generally like the open design and I would have a real problem living in most houses designed in the '70s, '80s, or early '90s—unless they were huge."

Aaron: "Sometimes I get all feely-feely about it and think 'I don't want the camera to hide the real world from me. I want to see the real world through the camera. So, give me an OVF.' Sometimes I get all techy-techy about it and think, 'But, the picture I make isn't going to look like the real world anyway [and it didn't in the days of film either!], so I want to see the picture through the camera. Give me an EVF.' Then, the irresponsible side of me says, 'I can have it both ways!' and so I buy too many cameras."

Geoff Wittig: "I have tried really, really hard to like electronic viewfinders. But to me they're still a dreadful kludge. I do recognize they provide some advantages, from much easier viewing in dim light to simulating exposure compensation. But they just lie to me constantly. The brightness changes dramatically depending on where you point it. Likewise the global color balance and contrast. The camera's electronic brain inserts a continuously varying filter between the subject and my eye, which may or may not be reflected in the captured file. So despite the allure of new spiffy full frame mirrorless cameras, I'll keep soldiering on with my pair of crotchety Canon EOS 5 DSLRs. They don't lie to me. I always know exactly what I'm going to get when I trip the shutter.

"I recently had to sight-in a .22 rifle I've owned for years after I missed an easy shot, which is unheard of for me. My first attempts were utter failures, with terribly random groupings that made it impossible to adjust the sight. After multiple attempts I finally discovered the rear bracket for the sight had loosened, introducing random variation that made accurate aim impossible. That's precisely what electronic viewfinders do to me."

Stephane: "After seven years with Fuji (X-T1, X-T2, X-H1) and thus EVF, I am back to a Nikon F3 and a D850. Fuji cameras are very, very good, no question, but it is indeed a delight to go back to a natural optical viewfinder. No one will be surprised to read the F3's viewfinder is wonderful. The big surprise for me is the D850. It is a great optical viewfinder that works very well for manual focus. It is actually easier to focus the AI-S lenses on the D850 than on the F3. However, it is not only the viewfinder. There are also the AI-S lenses. The focusing and aperture rings for me are also important aspects of the overall camera experience, or camera feeling. And surprise, manual focusing with the D850 works like a treat, and I am not talking about the digital focusing aid. The ground glass is wonderful for manual focusing. Of course, the F3 is a joy too. The combination of the D850 viewfinder and an AI-S lens is something Fuji does not approach. On the Fujis, the electronic viewfinder is not quite real time, the focusing rings on the lenses all have a dead feeling, yet without consistency between the lenses.

"In a word, manual focusing on a Fuji is a chore and a pleasure on the Nikons. I find the AF-S Nikkors to be much better at manual focusing than the Fuji lenses too. So I am the odd one who went from mirrorless to DSLR, entirely for subjective reasons."

Michael Wayne Plant: "Hi Mike, liking the new format of three posts a week.

"I have decided that I like optical viewfinders, I spent years being a Sony Global Imaging Ambassador and really liked the instant feedback of live histograms, but then found myself lusting after a Leica rangefinder and before I knew it I became the owner of not just one Leica, but a range of them from the M9 onwards. I eventually sold all my Sony gear to buy a selected limited set of Nikon lens and got the wonderful D850, as its viewfinder is just so good! Now I am happy except that the Nikon D850 might be the last DSLR from Nikon before they try to force us to move to mirrorless, which I do not want to do. So ultimately, I might end up with a Pentax DSLR if they ever release a camera that has above the Nikon D850 performance levels, as they keep making noises about keeping the DSLR and not moving to Mirrorless. If Pentax do that, they might pick up all the DSLR fans who want to keep using DSLRs and that might be okay with me as Pentax currently makes lens that I would be happy to own."

Matthew Buynoski: "I'm sticking with DSLRs because they have optical viewfinders and thus show you the scene as it really is, not what some electronic algorithm and circuitry says it is. I find especially that an OVF does not (to me) look blurry when panning, while an EVF does; this is important as I do a lot of birds-in-flight photography. Essentially an OVF has an infinitely fast (well, OK, yes it is speed-of-light limited :-)  'refresh rate,' something no EVF can match."

Polarizing Filters on Digital

Does anyone have experience with using ordinary polarizing filters on a digital camera? I really have very little experience with them, even on film. I'd like to hear from you if you use them, or if you've experimented and decided against.

All I know is that I have a pair of good prescription sunglasses that have polarized lenses that I use as driving glasses, and I really like them. They don't appear to be "colored" at all—they're more or less just neutral-density filters. But the way they enrich colors, cut haze, and, especially, render clouds, is quite addicting. I don't always remember to put them on when I'm driving, but on good days—meaning, bright, clear days—I'll usually go for them because they enhance my enjoyment of looking at the landscapes passing by. I'm wondering if or how much a similar effect might translate to digital sensors.

Item second in regard to filters
TOP reader Sroyon Mukherjee (he comments using his first name) has written a very thorough article called "Colour Theory for Black and White Photography Part 1: Digital and Analogue Filters" over on Hamish Gill's 35mmc. It's a deep dive (even if you don't continue into Part 2), but even if you don't read every word, many of the illustrations are excellent and thought-provoking, and well presented. Well worth enjoying. The article is more like a book chapter than a blog post but it's worth scanning through it (my smaller computer balked at it, archly informing me that "This webpage was reloaded because it was using significant memory") and you might well like to return to it for a thorough perusal.

Sample illustration from Sroyon's article

One thought it inspired in me was that black and white really requires a point of view as regards tonality. Maybe we can get by in color just "going with our guts" and picking whatever seems nice with any particular picture, but the tonal differences with B&W are so marked and so different in their effects that we really need to make some fundamental decisions about tastes and goals. It used to be easier; we'd just settle on films, developers, papers (FDP) and filters we liked, and let the tonality play out as it naturally did; but digital is so much more plastic that radically different effects on the same file are possible and we need to have a firmer sense of what we're after in order not to get lost. For instance, the blue-filter devil-child in the above illustration. I would never use a blue filter with humans; then again, I never have owned a blue filter. The only thing they're good for is as a demonstration of what not to do.

I always recommended keeping a small pile of prints and magazine clippings with tonality you liked near at hand in the darkroom, to use to calibrate your tonal palette in your mind before or during working. Still good advice. Maybe better advice now than it used to be, even. Tonality is tougher than color; it has a wider range, and a broader range of expressive effects are potentially admissible and acceptable.

Anyway: recommended. Nice job. And Sroyon must be young, because that was a lot of work.

Mike

Product o' the Week:

The Apple Watch Series 6. This is a portal to Amazon from TOP.

The following image is also a link. You support TOP by buying through these portals.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Martin Doonan: "I used to use polarizing filters extensively (when I was shooting a lot of landscapes in bright light) on digital. They work the same as with film because the incident light is 'corrected.' There are creative ways to use them, too, for which I think digital has an advantage (chimping, live view, etc). For example: a polarising filter can be used to eliminate reflections from the surface of water to 'look under the water' so to speak. But the effect can be tuned as a rotating polarizer enables this to be tuned so you can see partially below the water, maintain some surface effect. Quite easy to get right with digital, much trickier with film."

Jim Metzger: "I will not be the first to say this…you need a circular polarizer, not a linear polarizer for digital sensors. I use Nikon or B&W and have observed no color cast, just intensification of color. I have used them on artwork reproduction and the artists are very happy with the results. Polarized sunglasses will darken the LCD screen on the camera and sunglasses in general will distort the colors in a scene, and I do not use those. I also go so far as to get my prescription glasses without UV filter coatings."

David Rayburn Haynes: "I use polarizing filters on my digital cameras and find the results to be the same as when I used them on film cameras—reduced glare, accentuated colors, increased contrast, and so forth. I rarely use color filters with digital cameras. I find that the Photoshop 'black and white' filter provides much more control."

Brian Geyer: "I find polarizing filters vital, and use polarizers frequently in pursuit of the wildlife and nature subjects that I seek. The benefits are identical, regardless of whether shooting ’chromes or digital images. I'm a Nikon user, and generally find it best to avoid matrix metering when using a polarizer. I auto-bracket the exposure in 1/3rd stops after first setting a fixed +0.3 stop of compensation, using center-weighted manual metering. I've standardized on using B+W's premium series of 'KSM' MRC circular polarizers. Other brands and grades may be equally effective, but do be sure that you use a circular (not linear) polarizer. Polarizers provide the only practical way that you can easily cut through glare and thereby enhance color saturation. I find a polarizer essential in lots of daylight outdoor settings, including city-scape scenery."

Bryan was the founder of Really Right Stuff (RRS). —Ed.

Sroyon: "Thank you Mike for linking to my article; it's an honour to be featured on TOP! I should really thank Hamish too, for giving me the freedom to go down whatever rabbit-hole I like and write about it—at great length! And yes, I'm one of those annoying millennials who enthuse over film photography and darkroom work, without knowing what a drag it was (or some of it was) back when film was the only option and not a fun alternative and luxury :-) .

