- the ripped bystander
- Aug 25, 2021
- 9 min read
Updated: Sep 11, 2021
I noticed that most of the photographers own the best, or almost the best, camera in the world. It seems that when we choose a camera and buy lenses, everyone wants to reassure himself... like I spent so much money, that I couldn't mistake...
Most of the photographers focus on performances like max ISO, images per seconds, speed and precision of the auto-focus system, picture resolution, size of the sensor... My feeling is that all these features have been proposed by camera companies to stimulate the market but have little connections with photographer needs. Actually, photographers have little needs. Let's examine the needed features without being contaminated by companies and media.
- Size and weight. If you are a camera fanatic i.e. you spend more time in playing with your camera, or shooting flowers, insects,... while you usually don't even notice them... so if you spend more time in such practices than in capturing and telling stories with photographs, yes, you probably don't care the size and weight of a camera. For all other photographers interested in presenting a personal point of view about life, small size and light weight are obviously compulsory features. The only exception I found is coming from a professional photographer that told me "with a small camera in front of my customers, I don't look serious"... Something big suggests that he has a better equipment than others... and implicitly, that he makes better photographs... ok, why not? Business is business... With this perspective, it's not suprising that, for photographers not involve in business, the most bought cameras today are the one in smart-phones and the mirrorless ones. For professional photographers that need to look bigger, why not a medium format?... this is the biggest camera you can find...
- Simple controls. Control features are a way to promote camera capabilities when you are a manufacturer like "if you buy my camera, you could modify the color rendering when shooting", or "you will have a sport scene selector", and so on... A couple of weeks ago, I was with a excellent photographer that decided to use his old big reflex camera to shoot street portrait with soft-boxes... He spent most of the time in searching for flash control features because he couldn't remember... Actually, from a pure technical perspective, tuning a camera relies on adjusting 3 plus 1 variables (shutter speed, aperture, sensitivity plus brought light by flashes sometimes). Therefore, it consists in moving into a n-dimensional space (n=3 or 4) with one contraint i.e. if you adjust n-1 variables, the last one is constrained. You just have to understand the consequence of choosing a fast or low shutter speed, a large or small aperture (but it's not really the camera) or a low or high sensitivity. Therefore, the main controls should be related to the shutter speed, the sensor sensitivity and the aperture tuning although it's more natural to be on the lens itself. In case you are using flashes, the light power control should also be available. So, I wonder why there are so much controls on some cameras? Leica photographers know it for a long time: the core photography can be very simple. Moreover, with raw shooting (which is another fundamental feature in my opinion), auto-iso (another core feature) and multi-zone light measurement (another one), the tolerances are so large that you have to be really motivated to miss a tuning. I would say that nowadays the most difficult is to give an appearance of bad adjustment in a photograph, reason why probably some fine art photographers return to analog photography. Raw shooting is interesting because it turns away the decisions about the rendering of photographs after the shooting: it frees the fundamental shooting step from any worrying about details. Just point and shoot... the details will be solved later. Photography is born a long time ago and there were a lot of excellent street photographers in the past. In my opinion, this is the most difficult type of photography because your captures should be very precise, the famous decisive moment... and you don't have time for thinking about the best tuning. But our ancestor did it. Their secret? Anticipation... Being always ready for a capture. For that, you need to permanently adjust your control variables plus the focus distance to be ready to shoot in case a decisive moment appears. Automatisms might be very performant, but your brain is not and anticipation is the still the best way for street photography. My conclusion is that the more basic the controls for adjusting the 3/4 tuning variables, the better it is.
- Short time to shoot. For many kinds of photographs, it won't matter but if you are interested in live photography of people, capturing magic moments like in street photography, then a short time to shoot is compulsory: you can't wait for a second for the camera to be ready to shoot, even half a second is a lot. You also can't keep your camera on all the time because of the limited batteries. Unfortunately, when people buy a camera, they compare features with sometimes a little experience of what is essential... and the time to shoot is mostly omitted... why? I guess either some manufacturers can't reach good performance or customers don't consider it as a key feature.
