On 29/01/2012 11:42 AM, Paul Stenquist wrote:
I would find the trend toward more technology disturbing if there were no
options.
But since I can focus manually at will, or I can choose to use a single
autofocus point
-- with the plus of being able to choose the location of that pint --
the presence of other options doesn't bother me in the least.
Camera makers, for the most part, aren't brain dead. They're not going
to take away the
options that many of us require. More technology is fine, since it
doesn't get in my way.
You are thinking only in your own terms, not in the terms of photography
in general. It's hard to discuss things with someone who only has an ego
centrist viewpoint, but I'll try.
I think George's point, and it's hard to argue with it, is that
photographers, like all other animals, will tend to take the easy way
out. In the case of cameras, they won't learn how to meter a scene, or
learn what the limitations of the meter are, they will put the camera on
auto and hope for the best, or perhaps put the camera on manual and blow
it because they don't really know how to interpret what their meter is
telling them.
I spent enough time developing people's pictures during an era where we
went from manual everything cameras to automatic everything cameras, and
I did it in storefront labs that put me "on the spot" when it came time
to tell customers exactly what went wrong with Aunt Martha's 90th
birthday pictures, and yes, I'm sorry for you that she died yesterday
and now you don't have pictures from her party either.
There really has been a very strong regression in the basic photography
knowledge that people using cameras are willing to learn, even while
they are willing to learn much more complex camera operations that have
little to do with photography other than complicating it in it's own way.
We got automatic exposure and a fairly large % of people stopped
learning how to set exposure properly.
We got autofocus and an equally large % of people stopped learning how
to focus a camera (lots of overlap with the previous group).
Generally, they wouldn't learn until their ignorance came home to roost,
and even then, they would generally be very convinced that it was the
lab that caused the problem, even in the face of all evidence to the
contrary.
Digital just made it worse, since it took away any possibility we had to
fix things if the customer screwed up, and it gave the customer a lot of
new and improved ways to bugger things up.
At least with film, I could print through 5 stops of over exposure and
pull something out of the mess. At least with film, I didn't have to
worry about customers wanting 8x10 prints from VGA sized files, and I
could always read a negative, but quite often memory cards just wouldn't
read in our equipment because the photographer had stuck the card into
the camera and started writing files to it without formatting it.
If you think camera makers aren't going to take options away from us
that we require, look at the viewfinder of your Pentax DSLR camera,
compared to that of a good Pentax film camera from the 1980s.
It's small, tunnel like, and very hard to manual focus with even
moderate wide angle lenses, even if you change the screen out to a
Katz-Eye or some such (and having to do that kinda makes the point anyway).
Wait until you are forced into an electronic viewfinder, whether you
like them or not because the camera company decides that while they are
not as good as an optical finder, they are now "good enough".
If you think I'm wrong, I challenge you to try to find a non SLR camera
with a fully functioning optical viewfinder of any kind, good or bad. As
a feature, it is almost completely phased out.
So much for choice.
--
William Robb
--
PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List
[email protected]
http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow
the directions.