"Re polarising filters, I have a circular polariser for my 'landscape lens,' a Sigma 10–20mm ƒ/3.5 for Nikon APS-C-sensor DSLRs (I bought the lens off eBay and the filter came with it). But it's new to me and I haven't really tested it yet. I read a book called Light: Science and Magic which has a good discussion of polarising filters, culminating in a remarkable example (at least it seemed remarkable to me): page 47 of this (legal) PDF. I'm not sure if it was recommended on TOP or somewhere else, but I liked the book in general, and learned a lot from it."

Rob de Loe: "Circular polarizers are needed with cameras that have mirrors. Linear polarizers work with mirrorless. I use polarizers extensively because I often work near water. They let me decide very precisely whether or not I want reflections, and how much. Usually you need some reflection to show it's water, but I don't like so much reflection that you can't see bottom in shallow water bodies. Unfortunately my lenses have front filter threads ranging from 39mm to 82mm, so I have to carry five filters.

"Black and white is my thing, so I'm going to enjoy reading Sroyon's chapter. On film, I was much more accepting of whatever decisions the film manufacturer made about how to represent colour with luminosity. I did carry a set of colour filters, but found them a bother and never got much beyond Deep Yellow and Orange. Digital changed all that. Digital laid siege to Castle Tone and sacked it. Tones are what I say they are now. This is why I have no interest beyond technical curiosity in monochrome sensors. I make the call on how colours are represented, and I now have so many different ways to do it in Lightroom (none of which include someone else's presets). Despite talk of sacking, I have my own guardrails. I use the 'Toupee Rule': if what I've done with tones sticks out (or worse, like bad HDR, draws the eye to itself for its wrongness) then I've gone too far. It's not about tones being 'natural' or 'faithful' (compared to what, and to what?). Instead, for me it's about tones being pleasing and balanced. My choices should make sense relative to what's in the scene."

The Missing Featured Comments for the 'Menu Problem' Post

Ed. note: These are so late I figured I'd give them their own post. Sorry for the delay! The links and suggestions kept sending me down rabbit holes.

Here's the original post: How To REALLY Fix the Menu Problem, from this past Thursday.

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "I think that sounds great. It would also really familiarize the new owner with all of the capabilities of the camera. Most people, myself included, usually only scratch the surface of some of the tech innovations within the camera."

Bruce Bordner: "I've done things like this, and it starts out simple. The camera companies could easily do a setting-setting app or interactive website. However, I think what you really want/need is Thom Hogan in an app, with a few others to answer 'why would I need that?' Demos of effects would be great...now we're talking some real money with AI and gotta have blockchain, bro! It's still worth a start, but I think it has to start with the camera designers. They have to compete and cooperate with cell phones anyway. Why not add some image processing in your phone.... Now you got me going dang it!"

Malcolm Myers: "I've basically had similar thoughts for years: set your camera up on your computer. Want a faux-Leica? Turn everything off and shoot! Want your own menus? Great, set them up! Want different profiles for different situations? No problem! Two bodies? Make them the same! I'm amazed no-one's done it."

Speed: "There is a very large camera company which also manufactures printers. These printers are set up and controlled by users' personal computers. My experiences with printer setup has been...not good. The last thing I want in this world is having this or any other camera company writing more software to 'help' set up my camera or anything else. Their user manuals are bad enough. Eventually some camera manufacturer will do it. It will be painful and costly. In time it will become the norm but I'll wait for version three.

"As a software developer friend (I don't hold it against him) often reminds me, 'Software is hard.'"

Keith: "This is actually a well thought out concept, and could be carried over to many other items as well. How many off us still struggle with programming the VCR to record 'Sanford and Son'? Yes I'm being a bit sarcastic there, but I recall VCR's as being one of the first consumer items that was widely regarded as a bit of a user interface vs. user manual nightmare. Working in the field of industrial automation, I see this with many of the newer electronic components. From photo-eye sensors that have multiple pages of programming options, to basic control modules that require a full Ethernet setup for that device plus anything connected to it. I recently installed a small temperature controller (about the size of a four-pack of 120 roll film) that had nearly a 400-page manual. Companies that recognize this and implement a program to bridge the gap between their products and end users' understandings will have an edge on their competitors."

Robert: "A great idea Mike. Sign me up. There are examples of this in other technologies. For example, Logitech has a 'lead you through it' app for setting up their all-in-one remotes. You then download the setup to the device. It's not the world's best software, but it's better than the alternative."

Peter Wright: "This is such an obvious idea that I keep wondering why it has not been done. It would be I believe a major selling feature for a large part of the buying public. It could even have kept me using the Olympus EM-1 Mark II."

Kirk Tuck: "Or you could just buy into a system with a very well-designed menu system. The Leica SL2 is a joy to configure. It reinforces the idea that Olympus and Sony menus are first translated from Martian and then to Plutonian and only, finally to a human language. The one flaw with your idea is the need to have a computer just to be able to initially access your camera. We should be going the other direction and try to figure out more and more how not to go to the computer first. Leica; three buttons and a joy stick. That's it. Check it out if you are looking for simplicity in an interface. And a very logical menu."

JH: "I suggested this to several camera company reps in 2003 when I bought a Nikon D100 and again after buying an Olympus Micro 4/3 camera in 2010. The Oly U.S. rep I corresponded with told me they never passed suggestions along to the factory because they had been told that they did not want to get sued by somebody who claimed their idea was stolen. Actually I suspected the real reason was the NIH syndrome—not invented here."

Mike replies: Years ago I made some detailed suggestions to a hi-fi manufacturer. The VP (there were only a few principals at the company) entered into an involved discussion with me as to why they would never take my suggestions, with several rounds of long back-and-forth emails as I tried to persuade him that my ideas were good ones. He reported back to me about the reactions of others in the company, including engineers.

A year later, the company implemented all of my suggestions exactly as I had outlined them. When I contacted my 'friend' the VP to express my pleasure, to my astonishment he insisted he had never heard of me before, that our correspondence had never taken place, and that their actions were independent, were developed completely in-house, and could not possibly have had anything to do with me. I felt like I was being gaslighted! When I mentioned this odd development to friends in business, it was explained to me that they were probably afraid I would want to be paid if they acknowledged me. I had never asked for pay and I never had any expectation of payment, but it must be a problem for companies.

Anyway I don't do that any more.

David Dyer-Bennet: "I would never consider buying a camera that depended on an external website for configuration! The site might not last as long as the camera. Maybe, as a local app, taking advantage of the greater power and space on a computer compared to the camera; that could work. Also doesn't freeze out people working far away from Internet access."

Adam Lanigan: "I think there would also be a ton of value in your approach to the camera company as well, as this approach would really allow them to understand the features their customers actually use, how they set up their cameras, level of experience, how often they change that setup later on, etc., etc."

John Krumm: "Still sounds complicated! I would like my menus to look like Hasselblad's do now."

Alex Mercado: "'We are sorry, but the page you are looking for cannot be found. Click here to browse our latest selection of cameras.' I can't help but think one would vehemently regret such a solution, the very moment your camera's menus-on-a-website returns a 404 error."

Ed Hawco: "Mike, you might recall that I suggested essentially this on this very blog in a comment in October 2011. Specifically: 'Self-configurable menus. Not by jerking around with the buttons on the camera back, but by uploading a configuration file to your computer where a nice user-friendly GUI lets you drag & drop menu items around until you have menus that make sense to you. You can bury (or even remove) all the silly functions you don't care about and arrange the frequently used ones at the top where you can find them easily. Re-download to your camera and bingo, customized menus.'"

Mike replies: I wouldn't be surprised if that's where I got the idea! Could have happened. After moderating ~250,000 comments, I've learned a huge amount from others here. And by the way, many of your comments over the years have been great ones.

Scott Abbey: "This sort of user interface has been in use for many years in other fields. For instance, I use a multi-effects pedal board which allows me to have different guitar effects—reverb, equalization, compression, and many others. While the one I now use (a Line 6 Helix) has a pretty robust on-device UI, it also has a PC app which makes it even easier to configure, and it also lets you store sets of configurations which you can load as needed—your settings for a wedding gig, and another set for that thrash metal band you also play in. Why camera manufacturers have never done this is beyond me. It ain’t rocket science."

Mike replies: Speaking of which, the other day a reader called ghmcs recommended Gary Friedman's series of guides to Sony cameras—for instance this one about the A6100 and A6600 (search "Friedman Archives" on Amazon for others). Anyway, Gary Friedman literally used to be a rocket scientist!  :-)

Sroyon: "What a great idea. Could go even further (though I don't know if it's feasible in terms of computing power) and six months later, let you run an analysis of the metadata in your Lightroom gallery or whatever other archive, coming up with suggestions like 'You haven't used X in six months, do you still wish to keep it in your menu options?' or 'You appear to use Y frequently, do you want to assign it to a custom button?'"

Ed. note: The following two comments came in one right after the other, just as you see here, no foolin':

Joseph Reid: "Fantastic idea! You could store the settings on a card or just tether the camera for the setup routine. I wonder what Thom Hogan would say about how likely it is that camera makers would do this."

Thom Hogan: "I've been advocating something different for years (decades?). That something different is 'named settings files' that can be saved/loaded. You could supplement that with a computer/tablet/phone application that creates/manages such files, but it's not necessary. Why isn't it necessary? Because there's a huge ecosystem out there that would develop and distribute such files. I'm finishing up a book (!) on setting up a Sony A1. I could easily provide some named settings files if only Sony allowed it.  ;~)  "

Peter: "This is the best post / idea that you have had in the many years that I have been reading your blog. Well Done."

