Pixiq

When I first got my first digital camera, a Nikon D40 with an 18-55m lens, I remember how surprised I was that I couldn’t find a lens aperture ring. There was none and the shutter speed dial had disappeared and become an “Exposure Mode” dial. Looking at the lens I saw that what had been the focusing ring was now the zoom control. Since then this arrangement has become the norm for digital cameras.

But wait aperture, shutter speed and focus are the only camera controls a photographer has and now suddenly they are gone. What I mean is that these controls moved from physical things on the camera body to virtual controls in the  camera circuitry. These controls are literally taken out of the photographer’s hands.  

The hand is at the heart of the creative process, the tool that makes art. It holds the paintbrush, the clarinet and the camera and under the direction of the mind and eye produces art. For over thirty years I’ve photographed crafts which are of course handmade objects.

The link between the hand and art is powerful and just as important in photography as in any other art.

When you talk to older photographers, especially those who use or used rangefinder film cameras, you hear how physical the relationship is between the hand and the camera. I’m one of them and I developed a way of holding my rangefinder so that my fingers rested naturally on the various controls. One finger near the shutter release one on the shutter speed dial, a forefinger on the lens focusing tab and so on. The physicality was most pronounced for me in street shooting where like Henri Cartier-Bresson I sought to capture the “decisive moment.” Bresson was one of the greatest photographers and hardly a small man. Yet he could “dance” through a crowd almost invisibly, popping up only for a few seconds to shoot a frame, his large hands enfolding his inconspicuous Leica. The man and camera merged.

Bresson, like other great photographers developed a “high touch” relationship with his camera. Certainly it must have been that way for the earliest photographers who like Maxime du Camp had to not only haul around large wooden glass plate camera but loads of processing equipment. He took his gear to the Pyramids and to Aswan in 1850, and with the French writer Gustave Flaubert often acting as his reluctant schlepper produced the world’s first travel photographs.

Long ago, I had a photography teacher who would assign his students the task of going into a darkened room to practice handling a camera. We were to work the camera controls until we learned how, by touch alone, to correctly change and set the focus, the shutter speeds and the aperture settings.

Crazy? I don’t think so. He believed that like practicing musical scales on a guitar fret board over and over it was how you taught your body to do your art.

Learning to control the camera by touch was the same process of repetition and practice as we use to learn to play music. We also had to learn the “notes” of each control. We had to learn how each of the aperture stops related to depth of field and sharpness and how f/4 differs from f/8. Similarly we had to know how going from 1/500^th of a second to 1/30^th of a second altered the image. Like playing music he felt it was one thing to be able to finger a G chord, but quite another to understand how it differed in texture and shading from an E chord.

But what is the future of photography if no one has to practice scales any more or learn the subtly of the notes?

Taking pictures has always involved my hands and my eyes as well. And let’s not overlook the physical role the eye plays either. Looking through a viewfinder brings the eye and “into” the camera. We slip into the scene our attention framed and focused on the activity in front of us. Pressing the camera against the face also supports it. Compare that to holding a camera at arm’s length to see the LCD monitor. Now the camera is far from the eye and our bodies. It is detached and it is  much harder to see into the image.

All of this has been the most difficult part of the transition to digital photography. Moving the camera controls to the inner workings of the camera may be a convenience for some but for me it makes using M, A or S exposure modes (manual, aperture preferred or shutter preferred) tricky and awkward, despite thumbwheels and toggles. I very much miss real manual focusing and can’t  think of anything that will ever replace the beauty and accuracy of the overlapping images of a coincidence rangefinder.

Beyond my personal peeve about the loss of these physical controls I’ve come to wonder if camera automation isn’t leading to a strange sort of karaoke photography where the camera selects the tune and makes the music and the photographer just sings along as best they can. I feel that I’m see less creative use of camera controls with fewer images created using selective focus, blur or stop motion and there’s a lot more uniformity in how ambient light itself is recorded.  

Worse yet I can see all this creeping into my own photographs too, especially when I shoot in Automatic modes and it worries me. I fear that I too am losing touch with my camera.

Additonal note: Looks like the engineers designing the new Fujifilm FinePix X100 were thinking about this very issue. Read how they approached designing the "touch" of this new camera at http://www.finepix-x100.com/en/story/craftsmanship