- Image per seconds. Only for lazy sport photographers that can't anticipate... It turns your camera into a movie camera. Seriously, it can be useful to take several shots without moving too much in low light to merge pictures and reduce the camera sensor noise... but requirements are not too demanding: 2 images per second is enough... it depends on how long you can stay awake without moving. All the cameras on the market match this requirement.
- Silent shutter. If you want to capture scenes with people in actions without asking for the permission, electronic shutter is a must because it is absolutely silent (on some cameras): no one could know whether you pressed the shutter or not... except reading it on your eyes...
- Auto-iso. It is an auto-tuning mechanism for sensor sensitivity. It relies on a experimental model that states: if your lens has a focal length f and your scaling (I avoid using "crop", which is negative) factor characterizing your sensor (1 for 24x36mm, 1.5 for APS-C, 2 for micro 4/3,...) is s, then the minimum shutter speed for getting clear pictures is equal to 1/(s*f) seconds. The mechanism will try to reach this shutter speed by increasing the sensitivity if needed and adjusting the aperture if possible.
- Picture resolution. Typical retina screen high-resolution is 2048x1280 pixels (it's higher that my own screen because I can't read resulting small letters) i.e. 2Mpixels... If you are a kind of random photo shooter, you may want to re-frame your pictures, let's say you keep only half on each dimension. It leads to 8 Mpixels. The sensors you can find nowadays are minimum 12Mpixels (and you have to search a lot for such a low resolution). The highest the resolution, the biggest is the size of each photo file: 12Mpixels with a usual color depth of 14 bits lead to 21Mbytes files, 24Mpixels with a usual color depth of 16 bits lead to 42Mbytes files and 80Mpixels with a color depth of 16 bits leads to 140Mbytes... 7 raw pictures occupy 1Gbytes!!! Get ready for buying drives... Moreover higher resolution yields smaller surface for photosites, and then lower sensitivity (when comparing the same generation of sensors)... Some people would say that it might be interested to print big posters, which requires higher resolutions but (1) there are excellent interpolation algorithms that generate intermediate pixels (2) high-definition very realistic pictures is not necessary your target.
- Max iso. This is the maximum sensitivity that can be met for an acceptable image quality. What is a good maximum value? If you want to do high resolution night photographies, you should use a tripod because you search for the best image quality (100 ISO or 200 ISO) and the maximum dynamic range (the variations between the darkest to the lightest areas). It can be useful for people in motion in low light conditions (indoor or night context) but (1) low light means often poor light... even if you can capture something, without shadows, without subtle variations in lights, will the pictures be interesting? (2) low light conditions can be handled with a large aperture lenses but with shallow depth of field (3) small camera sensors use to have more efficient image stabilizers that can even be improved with (manufacturer) lens image stabilizers: consequently, the pictures can be crisp up to one second exposure and even more (4) night photographies do not require very high sensitivity because the picture should be under-exposed by about 2 stops to reproduce the night... otherwise, it will look like the day! (5) even without image stabilization, with short focal length lenses, if you take care of not moving, you can shoot up to 0.5s with an interesting night dreamy effect. As a conclusion, according to my experience, I would say that 3200 ISO is enough even for complex situations... Most cameras are able to produce high quality images at this sensitivy. Some manufacturers produce cameras that can reach 100000 ISO... What for?
- Auto-focus. Camera manufacturers are struggling for fastest and most accurate auto-focus. Nowadays, auto-focus is used by almost every one... except by me. I am wondering why the auto-focus mechanism is useful while focus peaking mechanism is so powerful to assist you in putting things into the crisp area... or out...
There are different contexts.
1) landscape photography. Manual focus with focus peaking is better because you perfectly control what is in the crisp area and not focus in one point like with auto-focus (by default, what you see in the viewfinder is the picture you would capture at maximum aperture... to maximize the light coming in, in particular for feeding the auto-focus system...).