Harry B Houchins: "Brilliant idea, but sadly impractical...."

Thanks to you if you left any comment, 'Featured' or not! (I'm going to dispense with the end matter on this post, as it's not really a separate post. I'm sure there will be comments on this; should I then do Featured Comments on these Featured Comments? Talk about rabbit holes....)

—Mike the Ed.

How To REALLY Fix the Menu Problem

I really want someone to switch camera setup to interactive screens online which you then transfer to the camera. That way everything could be explained adequately and systematically. Cameras are just too complicated now for paper manuals and mazes of menus. But that's a different post for a different day.

—Me, yesterday

Okay, here's my idea. I can't believe I haven't written about this before, because it's been in my head for years. But apparently I haven't.

The best way to fix the menu problem would be with an interactive setup/tutorial website that transfers your chosen settings to your camera.

You buy a new camera. The first thing you do when you get it is to plug it in to your computer and go to the dedicated setup website.

The website is takes you through a setup tutorial, in stages. First it ascertains your basic level—new to photography, experienced, or expert. That's to prevent you from having to wade through explanations of plane-of-focus and what tracking is and what ISO means, if you don't need that. If the level you choose is too confusing to you, just revert to the next one down.

Then it runs you through a sensible explanation of the various features available and what they mean and what they allow you to do—most maybe a paragraph long but expandable if you need more information about it—and asks you if you want that feature available. As you go through page after page of the website, it asks you how you want the camera configured, and you make your selections.

You would assign functions to buttons at that time, set up the custom modes the control (PASM) dial, pick the focus mode setups you want to have available to you, and so forth.

Ideally it would let you configure the menus themselves by adding or deleting items, such that the menus contained the things you might need to change on the fly but not everything else. For example, if you always process your JPEGs in post you simply wouldn't need any of the JPEG processing options.

Then you load this "customized firmware" into your camera and a.) you've got every capability you need; b.) it's where you want it, because you put it there; and b.) you know what all of your menu items mean because you chose them and you've read through the explanations of every menu item that exists on your camera.

Note that the interactive website itself would be effectively customizable too, because you'd be asked if you want things as you go along. For me, for instance: do you want to set up flash? Nope. GPS? No thanks. Tethering options, radio control, video? No thank you, no thank you. Makes the interactive website simpler and more streamlined, you see? If you're really a geek (I don't use that term as a perjorative) then you can happily dig as deep as you want and include all sorts of esoterica in your selections.

This just seems logical to me. In my experience, there are virtually no photographers who use, or want, every capability of their digital cameras. Virtually everybody just wants a subset of "everything," whether it's a small subset or a large one. And there are many things that, even if we have them available, we don't need to have access to them in the field, i.e., when we're out photographing—we could come back to the computer and re-configure the camera prior to a specialized shoot or job, for example.

The fewer button-pushes you have to make in the field, the better. Sony realized this when it set up some of its AF options to automatically revert to certain behaviors without having to select them in the menus. (See: Eye-AF.)

But never say never
I'm sure there are lots of reasons why this will "never" happen, but it's not my job to only talk about things that are immediately feasible based on current customs and norms. I look at things from the perspective of the photography enthusiast. That's whose interests I care about.

Mike

Book of Interest this week:

The Education of a Photographer, Edited by Charles H. Traub, Steven Heller, and Adam B. Bell, Allworth Press, 2006, 256 pages. A small but rich gold mine of short essays and interviews by and about photographers. Also available from The Book Depository with free shipping worldwide.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Canon v. Canon

The other day in the "Competition from Used" post I said, "It's almost like we're in the exact opposite situation of the one we were in at the turn of the millennium." Which got me to thinking.

Back then, Canon had just introduced the D30 (not 30D, but D30) a "reasonably priced" digital SLR that had a three megapixel sensor. It was bigger news in the photography world then than anything at all is now. Photo writers across the globe breathlessly ventured the holy-grail claim—that the D30 it was almost as good as, or as good as, or a little bit better than, the results you could get with 35mm film! This was hotly and happily debated far and wide. I was Editor-in-Chief of Photo Techniques magazine at the time, and at the magazine we offered a selection of "Collector Prints" taken with the new D30 by a guy from Canada I had met a few years earlier by the name of Michael Reichmann. Michael's prints were meant to show off the new Canon and make the case for digital as something that might actually be viable for enthusiast non-pro photographers, an idea to which there was still a lot of resistance at the time.

Now cut to today and compare that situation to this: the Canon EOS M6 Mark II is in its second iteration already and it's hardly even made a blip on my personal radar screen...even though I prefer small cameras and tend to pay attention to them. Lens options are limited, but paired with its standout 32mm ƒ/1.4 normal prime lens, its capability compared to Y2K norms is just insanely good. It's a small carry-around camera no bigger, really, than an original Barnack Leica. (Strange that Leica would let another company call any camera M6, but maybe some kind of statute of limitations has run out.) The little lens, which is about two and a quarter inches long (56.5mm) and weighs just slightly more than eight and a quarter ounces (235g), is nevertheless a no-apologies fast normal with superlative performance—and very nice bokeh I might add. The little camera has a spectacular 32-megapixel sensor (more than ten times as many pixels as the D30, n.b.) and is reputed to be very fast. Any way you look at it, the little M6 Mark II runs rings around the hot news from October 2000.

Despite all this over-the-top goodness, though, the M6 II barely moves the needle in today's world as far as consumer excitement as concerned, at least that I can tell. Certainly nothing like the frenzy of interest in the D30 in 2000.

The lens and camera together cost $1,328, which might be somewhat of an impediment to interest, but then, it's neither a compromised camera nor meant to be a budget alternative. And consider that, adjusted for inflation, that $1,328 would have been only $866 in 2000, the year the Canon D30 came out at $3,000 and DPReview called it an "unbeatable" value for money. Put the other way around, the D30 would cost $4,600 today. That was cheap compared to the digital SLRs that newsrooms were paying $25,000 for only a few years earlier. And by the way, DPReview calls the M6 Mark II "a good bit cheaper" than the Sony it competes against (they must mean the A6600). Of course, you might also want the M6's removable $199 EVF-DC2 viewfinder, but that's up to you.

The M6's only problem? Odd, but it might be a little too old fashioned. Not enough bigger/better than its biggest existential threat and wannabe competitor, the smartphone.

Mike

Book of Interest this week:

How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to the Digital Age, by Andy Grundberg, Yale University Press, 296 pages. A longtime critic and observer attempts a synthesis. Good reading. Also available from The Book Depository with free shipping worldwide.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ken Bennett: "Back in the fall of 2000, the university where I work hosted a presidential debate. I was going to cover it shooting all film, of course, but Canon Professional Services offered to loan me the as-yet unreleased D30 digital camera. So I got one and shot some test images, figuring they would be okay for maybe a website, and I was amazed at the overall quality of those photos. I ended up shooting most of the events surrounding the debate and some of the debate itself with that D30. Had a double-truck image in the alumni magazine from one frame, and it looked great. Nothing like today, of course, but easily comparable to or better than the Fujicolor 800 color neg we were shooting at the time.

"Then I had to send it back, which turned out to be a huge blessing. I had shot 1,500 frames and had no idea how to handle them; editing, viewing, captions—none of it. I was used to shooting film and scanning individual images for print reproduction (or making actual prints in a darkroom). So I spent the next couple of months figuring out how to manage all the digital files. Then we got our first D30 that winter, the second one a few months later, and a pair of the original 1D bodies the following year. (Four megapixels! Eight frames per second! Amazing autofocus! Seriously, they were da bomb, and the later 1D Mark II was my favorite Canon ever. Shot a lot of good photos with those.)

"Kudos to Canon for the D30. It changed my life and my career in so many amazing ways. I could go on at length.  :-)  "

Tom Burke: "I use Canon cameras and have for many years, so the M line ought to interest me. However, it doesn't—there aren't enough good lenses (and none from third party suppliers that I know of) and a lot of the cameras are missing viewfinders—I need a VF.

"I was however attracted to that sensor, so I bought the M6's cousin, the 90D, which has the same sensor in an APS-C DSLR body. Yes it's bigger and heavier than the M6 but it's lighter than the full frame camera I had previously. I'm delighted with it, and given the price of Canon's R series, I suspect I've bought my Final Camera. The 90D and my iPhone 12 Pro will do me for the foreseeable future.

"I never had a Canon D30, but I did have its successor, the D60, which I bought used. That was my first DSLR and was the game-changer for me—previously I'd had EOS 35mm SLRs."

R. Edelman: "The Canon D30 made me think of Bill Biggart, the photographer who was killed at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He had some film cameras and a D30. The only images that survived were from the D30. Even though the lens was ripped from the camera, the compact flash card survived. That's one tough camera."

Ed. note: Bill Biggart's website is still up, and contains a picture of his ruined D30 as well as a small selection of his recovered 9/11 images. 

Three Pictures Under Discussion

So let's look at a few actual pictures. These all come from the same sharing site and several are made with the same lens, but there's no need to read anything into that.

