This essay wanders around subjects from my new ‘street’ every-day-carry camera to the advantages and disadvantages of viewfinders and JPEGs. Perhaps the place to start is how most people take photographs and what they then do with them. About 1.8 trillion photos are taken annually, translating to 5 billion daily or 57,246 every second. Whoa! The typical smartphone user stores ~2,795 photos in their camera roll. It’s hard to find any statistics for how many are ever printed or even viewed again, but my feeling is that in both cases it is very few. I suppose more find their way on to social media but I suspect their half-life is probably only a day-or-two. My theory is that if a proper camera is used to take a picture then it has a greater chance of being printed and being ‘valued’ by the person who took it. Notice, I avoided using the word ‘photographer’. However, my artist friend Gary responded to my question ‘what makes someone an artist’ with the response, ‘because they say they are’ and so it is that the claim to be a ‘photographer’ appears in so many social media profiles… and in mine! But, I digress – my view (!) has always been that the ‘viewfinder’ is a window onto the world and that it has ‘magical’ properties. For example, it literally focuses attention and can show you things that you would not otherwise have noticed and just passed by. That is how my catch-phrase was born – ‘the closer you look, the more you see’… a phrase particularly applicable to my main interest; macro photography. However, it isn’t just a ‘focusing’ mechanism, it has other magical properties. Every photo captures a moment in time and even though 1.8 trillion photographs are taken every year, each-and-every-one captures a never-to-be-repeated instant. The magic of the moment and seeing things that you might not ordinarily notice, for me gives photography a profound meaning and implies that we should give more thought to the process of capturing images.
Something captures the eye or a situation is created as in a selfie – a phone is lifted to sit at the level of the photographer’s eye and a picture is taken. The phone-camera experience can be close to that of using a ‘real’ camera or very different. I took my first photos 62 years ago using a Kodak Brownie 127. My father later gave me his Agfa Silette 35mm. Both of these cameras had view finders and until I got my first smartphone, that is how I always took photos – look at the image-to-be in the viewfinder and press the button. Simples! The experience with the Brownie consisted of just that; it had a fixed shutter speed of a 1/50th of a second (not even a ‘B’ setting). The Silette was a big step up! It had controls for aperture, shutter speed and a focusing ring – the opportunity was there to ‘compose’ a picture both in terms of what was in the view finder and also what was in focus. There is an awful lot of smart stuff built into a smartphone camera but by-and-large the experience is closer to the Brownie than the Agfa – I say this even though I am aware of the multiple lenses and various ‘modes’ available on phones. The vast majority of smartphone photos are ‘everything-in-focus-all-at-once’. Yes, I know, you can do loads of stuff to change that but the honest truth is that other than using the on-screen two-finger-zoom, most people are ‘Brownie shooters’. Perhaps this is why Gen Z is bringing back the compact camera? With even the most basic compact camera you can more easily control the picture and you are more likely to think about the process of taking the photo. The images from smartphones are now part camera, part algorithm that can add fake bokeh etc and have ‘the AI is in charge’ feel to them. With a dedicated camera, there’s less processing, real bokeh, and you can shoot in RAW to pick and choose how to process the image. However, above all there is that indefinable thing, be it a Brownie or all-singing-all-dancing camera moment, in which you press a real shutter button, an experience that’s enhanced by being in charge of the aperture, shutter speed etc. Then there is the sound of a high quality shutter! Bliss but probably soon to disappear as the global electronic shutter rolls in. I have some not very charitable things to say about people who carry multi-thousand spondulie cameras that are always on ‘iAuto’…but I will keep them to myself.
