By Teresa A. Martin
You may have spotted me Out & About the past week or so with new digital camera in tow. This isn’t my first digital camera, of course, but it is my first that has really crossed the line to leave behind some of the user interface assumptions of its film-based ancestors.
Or maybe, as a photographer friend pointed out, the first to return to old old ways.
Digital photography has been a monumental success story. In a few short years, film has become a quaint concept and digital photography has been one of the “killer apps” that brought non-computer users into contact with the world of digital data.
We love our photography. We love our photos. We might be suspicious about computers but it took us about two seconds to calculate that “buy no film but make lots of photos” was a pretty good deal, so good that we figured out how to make the technological leap in record time.
The newest generation of cameras is leaving behind the user interface vestiges of the film camera and I’ve been catching myself stumbling over the changes ... and at the same time watching my third-grader (who carries no previous use baggage) using it without a bump.
The most visible difference is the demise of the viewfinder. You know, that spiffy little eyepiece that you look through to see what image you’re going capture on film. Err, I mean, in pixels. Since you can’t see what you’ve made on film until the film is returned to a darkroom and processed, a viewfinder is the best approximation you can get. It’s essential.
But the digital camera doesn’t need a viewfinder. It has a screen. A monitor. And an increasingly large one at that. The second you snap, you see what you’ve captured. The concept of viewfinder is obsolete.
Except that by putting your head against the camera to look through the viewfinder, you created a sort of informal tripod that helped stabilize the camera while you made the photo. Take away that extra balance and it turns out it’s pretty hard to hold a camera still. Which is why all the new cameras include an automatic “no shake” or “stabilization” feature, which compensates (at least in theory) for the wobbles on your hand.
I’ve also discovered that the screen is hard to see in certain light conditions. At dusk, for example, I’m guessing what I’m making an image of. And when the light is at a direct angle I get a lot of glare and more guesswork. The good old human eye looking direct is a lot more forgiving of conditions than the screen is.
But I suspect that these little preferences were trained preferences. When I watch my daughter make images, she ignores the viewfinder on the old camera completely and looks at the tiny screen instead. She tells me she quite approves of the larger screen on the new one. And she is down right indignant about my last film point-and-shoot camera because it lacks any preview at all. Clearly a defective product, at least from her generational viewpoint!
I’m also quickly taking for granted a plethora of functions. My old Pentax K100 SLR took a certain learning curve to use. It could do wonderful things and provided a great level of control, but my new camera’s digital brain makes it pretty much brainless to make a lovely image by jack-o-lantern light. It also lets me make a three-up image of an object, suitable for posting on eBay. And lets me make my beloved macro shots without extra gear.
The question of quality has become moot, as well. With consumer grade cameras in the 6-8 megapixel range, there’s plenty of data being captured for most uses. A pixel is a “picture element” – aka, the tiniest piece of a digital image. One megapixel is, as you might guess, is a million pixels. A six magapixel camera capture images that contain six million pixels of image information. That’s enough data to make a lovely quality 8x10 print with ease.
Technology cycles and recycles. The first cameras used big 8x10 plates. No viewfinders. What you see is what you capture. There was total control over the image process and large prints could be made with great quality.
What quickly followed, of course, a market push for portability, smaller size machines, and greater ease of use. Purists complained that tiny 35mm film was inferior. That viewfinders were inaccurate. And that automation made for weaker images. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
With this latest generation of consumer cameras, the mass market has left film and the film interface largely behind. The arguments of quality/accuracy/use that always happen during a technology transition are resolved in all practical sense. And Kodachrome is just an historical memory and words in a Paul Simon song.
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