A digression first
Before I start, though, I just wanted to comment on one thing in passing: in looking for a deliberately soft lens that doesn't go for the analytical/clinical/forensic look, I happened across one of those very cheap third-party manual-focus lenses (I sometimes jokingly call them "fourth-party" lenses—you know, sorta like "off-off-Broadway"—but nobody gets the joke). It only costs around a hundred bucks, and it looks like it might be quite nice for intentionally less-than-sharp portraits.

So then what does the first review say? "This lens is total crap! It's soft at every aperture!"

...Which seems unfair. He's criticizing the fact that the $100 lens he bought is not the same as a $500 lens. Whose fault is that though? His, if you ask me. If you insist on a lens that renders like a $477 Nikkor, then save your money for a bleepin' $477 Nikkor, ya broke-ass, no-cash-having jamoke. Leave the soft $99 lenses to those who are looking for soft lenses.

There, now I feel better.

Picture 1
Okay, now on to the pictures. When you open this first picture, just look at it sitting a normal distance from your screen, without being critical. Pretty standard, right? And looks okay. At a glance, you know what's going on: sharp, in-focus blooms in front, fading into progressively more blur in the distance. So now take a look.

But zoom in by clicking to enlarge it two times, and we find to our astonishment that virtually nothing in the picture is sharp, save a few leaves on the left-hand side of the frame. None of the blooms are sharp, not even the one at the lower right which seemed like the prime candidate at first glance.

But remember 3R prints, the once-ubiquitous standard so-called "drugstore prints" that were 3.5x5 inches in size? This would look fine at that size. Those 3R prints were optimized to mask slop and imprecision of many kinds. It was a system designed to routinely make silk purses out of sow's ears.

Picture 2
Or take this one. Now, in my humble opinion at least, this portrait (which gets the important things right, the expressions and what it implies of the relationships—and it's a nice enough composition, too) has a few more pressing technical problems, specifically a tonal scale that's way too short and what looks to me like a virtual green filter (you can see it in the gums, which should be a much lighter tone that doesn't draw attention, and that characteristic mottling of the skin tones. Light skin often has slight reddish mottling which is nearly invisible, or rather inoffensive, to our eyes, but it's highlighted in an unpleasant way when you make the reddishness darker with a green filter). But again, if you look at it uncritically at the original screen size, it looks fine. But, enlarged, the boy (middle figure) is clearly less sharp than the other two and the face on the left is less sharp than the face on the right.

When I was a custom printmaker (I always said "custom printer" but that was before a "printer" was a black plastic box made by Epson), I would often call clients to inform them that a certain negative would only go to a certain size. My clients were mostly photographers, and they would almost always assume that I was talking about technical parameters. They might reply something like "I've enlarged Tri-X negs from the Hassie to 16x20 before and they looked fine." Sometimes I was indeed talking about technical parameters, such as the size at which a slight touch of camera shake became too obvious. But I was usually using my judgement about the size at which that specific image would most effective. For example, if I were printing this picture, I might suggest a smaller size as the max, to avoid drawing attention to the disparity of sharpness between the three faces. Printing it overlarge would just draw the viewer's attention to the differences in sharpness, and those differences are absolutely immaterial to the picture.

I might even cheat a bit and actually soften the sharpness of the face on the right. Have to be careful with that, though, because that would never be something you want to call attention to.

Picture 3
It's actually not easy for non-specialists to detect very small amounts of blur, whether it's out-of-D-o-F blur or camera shake. I'm more sensitive to it than the average bear*, but I can't claim to be infallible. Sometimes you almost intuit its presence depending on how large you're seeing the image. On this third and final picture, there are three women dressed in blue T-shirts front and center. Look at the middle woman first when you open the link.

She looks fine, right? Comma, at that size. But, again, after you enlarge this and look critically, you can see more easily that she's actually not at the plane of best focus. The woman on the left, with the tiara and the portrait of the photographer in her purple sunglasses, is the most sharp. The smiling woman on the right is now clearly out of the depth of field, even though she's in the D-o-F at the smaller size.

I would probably have simply placed the focus on the middle of the three women and stopped down one more stop. That can sometimes be a bit risky, of course, and I'm betting you know why: because if you misjudge and get the woman closest to the lens—the woman with the tiara—a little too soft, you draw too much attention to that. (As a general rule, subjects closest to camera position need to be sharp, and it can be distracting if they aren't.) Hence the extra stop of increased D-o-F, as a safety margin...assuming I'd have the presence of mind to adjust in the heat of the moment, which I probably wouldn't. But those are the things that experience teaches you to judge.

(Oh, and that "portrait" of the photographer in the sunglasses? I'm betting it's the other photographer. It seems to me that the three ladies are looking at someone taking their picture, and it's not the guy who took this picture. Because of the angle of their heads, I'm betting we're seeing the other photographer in the sunglasses, the one who they're looking at. Just my interpretation.)

How to evaluate your own pictures
So how can you start to get a sense for the optimum sizes of your own pictures? There's actually a pretty easy way, although it takes a fair amount of experience. Assuming your eyesight works for the distances involved and your room is big enough, just fill your editing monitor with the image, and stand up and back away from the monitor! As you move farther and farther away, notice how the image subtly changes and how the level of visible detail gradually diminishes. If you study what you see and learn to "feel into" the image and how it works, you'll start to get a sense of how much each image can take of enlargement, and the way different degrees of revealed detail "work" for that particular picture.

As mentioned above, though, I'd encourage you not to look at mere technical parameters, but rather to look at how the specific image is functioning in terms of content and meaning. All of what we've been discussing is a judgement call, a balancing act, based on what in the picture you want to call attention to, and what would be a distraction that would detract from the picture if it is spotlighted too much. This is influenced by technical parameters but is not a technical issue at root. It depends on each specific picture, and how you want that picture to work.

Mike
(Thanks to Junpei, Jim, and Glen, the photographers of these three pictures)

Ed. note: The second link was missing when I posted this. Gah. Sincere apologies for the inconvenience.

*That's actually a Yogi Bear reference, and if you even recognize that name you're showing your age as badly as I am.  :-)  Five life points if you know who the cartoon bear was named for.

ADDENDUM: Here's some truly trivial trivia for ya. Do you know why Yogi Bear had a collar?

The answer, says Wikipedia, is because it allowed animators to redraw only his head when he was seen speaking, and not have to redraw his entire body. This was a cost-cutting measure by Hanna-Barbera, the studio that produced the cartoon. It reduced the number of frames needed for a cartoon from ~14,000 to ~2,000.

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Featured Comments from:

Gavin Paterson: "It’s Yogi Berra, baseball player, but I do have an advantage, as I worked for the Australian subsidiary of Hanna Barbera in the '80s, when we still produced animated series for USA networks, such as the Flintstones, Scooby Doo, Yogi Bear, and the Jetsons—now that’s showing my age!"

V.I. Voltz: "Yogi Bear was named after Yogi 'You can observe a lot by just watching' Berra. My kids watch YouTube; we had to make do with cartoons, which, at first, were in black-and-white."

Rob de Loe: "You can do as many of these posts as you like...."

hugh crawford: "I got the bear reference, but you missed the opportunity to call out your Boo Boo. Did you know there is a Daws Butler stream on Spotify?"

Mike replies: I never knew his name before! Thanks for that.

w98abee: "The Yogi Bear reference was like deja vu all over again."

Guy Couture: "Thanks, Mike, for this clear explanation. I think it's the first time I see it explained this way. No doubt you're a good teacher."

Mike replies: Gracias Guy.

Jim Kofron: "Photography is 90% mental, the other half is camera gear...."

Steve Renwick: "The bear's namesake might have said, 'Most pictures are not as sharp as they look.'"

Lawrence Huggins: "Why would you bother to devote any of your time to writing about three such unexceptional photos?"

Mike replies: Because they are...

Cary Talbot: "Nice examples to illustrate your point, Mike. Reminds me of something I read in a photography book by Scott Kelby. He was stressing the importance of zooming in on your image when 'chimping' it on the back LCD to make sure you nailed the focus because 'everything looks tack sharp on a 2.5-inch screen.'"

Mike replies: Yes. And, in like wise, just as with the old 3R prints the small size of a smartphone-as-display masks a multitude of sins.

John Robison: "Ah yes, 3R prints. I well remember an ad by Keystone Camera for a cheap 126 camera, comparing results from it to a Hasselblad. Of course, in a magazine reproduction at a 3R print size, there didn’t appear much difference.

"When working at a camera store, more than once customers would bring in a strip of 35mm negatives with the sample 3R print and ask for a 8x10 enlargement. Grabbing a 10x magnifier would often reveal that the neg was just not up to that degree of enlargement. It was surprisingly hard to explain this to customers. Some would insist that we send in their order anyway. Once a year, at inventory time we always had a box of enlargements refused by customers that were written off and discarded.

Mike replies: They never want to take your word for it, do they?

Blur Never Sleeps

Internet, that big fellow with the scattered brain, seems to think that bokeh or out-of-D-o-F-blur is a fixed property of a lens. It's not.

For starters, the higher the resolution of your system (lens + sensor + processing treatment + presentation method), the more will be out of focus and the less will be sharp.

Let's say these lines represent distances from camera position, which is off to the right somewhere. You are precisely focused on the "10" in this graph, meaning that's the plane of best focus. The numbers stand for higher or lower resolution.