Ok, so I think real cameras, almost any real camera, is better than a phone. However, just like all smartphones, many every-day-carry camera choices do not have a viewfinder. When I decided I wanted a small every-day-carry camera, the presence or absence of a viewfinder became a real question. I had only ever taken casual photos with a phone – ‘real’ photos were something for my high-end cameras which have electronic view finders (EVFs). Your picture sits in the EVF surrounded with as much or as little, information about the camera’s settings as you want. They work under the desert sun and in a coal cellar. I started to survey the market for a camera that would fit in my pocket. It seemed pretty clear that it should have a viewfinder. However, given the lenses I already had available to me, all m4/3rds, I knew it would have to be an m4/3rds camera. I started out looking at the Pen F, a modern classic with a viewfinder but two things put me off; the age of the Pen F and its cost. The latter speaks to how sought after these little cameras are – they cost almost as much now as they did when they were new in 2016! The Pen F is famed for its layout. Everything falls to the hand/fingers so easily that they rapidly become what any camera should be; an extension of the photographer’s arm and eyes. There were other possible choices from Panasonic in the GX series but I don’t like the layout of Panasonic cameras and the EVFs on the GXs while usable, didn’t look likely to match the experience of the EVFs on my top-of-the-range OM systems cameras. I considered the Pen EP and EPL series. The EPLs (EP Light) were a little too ‘light’ on the technical side – the older EPs with the possibility of a plugin EVF looked to be potential choices. Then I had an epiphany born out of the experience of peering into the waist-level viewfinders of yesteryear. While you have to hold a phone at eye-level, that isn’t true of a camera with a folding screen. Strangely, all my cameras have folding screens and yet I had always used the viewfinder! OM Systems reduced the price of the EP-7 which had been way-too-high and I jumped – no viewfinder or even the possibility of one, but small and with exceptionally well thought-out controls that enable single-handed operation. With the screen folded at 90o to the body and with the camera held at waist-level, hardly anyone notices you are taking a photo. That tell-tale raising of a phone or a viewfinder camera has gone. My worries about the difficulty of taking photos without a viewfinder in very bright light disappeared too. Firstly, the screen is very bright but most importantly unless the sun is directly overhead, held at waist-level, the screen is shaded. With the little kit 14-42mm zoom the camera fits in a coat pocket something that the bump of an EVF would have made more difficult. Mr Snappy 2 the Street Camera was born (Mr Snappy 1 had been my iPhone).
The EP-7 with the kit 14-42mm fits easily into a jacket pocket and weighs very little. This camera is small! The only ‘bump’ is the lens. I chose white because I think it makes it look even less like a camera. The ‘magic’ Color/Mono switch is to left of the lens – it’s hidden here. Everything you need is positioned so it can be operated with one hand. It weighs practically nothing.
These pictures are not here as examples of photographic excellence because they surely are not, but rather because no one noticed I was taking them. Shooting from waist-level and sometimes with one hand you are not seen as a photographer – the World just goes on. All straight from the camera – a little more contrast would have been nice but this was my first experiment with a home-cooked mono profile.
I have always taken pictures in RAW and then ‘developed’ them myself in Affinity Photo. The experience of having an ‘every-day-carry’ camera may have changed that. The main reason for looking at JPEGs as the main file format for street photographs was born out of the little switch on the front of both the Pen F and EP-7. Marked Color/Mono, it would be easy to ignore as just being a gimmick but in fact it unlocks a new experience of black and white photography in which you can tweak every nuance. When you have set up the black and white mode in this camera, what you see on the screen has already been crafted and a RAW file becomes much less necessary. Indeed, it is an experience very like that of deciding on what film you would put in your 35mm camera and how you would choose to develop it in the darkroom for a particular ‘look’. That little switch and the control it allows is a work of genius and I have to say that it also probably underlies the success of the older and now classic, Pen F. Would a viewfinder add anything? It might, but so far I haven’t wanted one though for some lenses an optical viewfinder (OVF) is a possibility and I think the retro ‘bright-line’ experience of an OVF maybe something I buy into at least as far as having one in my pocket as an option is concerned. When you switch to JPEG for black and white photography, it raises another question about how you take photographs. If you have created and accepted the look of the image displayed on the camera screen it becomes obvious and feels right, that with a little more thought one could compose photos intended for use without any cropping – i.e the JPEG IS the finished photo. There is something ‘retro’ and ‘right’ about that experience and I see it as a bridge between film and digital photography and it has brought me some extra joy.
I am about to buy a 2nd hand Olympus 17mm f1.8 lens as an alternative to the albeit very good digital zoom kit lens that comes with the EP-7. The old version has a focus ring and focus clutch. I remember from my days with film cameras that zone-focusing was a good on-the-street trick. While speedy auto-focus may be considered to have rendered it irrelevant, turning it off and in advance manually setting the focus and the aperture allows one to concentrate on composition and telling the story. Damn, I am beginning to think I want a film camera! But meantime, long live Mr Snappy 2!
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