Smile - Click
I bought a digital SLR about a year ago, and I love it. My previous SLR was an early 80’s Nikon, so buying the DSLR meant getting not only the ability to take several hundred pictures without needing to change the film, but auto-focus and stuff like that. I already have a pocket-sized digital camera for everyday snapshots, but I use the SLR for “real” pictures - portraits of kids, arty expression, etc. It’s great. But something happened when cameras went digital: they became computers. My camera is a low-end model, and although I love it, I’m feeling a little jealous that it was superseded this week by a new model.
It’s a feeling I know well from buying computers. I expect that when I buy a new machine, a newer one will show up within 6 months, and I’ll look at my “old” computer with a little bit of disgust. How could you be so slow? But, really, computers tend to be overpowered for my everyday use, so it doesn’t matter, and I can appreciate the new technology without needing to own it. As long as it runs whatever software I want to use, fast hardware is pretty much the same as super-fast hardware.
And when I had my Nikon, I thought it was pretty cool to carry such an old piece of hardware. It was not fully manual, but pretty close. It was also made of metal and pretty much bulletproof. I didn’t miss autofocus, and whatever idiosyncrasies the camera had in terms of metering or exposure - well, I just lived with them. I thought of that camera was a one-off tool, and once I mastered it I didn’t think about improving the camera; I thought about improving my use of it. Improving myself.
So now I have a Pentax K100D. And it has autofocus, which I will (belatedly) admit is pretty useful. And I can make it fully automatic and snap away, and it has some other fun bells & whistles that I enjoy. But now I pay attention to firmware upgrades. And I worry about which picture-mode setting is better - Bright or Natural? And although I consider inflated pixel counts to be silly - 6 megapixels is plenty - I cringe a little that the new bottom-of-the-line K200D has 10. I can certainly treat my Pentax like I treated my Nikon: I will freeze the settings where I like them and never open that menu again. But what if I could make all my pictures better by flipping a bit and I don’t even know it? Horrors.
It’s interesting to think about digital SLRs in light of their manufacturers. Pentax is a camera company, as are Nikon and Canon and Olympus. They all have a rich history in photography. But Sony? Samsung? Pentax and Samsung work together to build cameras - Pentax DSLRs usually have Samsung-branded equivalents. But I wouldn’t trust a Samsung SLR - they don’t speak camera. On the other hand, why should I trust the electronics in a Pentax camera - what right do they have to succeed in the modern world of consumer electronics? I suppose mine is the last generation that will think of Canon and Sony as having completely different strengths. Sony DSLRs compare favorably to their cousins from the “camera” companies, and the digital user interface on a Canon camera is as well done as any I’ve seen from an “electronics” company.
Of course, photography is still photography. No matter how many settings I pay attention to, or ignore, I will only get out what I put in. Getting good pictures is skill and art, not settings. But I can’t help checking the Pentax site to see if there’s a new firmware upgrade…
It feels like the digital camera is taking the picture, not me. I miss the feeling of mastery, of the craft of working the camera. But we will trade anything for convenince, no?
Apparently the first Space Shuttle pilots complained that they were merely passengers, since the entire shuttle was automated. So the engineers put a button into the cockpit that let the pilots operate the landing gear.