Camera position —>

|                |             |         |      |    |    |       |         |            |            |    

5               6            7        8      9  10  9      8         7           6           5

If you're using equipment and methods capable of a resolution we're calling "10," then you can distinguish between 10 and 9, and the 9 from the 8 and so on. Only a small area around the 10 looks sharpest, and the 9 and 8 look progressively less so.

Now just imagine you're using a system that's only capable of a maximum of "8" as its highest resolution. Then, the area of highest resolution in your picture now appears to have expanded—it goes all the way from the one 8 to the other 8, because you can't distinguish any difference in blurriness vs. clarity within that distance range. Furthermore, the 7 distance is now closer to the zone of best focus, so there is more more depth of field. Sounds strange, but the lower the system resolution, the more depth of field there is in the picture.

So the higher your system resolution, the less will be in focus for any given aperture.

This would predict that photographers should be using smaller apertures now. But they're not. Encouraged by advancements in optics that enable high center sharpness at wide apertures, plus the current fashion of photographing everything with the lens wide open no matter how it looks, photographers tend to use wider apertures now rather than smaller ones.

One oddity this has led to is that photographers who are trying to make an isolated central subject "pop" off the background are going too far and not getting all of the central object in focus. So you'll see things like a single flower against a blurry green background, but the flower petals closest to and farthest from camera position will be slightly blurry, which reduces that sense of "popping" off the background. Oh well: having as much as possible out of the D-o-F has evolved into a status marker, showing that the photographer can afford big sensors and fast lenses. Photographers even say this in words sometimes, protesting that they're not going to shoot something at ƒ/2.8 when they paid for an ƒ/1.2 lens.

Unwelcome comments
Additionally, system resolution is highly dependent on another factor that has nothing to do with the lens, aperture, focus distance, and the sensor and its resolution: namely, degree of enlargement, or how many pixels in the file you're using to look at the image. I'm sure we've all had the experience of looking at an image small on our screens and thinking it's fine, only to enlarge it to 100% and realize that more areas than we first thought are unsharp.

This is not merely an illusion. Throw away enough pixels, and you're effectively reducing the system resolution; and as you do, more and more distances from camera position will be in the zone of best focus. In the terms of our illustration above, let's say you reduce the system resolution to what we're calling "7." What that means is that everything in the picture with a resolution of 7 or above will appear to be at peak sharpness. It's not just the peak sharpness that you can see; it's the peak sharpness that exists in the small rendering.

There was a time when most digital cameras did not have enough pixels—I can recall when "a million pixels" was considered an impressive landmark of progress. Now, though, almost all digital cameras have an excess number of pixels for common uses. So you can demonstrate the above claim for yourself. Simply find a large file that has lots of subtle differences in focus when viewed at 100% (closeups of flowering plants with multiple blossoms work nicely for this) and reduce its size progressively. As it gets smaller, differences in degree of blur you know are there will be masked, and more and more will look "sharp." 

At some sharing sites you can now enlarge posted pictures so much that it's easier to see when the photographer has missed focus or used too large an aperture. Sometimes it makes me wonder if some photographers now even recognize what slight misfocus looks like! I saw a picture the other day—a full length portrait of a woman on a beach—where the entire figure was subtly out of focus. Looking at the sand she stood on, it was clear that the plane of focus had been placed about two feet beyond the woman, and, then, such a large aperture had been used that the woman's face and body were not within the depth-of-field.  At smaller sizes, though (such that the entire vertical frame could be seen at once on my 27" monitor), the picture looked fine. Only when it was enlarged was the incorrect focus revealed.

Many is the time I'm tempted to leave a comment on some poor stranger's picture saying, "you do realize this entire picture is out of focus, right?" But "restraint of tongue and pen" is a helpful maxim to live by. He or she doesn't want to encounter that among all the other comments saying "fantastic capture" and "great pic."

It's tempting to make blanket condemnations that begin with "photographers these days...," but it's easy to be critical. Let's be real: photographers have struggled with focus and D-o-F in every era. It's one of the basic issues of what we call technique. Maybe it's easier to see these days, but it's always been an issue we have to contend with, and one of the choices we have to try to control.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Mani Sitaraman: "Re: 'Internet, that big fellow with the scattered brain, seems to think that bokeh or out-of-D-o-F-blur is a fixed property of a lens. It's not.' The internet has created a large circle of confusion about the topic. Information online about depth of field tends to be unfocused and so, details are imprecise."

John Hufnagel: "A digital discussion of the 'circles of confusion' concepts I learned back in the mid 1970s. I've tried to explain this on various internet forums and mostly failed; no one is as blind as one who refuses to see."

Mike replies: I actually refuse to discuss it most of the time. For some reason, out on the wilds of the internet, those who are armed with partial knowledge, part of which is untrue, act like attack dogs on this subject. The reason is probably that there are a number of coherent-seeming misconceptions out there which feel persuasive to people even though they are wrong.

Plus, once you hash through the subject and exhaust yourself bringing the crowd up to speed, that crowd dissipates and a new one forms, a new one as contentious and belligerent as the first crowd was at first. It's neverending toil, like the rock of Sisyphos.

Bill Tyler: "The idea of low resolution yielding large depth of field reaches its ultimate in a pinhole camera. Everything is equally out of focus. And it's an interesting look, for some subjects."

David W Scott (partial comment): "I have learned not to judge other’s photos by close inspection. That lesson came from attending an exhibition of large prints by Yousuf Karsh. Standing nose to nose with Ernest Hemingway (one of Karsh’s most celebrated portraits) you could immediately see that Hemingway’s eyes were out of focus—the actual plane of sharpness was somewhere forward in Hemingway’s beard and his fisherman’s sweater. It spoiled the picture for a moment...and then I backed away from the print and let myself enjoy it!"

Mike replies: I've actually used that very picture as a teaching tool on this subject. There are also several H.C.-B. shots where the main subject is subtly out of focus which made for good discussion.

Gaspar Heurtley: "On one hand, you’re absolutely right. Period. On the other, about the picture of the woman on the beach: maybe the photographer knew that the picture was slightly out of focus but posted it anyway because he/she knew that no one is ever going to see it at 100% (let alone print it). I suspect many pro photographers share their work exclusively online and have learned that they can widen the margin of error, based on where their target audience is going to see the pictures (mostly cell phone screens and poorly calibrated monitors)."

Mike replies: Yes, and if Henri Cartier-Bresson can do it, why can't she?

The Coolest Camera Features

What would you say are the best features of cameras (or processing software) for you over the years of the digital era?

I have a few nominations to list—a few I use, and a few I don't but admire from afar*:

1. Image stabilization
2. Silent shooting (electronic shutter)
3. Fast and easy sharing of pictures and videos via texting, in smartphones
4. Eye-AF, best implemented in Sony full-frame mirrorless cameras as far as I know
5. Olympus's Pro Capture, which allows you to record a series of exposures before you press the shutter

Strictly speaking, IS preceded digital by a few years, first appearing on a Canon zoom lens in the '90s. Before that it was available on Canon binoculars. But as a commonplace feature it maps to the digital era pretty closely.

As far as Eye-AF** is concerned, many cameras have it now, but it has to work really well in order to become a useful feature IMHO. Sony seems to win the battle there as far as I can tell.

I suppose the highest, ultimate, or strictest question here would be: is there any feature that you either have bought or would buy a new camera just to get?

A more relaxed question would be, are there any features that have been game-changers for your work since ~Y2k?

Mike

* There are also lots of technically impressive features that I don't use and that therefore don't mean much to me. Although sometimes I do wonder if there might be features I'd really like if I'd just explore them. This obviously isn't a comprehensive list.

** Eye-AF is not to be confused with eye-controlled focus, Canon's feature which tracked your eyeball to (hopefully) focus on what you were looking at in the viewfinder, or Minolta's eye-start, which turned the camera on when it detected your eyeball behind the viewfinder window, or whatever that feature is called that switches from the rear-screen view to the EVF view if and when it detects an object near the latter—which is as often an annoyance as a convenience if you ask me. Eye-AF means the camera automatically detects eyes in the frame and instantly places focus exactly on them. It's so precise that you can choose which eye you want the camera to focus on. If you let the camera focus through lots of foliage or reflections or other kinds of visual confusion, it's quite impressive that it works so well.

Book o' this Week:
Sugar is the silent nutritional crisis that is hiding in plain sight. The best book about it might be the prescient 1972 classic Pure, White and Deadly by the British scientist John Yudkin. Recommended. <—This is a portal to Amazon; also available at the Book Depository for global delivery with free shipping.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John Shriver (partial comment): "Huge depth-of-field (DoF) with small sensors on small cameras. Small-sensor cameras (digital compacts, cellphones) have great DoF. Fantastic for taking pictures of model railroads, taken from a 'scale person's' eye level. Could never do anything like that with a film SLR, at least not well, and without blisteringly hot lighting. Before this, model railroad photography looked like drone shots—from above."

Richard Skoonberg: "To me, the coolest and most important feature is the low noise, high-dynamic-range sensors that we have in our cameras today. I am constantly amazed by them. As a landscape photographer, I often photograph within the dark recesses of the forest and spend hours burning and dodging my images in Lightroom and Photoshop. Because of the ISO-invariance of the Sony sensor in the Pentax, I usually start by slightly underexposing my images to avoid highlight clipping. I have often surprised myself with what I am able to discover as I adjust the exposure across the image. I always feel confident that I have truly captured the image when I click the shutter. So the sensor is the most important feature to me."