2) street photography. In this context, you have a very short time to shoot a picture. With an auto-focus system, the only way is to use a subject auto-detection feature... that will decide for you what is interesting... Great! Who's the photographer? Who's deciding? The engineers in the manufacturing company? Once again, I'm gonna mention the old-way used by street photographers: anticipation! On manual single focal lenses, when moving the focus ring, you can read the minimum and maximum distances of the crisp area. So you just have to anticipate your position to the subject and you know what will be crisp.
3) studio photography. In studio using flashes, the light uses to be low to avoid impacting the pictures with uncontrolled lightings. In this low-light context, auto-focus systems operate generally poorly... and you have to fight with a manual focus ring which is just an added feature. Real manual focus lenses are designed for easy focusing: there are much more comfortable to use. Nevertheless, I have to admit that manual focus lenses have a drawback in a studio low light context: what you see is what you will get except that if your aperture is small, a very little quantity of light enter the camera to hit the sensor, and the resulting image appearing in the viewfinder is so poor that it becomes tough to focus. I found a workaround in using old lenses from other manufacturers that the one of my cameras and then, using adaptation rings to force the aperture to the maximum at focusing step, and then step down to the pre-defined aperture. Results are quite impressive and it's very easy to manage, easier than with my previous auto-focus lenses I sold.
4) sport photography. I am not a specialist, but when working with tele-lenses on subjects in motion, auto-focus lenses seem to be more useful than manual focus lenses. Actually, my tele-zoom lens is the only auto-focus lens I didn't sold.
- Sensor size. Actually, it's not really a feature but let's discuss a little about it. Here are the typical sensor sizes for cameras:
- GFX medium format: 44x33mm (scale factor: 0.79)
- 35mm "full frame": 36x24mm (scale factor: 1)
- APS-C: 23.6x15.7mm (scale factor: 1.5)
- micro 4/3: 17.3x13mm (scale factor: 2)
Let's compare them with smart-phone typical sensor sizes:
- 1/1.7": 7.6x5.7mm
- 1/1.8": 7.18x5.32mm
- 1/2.5": 5.76x4.29mm
Such a big different in size but is it such a big difference in image quality? I have compared 2 images taken in the same conditions in a room with one top-ranking smart-phone, with one top-ranking APS-C camera (with excellent manual focus lens)... Resulting pictures have been compared on a retina screen. I was very confident... The camera was mine... but yes, the results on the camera was slightly better than the one coming from the smart-phone... in the crisp area... but not that much... the depth of field on the smart-phone was much wider so it was leading to an overall more crisp picture... Of course, the room context gave the advantage to the smart-phone... but the low light should give advantage to the camera...
The sensor size are so different between cameras and smart-phones... At the beginning of digital photography, the camera sensors were smaller: micro 4/3, then APS-C and now full-frame and medium format. I am wondering about the direction of the progress... Usually, sold items are getting smaller with time... It is clear that image quality of smart-phones have been improved... with small-sensors... but for digital camera, it looks like the opposite... sensors become bigger and bigger... and manufacturers use to suggest the bigger the sensor, the higher is the image quality. However, let's state the following facts:
1) the larger the sensor, the shallower the depth of field is, at same aperture (shallow depth of field can nevertheless be obtained with small sensors because there are small lenses with huge aperture, f/0.95 for instance)
2) the larger the sensor, the bigger the lenses are
3) the smaller the sensor, the more the central part of old manual focus lenses will be used... that means less vignetting and less distorsion
According to these facts, I am wondering about the meaning of the permanent increase of sensor sizes. What for? Probably for business purpose... I know excellent photographers that shoot micro 4/3, APS-C and full frame... I could not distinguish between resulting pictures on my screen... even on zooming... but I could distinguish the sizes of the cameras and lenses... and also imagine the size of the hard drives...
As a conclusion, I don't trust manufacturers, magazines, media and dishonest Web influencers who are all focusing on the same aim: getting photographers' money. In the next, I will do my best to carry out fair and neutral analyses... focusing on photography only... For instance, in a future post, I will show a comparison between old lenses and modern ones... An opportunity to wonder again about the direction of the progress...