JOHN B GILLOOLY (partial comment): "For me, game changer #1 once the digital era was in full swing, was Adobe Lightroom and the ability to effectively batch-process small and large groups of images visually in the browser. Prior to that we were opening images individually in Photoshop or creating 'actions' for certain sets of images. Early digital workflow was a nightmare."

Rand Scott Adams: "For me, it was IBIS, but only when its implementation migrated to medium format cameras. The ability to use a large sensor with excellent dynamic range in a truly offhand shooting style changed everything."

Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): "What history will find most notable about the advent of the digital photo era is its integration with communications technologies. That someone can take a picture in, say, Caracas and literally a minute later someone in Winnipeg or London can be viewing that picture is unquestionably the 'coolest' and most tectonically significant aspect of all incarnations of digital photography today and forever."

Alex G.: "Usable, almost grainless ISOs above 800 is, to me, the biggest game-changer of the digital era. Also, the ability to 'pre-see' the photo on the back...it’s so basic to digital photography that it’s hard to remember that it’s a feature. And while it’s a blessing and a curse, it was completely transformative. Because of it, it is much easier to learn photography, among other things. You can experiment and learn more in an afternoon now than you could in months during the film era."

James: "Easier travel—I didn't change to digital until I booked to go to Antarctica. The thought of all the X-ray machines I would encounter with three flights in each direction swung it for me. (Not to mention carrying dozens of rolls and changing film while it snows.) I would have needed over 100 36-exposure rolls."

SteveW (partial comment): "This is good to reflect on. The top taken-for-granted item: autofocus. I don't think as an old dawg that photography would be fun if I was frying my eyes attempting manual focus."

RayC (partial comment): "Quality electronic viewfinder—I know they are still controversial but once they got to a certain level of quality they became a game-changer for me."

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "Coming from landscape, I’ll go with post-processing software that involves blending multiple images. Be it focus stack, HDR-like capabilities, or stitching, or various combinations thereof. While the basic premise existed with film, the digital capabilities allow us to overcome many physical constraints when using a given body and lens combination—DoF, dynamic range, focal length or sensor size/area."

Juan Buhler: "Short flange distances! These days you can get a used mirrorless full frame camera for under $1,000 that can take any lens made for any rangefinder or SLR! Imagine dropping by a Canikon flame war in the '90s with news that in 20 years you would be shooting with a Sony that takes both Canon and Nikon lenses and can even autofocus with them?"

Keith: "A lot of comments regarding the communication available with current digital cameras refer to the near immediate ability to transmit an image to a phone for sharing, either to select individuals or the world at large. But for me, the ability to communicate with and remotely control the camera during the capture process is a tremendous benefit in the first step of the workflow. This is especially useful in long exposure, multi-image bracketing for composites, and studio work. It's like having unlimited real time Polaroids and full control of the camera without having to touch (and possibly move) the camera."

Somnath Goswami: "The ability to tweak ISO as per requirement is a great digital boon."

Lesley T: "Have I ever bought a camera because of certain features it offered? Oh yes! The first was a Nikon 1 AW1 purchased just before a trip to Antarctica that would include kayaking. I wore it on a harness that sat on my chest and was able to get some photos that I never could have taken otherwise. Worth every penny!

"The second was a Nikon Z50, bought when we planned (in March of 2020) to go to Austria to see a grandson compete in a biathlon competition and I really did not want to take a lightweight point-and-shoot or to tote my D600 and a heavy telephoto lens around the course. Well, we all know how 2020 turned out, so the camera wasn't used for its intended purpose, but it is the one I toss into my bag when I wonder if I should bother taking a camera with me. Could I do without it? Of course, but I really enjoy it.

"The third is the Nikon Z6 II. My husband was quite ill during the first part of the pandemic, and then I broke a hip, got a new one, and have been suffering with a slow recovery, so we stayed pretty close to home. I spent a lot of time in the garden, photographing flowers as they bloomed, then withered, but became a bit bored with what I was doing. But I could do focus stacking with the Z6 II...and I have just had so much fun with it!

"At the age of 74, I firmly believe that I am too old not to have fun with what I do, so that's what prompts me to buy a new camera...the opportunity to have more fun with my picture-taking."

Let's Try That Again

Evidently, I did not make my point clearly enough in the previous post. Such mistakes are usually the writer's fault, so mea culpa. What I'm saying is that if the camera market were purely rational, Micro 4/3 would be the dominant format now. Instead of Olympus selling its camera division and Panasonic putting all its R&D into full frame mirrorless, Nikon and Canon would be making Micro 4/3 cameras just to compete and Micro 4/3 would be dominating sales of non-phone picturetaking devices. It's the format that makes the most all-around sense for the largest segment of the general market in my opinion.

Sorry for not being more clear.

Mike

P.S. This is the first post I typed with my new keyboard in Dvorak! I moderated all the comments last night and this morning with it too. I'm definitely not ready to switch over yet.

Gear o' the Week:

If I could shoot with any 50mm focal-length-equivalent lens, it would not be unobtanium: it would be the relatively modest, relatively older HD Pentax 35mm ƒ/2.8 DA Macro Limited on APS-C (it has recently been revised with new coatings). I don't know how it measures and couldn't care less. If you care first and foremost about pictures, especially prints, it is one beautiful lens. Luverly. As a normal too. This link is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

B&H Photo also has the Magic Macro, naturally.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Robert Roaldi: "In a rational world, a non-Micro-4/3 user would not even pay attention to what Olympus/Panasonic are doing. (And by the way, Panasonic is getting set to release several Micro 4/3 products, so they haven't abandoned the format.) And yet, when the E-M1X was released, many non-Micro-4/3 online experts lost their minds. Why? If they wanted a smaller Micro 4/3 body, there were several to choose from already, so why were they bothered? They complained about the size, but it is about the size of my 1st gen E-M1+grip, which it not that large. Compare it to a D3, why don't they, and not to a Rebel.

"I think I know the real reason. They were jealous. A reasonably sized fully professional body, with many available pro lenses whose weight would not dislocate their shoulders, for less than half the price of the Canikon flagship models. It must be starting to bother them by now that they have to spend $8,000 on a body alone and carry around 50 lbs. of gear just to produce down-rezzed JPEGs for the web. In a rational world, Micro 4/3 should be the preferred system for pro sports shooters and birders; why they still cling to last-century technology is a mystery. And I don't buy the argument that it's because they are heavily invested in lenses. Reading online forums, all they seem to do is to perennially trade in their Canon system for Nikon and then trade in that for Sony. Investment in lenses never stopped them from doing that. Boys just want big toys. (Just having some fun.)"

Kenneth Tanaka: "Your sense of what is 'rational' is anchored in the era when photography was in the artsy-craftsy world. Of course that’s long over. Cameras have long ago become part of the gigantic consumer electronics world where survival requires growth, and growth requires relentless 'improvement.' It’s hard to argue that Micro 4/3 established a sweet spot nexus of size/price/performance. It was more than good enough for nearly all amateur needs, and affordable. But it boxed itself into a corner and consequently stagnated. Very unimaginative, uninspired business management and leadership. And that, in the consumer electronics world, is not rational." 

John Camp: "I would like to know where people are getting information that Panasonic is about to release new Micro 4/3 products—I've seen this a couple times here in the last two or three days. My GX8s are getting a little long in the tooth—I've had them for five years now—and I would be overjoyed to see a follow-up.

"Something about rationality—I think it's extremely hard to see in the present. It's mostly afterwards that the rationality seems to sort itself. To go back to the tulip craze, it apparently seemed to some Netherlanders that the very best tulips were worth more than their houses, what they thought was a rational judgment. It wasn't. In retrospect, that is quite clear, and the market made it clear even to the final fool who spent his last buck on the most expensive tulip bulb. To sort out a rational decision in a controversial subject (like camera futures) in the present is quite difficult—not even the camera companies seem to be able to do it."

Ronny A Nilsen: Micro 4/3 might be rational for printing up to some size, but printing is not how people look at images any more. In a few years many (most?) will have large 8k TVs in their homes, and then full frame or bigger with 45+ MP will actually be useful or even needed. I show my images to my family and friends on my 4k 65" TV, and even that 'small' you need good lenses, because the magnification from the 24x36 sensor is so large. But the images really look great on a big screen. For looking at images on a phone, even Micro 4/3 is overkill.  :-)  "

Benjamin Marks: "I have never found consumer markets rational. How could they be? They aim to create desire for things you don't need and then to fulfill those desires. On the contrary: this is the height of irrationality. What markets are is reasonably efficient at fulfilling those desires. Hence the declining cost of the megapixel (not quite Moore's law, but something adjacent).

"I am in NYC for a week caring for an Aged Parent. The only cameras I brought with me? An Olympus Pen FT and an E-M1 Mk III. Perfect walking cameras, IQ that has never held me back. Light, good images, acceptable high ISO, etc. etc. What's not to love? That last shouldn't be rhetorical. I tried some of the Panasonic Micro 4/3 cameras and just never bonded with them. But I find the Oly's perfect."

Cecelia: "I just cashed in my entire Micro 4/3 kit after five years of using it exclusively. The reason? There were basically three:

1. 20 MP was not enough for some of my uses.
2. The low-light performance of Micro 4/3 is poor compared to larger sensor alternatives, which was a problem when shooting moving subjects in natural interior light.
3. Full frame mirrorless alternatives are excellent.

"The files from my Z7 are joy to behold and much more pleasant to edit, especially when cropping. The 50mm ƒ/1.8 S lens is spectacular—like having a small and affordable Otus. The stabilization, focusing, and general ease of use is quite good, and using the 24–200mm makes for a very similar situation to my Oly setup with the 12–100mm. The Z bodies are not that much bigger than the Oly E-M1 bodies, and the files are much better. The 24–200mm kit weight is 1,135 g for Oly and 1,245 g for Nikon and the 50mm prime kit weight is 984 g for Oly and 1,090 g for Nikon(ƒ/1.2 pro on Oly and ƒ/1.8 S on Nikon). The only things I miss are the closer focusing of the Oly zoom and the really tiny ƒ/1.8 primes.

"In other words, my phone is excellent for most web, snapshot, and notetaking uses, and when I need better than that, I want much better. No regrets so far. (I am drooling over the Fujifilm GFX 100s now....)"

Whither Micro 4/3?

I like to imagine camera kits, and one that I find increasingly attractive is the idea of marrying a late-model iPhone camera with a "medium-format" digital camera. It seems like the two are about as far away from each other as cameras can get, and complement each other nicely: the one a handy always-with-you note-taker, ideal for quick sharing, and the other a deliberate and involved tool for very high-quality results and large prints. What we call medium format is really digital's large format, and I like the idea of thinking of a medium-format digital camera as serving the same purpose as, say, an old Deardorff 8x10. I wouldn't mind if it were slow; I'm familiar with that way of working, and it's very amenable.

I'm not even an amateur economist, but one of the myths of capitalism that has always baffled me is the one that claims that markets are always rational because the players are always acting rationally in their own best interest. This immediately seemed flat wrong to me the moment I first encountered it as a teenager. Tulip bulbs, anyone? Markets are just as irrational as humans, and humans are exceptionally irrational, especially when behaving en masse. (One of my father's favorite books was the classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The chapter on tulip-mania is a must-read.)

Anyway, we agree that what's happening in the market over the past half-dozen years is that tiny sensors, having lost the battle in cameras, have been coming back like a resurgent virus in smartphone cameras; and smartphone cameras are getting so overpoweringly adequate that they are driving traditional cameras toward bigger and bigger sensors as the cameramakers seek meaningful differentiation. If someone already has a late-model, good-performing smartphone camera, he or she is not going to be very impressed with the promised improvements of a Micro 4/3 camera, let alone a 1"-sensor camera. So the aspirations of traditional camera fans are turning toward cameras with sensors of the old 135 size, 24x36, which is considered large now, and larger ones.

But rationally, what really makes the most sense for general photography would be for the standard to settle on Micro 4/3 size or even 1". Years ago Hasselblad had a marketing campaign (somewhat contrived, I admit), that had the tagline "Bigger is better up to a point." Naturally, what they wanted you to think was that increasing negative size up to 6x6 cm was an advantage, but increasing it any more than that was just a hindrance, requiring bulky cameras and unwieldy lenses to get enough covering power (6x7 cm cameras were making inroads on Hasselblad's sinecure at the time). But we might now turn that around and say "Smaller is better up to (down to?) a point." The "point," of course, being the one at which quality noticeably begins to suffer. Until that point, handier cameras, cheaper fabrication, smaller and lighter lenses, longer telephoto reach, are all advantages. As sensor tech has gotten better and better, gradually the limitations of smallish sensors are being beaten back; Micro 4/3 sensors are now at least as good as the early full-frame sensors. These advancements make smaller sensors more viable by bringing image quality up to "good enough." If Micro 4/3 were the standard and receiving more in the way of development resources, the advancements could be greater still.

As it is, Micro 4/3 seems to me to be the smallest sensor size before quality begins to suffer noticeably. And rationally, smaller is better...up to a point.

Of course, what's actually happening is that Micro 4/3 has fallen on hard times and 1" has more or less disappeared beneath the waves. Olympus's "pro" Micro 4/3 camera (also discounted by $1,000 right now) was met with perplexity among customers and ended up being one of its swan-songs. (The swan is reputed to sing only once, as it is dying.) 

Of course, at the present moment, Micro 4/3 is still viable, and you can choose it if you want to. But it looks like the handwriting is on the wall, and what the hand is writing is that Micro 4/3 is inching (sorry!) toward to the dustbin of history. We can understand why, even if you agree with me that it isn't objectively rational. 

By the way, regarding those Pollyannas (sorry, but still) who like to assert that the Olympus camera division was merely sold and will continue unchanged, consider what Eamon told us about how many billions of dollars Olympus lost on the camera division in the last decade. How likely is it that a private equity firm is going to want to invest, and lose, a billion dollars a year on an acquisition? And do it year after year? That's how Olympus was maintaining its camera business. Whatever happens with OM Digital Solutions Corp., the catchy name of the old camera division in its new state, it's not going to be business as usual. The old Olympus we're used to is gone. At least as we knew it.

Mike

Gear o' the Week:

If I could shoot with any 50mm focal-length-equivalent lens, it would not be unobtanium: it would be the relatively modest, relatively older HD Pentax 35mm ƒ/2.8 DA Macro Limited on APS-C (it has recently been revised with new coatings). I don't know how it measures and couldn't care less. If you care first and foremost about pictures, especially prints, it is one beautiful lens. Luverly. As a normal too. This link is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

B&H Photo also has the Magic Macro, naturally.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Keith: "What we've learned from Olympus over the past decade or so is that they have a bit of an integrity problem in regards to managing and reporting financials. It may be that imaging was the scapegoat to spare the rest of the company. JIP specializes in financial management, running a tight ship so to speak. So long as they have a goal of advancing a competitive product line and growing market share, and have the right people in place to do so, they may very well make Micro 4/3 relevant again. Key to this is developing and implementing a strong marketing message while they are still able to utilize the Olympus brand name. Micro 4/3 has a very complete system that provides sufficiency and more to a large percentage of the photography market, but was never promoted well as it could have been. Too many consumers are of the 'Canon or Nikon' mindset. JIP and OMDS has to overcome that mindset. This means looking beyond the Asian market to the European and North American market in order to meet minimum numbers of unit sales to remain viable."

Robert Roaldi: "To play devil's advocate, I'd take a different point of view. Given my assertion that the number of people who print large rounds to zero, it's 'full frame' whose future I think is in doubt. Why spend all that money and carry all that weight? There are advantages to larger sensors, of course there are, but are there enough people who care? Only time will tell, I suppose, but I think that the demise of Micro 4/3 is not so imminent. There are new Micro 4/3 lenses announced almost every week, and it is probably only a matter of time before those Chinese Micro 4/3 lensmakers turn their hand to making serious camera bodies."

Moose: "Re 'who like to assert that the Olympus camera division was merely sold and will continue unchanged': It will inevitably change. The question is whether it will continue as a camera company.

"Re 'who like to assert that the Olympus camera division was merely sold and will continue unchanged, consider what Eamon told us about how many billions of dollars Olympus lost on the camera division in the last decade': I spent decades at a huge company with many different operations. Allocation of income and expenses between operating sub-entities is a highly arcane business. Even with pure intentions, it's impossible to do perfectly. When internecine politics are involved, amazing things can happen.

"Rumors have said that Oly has forever been dumping expenses more properly allocated to other divisions into the camera division. Whether this is true or not, we will never know directly. If the camera business happens to continue as a viable company, and become profitable, that would be an indirect confirmation.

"I don't recall who Eamon is, but I'm willing to bet he has not been inside a company going through an LBO, restructuring, re-evaluation of internal allocation of income and costs, and thus on the profitability of all its divisions, shedding of unproductive assets—emerging as a viable company and eventual IPO. I have. I oversaw the valuation of billions in real estate assets for the LBO. I am confident that no outsider, reading annual reports, etc., can know whether divisions of a company are actually profitable or not, nor whether it may be successfully reorganized or not.

"You highlight possible overproduction of the E-M1x. I choose to point out that the 100–400mm lens has been on back order since the first shipment; when mine arrived it was still on back order—and still is. Shipments haven't kept up with demand. Sales of the huge, expensive 150–400 have exceeded Oly's expectations. Strong sales of highest margin products is not a bad sign. Neither proves anything.

"You can't know how it all turns out until the fat lady sings. \;~)> "

Kye Wood: "DxO Photolab 4 with Deep Prime processing has turned my two G85 Micro 4/3 cameras into medium-format-rivaling monsters. In a word, stunning, which is truly an understatement. Lush thick colour and gradation to die for. The extra three stops of ISO is just a bonus. My phone camera is the best available today. And its best images are so far behind the G85 with DxO that it's laughable."

Kevin: "After shooting 24x36, 24x65, 6x6, 6x7, 6x9, 6x17, and 4x5" film for many years, I borrowed a digital Rebel and was astounded by the results. No more film! After shooting APS-C digital for years, I tried full-frame, and was astounded by the results! After shooting full-frame for years, I tried 33x44mm, and was astounded by the results! Now, 33x44 cameras are actually smaller and lighter than a good 24x36 camera, and they even have IBIS. Going smaller than 33x44 now does not seem rational at all. The results (without resorting to any magic 'Deep Fake' processing) are the proof. (Yep, I print big.) I get your point about 33x44mm equating to a big, slow Deardorff, but it's not correct! It's as small and light and fast as popular 24x36 units, and feels right in your hand. So, I disagree. Half-frame (4/3) is now more irrational than ever."

What's Your Favorite Camera Viewfinder?

Of all the viewfinders in all the cameras you've ever used, which would you say is your favorite?

If you don't have one, no worries. You can sit this round out. 

"Finding the view" is one of the basic functions of a camera as a device, and has been since the beginning. A history of camera viewfinders would be astonishingly varied. How does the camera show the operator what it's about to take a picture of? It's a technical problem, of course, but it's also integral to how the photographer interacts with the visual world, and and how she relates to the camera as a tool.

Do you like an OVF or EVF? TTL or not? Looking down, sideways, or remotely? Several Fujis can be switched at will from optical to EVF, an exotic but useful feature. The Leica SL's feature a super-high-quality screen, which nicely echoes the original Leitz SL's, some of which had microprisms over their entire field. Larger cameras tend to have larger VFs—comparing the view through a medium-format DSLR to the one through a consumer APS-C with a mirror-box is instructive. The one seems as broad as the Grand Canyon, the other like peering down a tunnel or through a keyhole.

If some company was going to build your perfect camera, at your direction, what kind of viewfinder would you tell them to make?

As I think about this question, two cameras come to mind. They're from different eras, so maybe I can be excused for mentioning them both. One is the Olympus OM-4T film camera, which has a remarkably generous and direct viewfinder for such a small camera. The other is the Panasonic GX8, which has that high-quality EVF that swings from vertical to horizontal and everything in between. I loved that one. (At some point in the 2010's, I transitioned from being an OVF to an EVF guy. I like to shoot in low light, which is where the EVF comes into its own. In daylight, you still can't beat an SLR.) The GX8 viewfinder must be difficult and/or expensive to make—I can't imagine, otherwise, why any company would develop that and then promptly orphan it. Such a shame.

I also love the viewfinder in the iPhone. Looking at an image that's already in just two dimensions has always been helpful to me in visualizing. That's true whether you're looking down at the waist-level finder of a TLR or looking at the back of a smartphone. It's pretty clutter-free, too—viewfinder clutter doesn't get much "ink" in the Photosphere, probably because most cameras give you options, but it's become an increasing problem in the electronic era.

And of course I still love the view through the Wista 4x5 with its fresnel intensifier. Seeing the image as it's cast by the lens has a special kind of magic. Back when I taught, the day when I'd let all the kids line up and look through the 4x5 was always a fun day. I loved hearing the happy exclamations of amazement from under the dark cloth.

Mike

Book Product o' This Week:

Is it too late for this? 2021 is still young. There are two reasons to value these Michael Kenna calendars from Nazraeli Press: one is that his originals are 8x8", so these pictures are meant to work at wall-calendar sizes. The other is that Michael's calendars can actually increase in value! Dan Smith suggested this, and he reports that some older ones sell in the hundreds of dollars. "The printing is excellent," Dan wrote, "and the calendar is beautiful."

The above link takes you from TOP to Amazon. This week's pick is not available at Amazon Canada, but 2019 is. Hey, the pictures are still good. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

 

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jack Mac: "My favorite viewfinder is on a Leica S. Mike, you have looked through mine; did you approve? I do not have a favorite mirrorless viewfinder. None of them are enjoyable to use except at night. I like the Leica M10 RF viewfinder but interestingly sometimes combine it with a live view WiFi connection to an iPad. Then it’s as if I’m looking at a 8x10 ground glass. Should I cover my head with a black cloth?"

Mike replies: I took pictures with it twice, once at the sushi restaurant near the expressway between Waukesha and Brookfield, and once on our field trip to the ruins of the old Pabst Brewery. But although the impression I have is good, I don't really remember it well enough because I just didn't use it long enough.

Richard Arsenault: "Great topic. Two answers: My favorite viewfinder is...a.) the one I am actually using right now. Too many cameras not being used.  :-(   b.) the one that won’t fool me and crop out the people on the sides of that group shot I got finagled to do at so-and-so’s wedding (mostly because of the item above). The only thing about EVF that irks me is that there are so many bits of information that I am always at risk of focusing on the camera settings instead of the shot. Granted that is more of an « id10t » user issue than anything else, and my biggest goof-up (above) was when I was using a new-to-me DSLR....

"All the best and hope your pool game is improving."

Mike replies: Right now I am making some spectacularly difficult shots and missing some very easy ones. I'm concentrating on position play, and that's slowly getting...a little better.

Rod S.: "The Cambo T-20 reflex viewfinder for my Cambo Wide DS 4x5 camera. This viewfinder brought me into 4x5 format and architectural photography, by far the biggest advance ever in my photography. If getting under a dark-cloth was the only way to do 4x5 then I may well have said 'No way.' The Cambo T-20 reflex viewfinder is a simple device. It contains a 45-degree angled mirror and 2X magnifier within a high-quality, robust plastic housing that swivels between landscape and portrait orientations. The net result is revolutionary: You look downwards into the soft rubber eyecup positioned at a comfortable high chest height and view the image upright, not inverted. And the camera bubble levels and lens controls and shutter all become easily viewable and accessible. I can focus accurately and quickly using the 2X magnifier, another real advantage over conventional practice. It makes my 4x5 use...slick. I shoot architecture in busy foreign places where getting under a dark cloth would have me feeling vulnerable. This viewfinder solved that problem, too.

"The design has been cloned by Shen Hao to fit onto numerous other brands of cameras. I have these clones for my Toyo VX125 and Arca-Swiss F-Metric. If you shoot 4x5 or are intrigued by the possibility, this viewfinder might just be the thing that makes it all sing."

Steven Palmer: "Easily, the viewfinder from my Nikon FM3a is my favourite. It's big, bright and has match needle metering. For those who have never used a camera with match needle metering, you can see your exposure without actually having to look at the readout. You can see the needle with your peripheral vision so you don't have to look away from your subject. The FM3a also has an exposure lock button under where your thumb is likely to be so you can change exposure quickly simply by moving the camera to a brighter or darker part of the scene and pressing the button when the needle gives you the exposure compensation you want. It's simple, dead easy and fast."

Jim Simmons: "A topic near and dear to my heart. I look for three things in a camera, all of which I require—excellent viewfinder, ergonomics, high quality lenses. So...my favourite 35mm SLR viewfinder is the Leicaflex SL, in spite of 92% coverage. Magnification reportedly .9X, and the fine micro-prism screen snaps into focus like no other SLR I ever used. Eye relief was just OK (I wear glasses), but I had a diopter made so I could use it without glasses.

"Next favourite: Pentax 67 with Beattie fresnel screen. Only 90% coverage, but a big screen to look at and compose on, and the Beattie screen makes it reasonably bright.

"Next favourite: Arca-Swiss 4x5 with fresnel screen and the mirror viewer. The viewer is almost as big as the camera, but it makes the viewing a delight—both eyes used and right side up (but flipped left-to-right).

"But my most favourite viewfinder of all time is my current Fujifilm X-T4. 3,690,000 dots for very fine resolution and crisp focusing, 100% coverage, .75X magnification, very long 23mm eye relief. A real joy to use. I have adjusted all the elements of the viewfinder—brightness, colour, contrast—so that I can trust that what I'm seeing on the screen is very close to the Fuji JPEG settings I use most often. This is as close to a WYSIWYG viewfinder I've ever used."

Kodachromeguy: "For a rangefinder camera, the Leica M3 is hard to beat. That has always been my favorite."

PJ Cicalo: "For many years my longstanding favorites were on my various Olympus OM bodies. Then I got a Voigtländer Bessa R. Now that was a bright viewfinder! Much brighter than any Leica I ever peered through."

Vijay: "For me, the viewfinder is the most important part of the camera. Bad viewfinders discourage me from taking photographs. Great ones invite me to engage with what I’m seeing and lead to more enjoyable photography and more satisfying results.

"I prefer viewfinders that most closely match what I see with my own eyes. Rangefinders are my top choice, followed by reflex finders, and EVFs are a last resort. In all cases bigger is better. Eyepoints under 20mm put me in a bad mood. When shooting landscapes on a tripod, I’m all for the fully articulated LCD screens for convenience and the size of the view.

"Favorite viewfinder ever: Zeiss Ikon ZM. Never owned one though, as I’m afraid of the lack of parts/service."

Michael Ryan: "My favourite viewfinder is the 27" iMac 5k in my studio while shooting tethered."

Mike replies: Now that's a viewfinder.  :-)

Helcio J. Tagliolotto: "The Contax RTS III's viewfinder. It's even color corrected."

Mike replies: Yes, that one was a beauty. Deluxe construction. It was criticized because the exposure information in the finder (in blue!) was allegedly difficult to see in bright light. I never owned one but only looked through them in the store, so I don't have experience with that.