As someone who spends quite a bit of time with a viewfinder stuck to his eyeball, and has used cameras ranging from an ancient Canon 1DS, through various compact cameras (including Micro 4/3 cameras) to my latest camera – a Leica M8, it is hardly surprising that I have some strong opinions on cameras. Here are just a few …
Camera user interfaces are too complex
In some ways there are too many buttons doing too much – it is all too likely to result in accidental changes whilst shooting. Which is the last thing that you want! The important thing when shooting is just that – not fiddling with the settings. Anything that gets in the way of the most difficult part of making images – composing that image – is a compromise on what a camera should be.
Whilst there are many settings that can be changed, it is rare that someone wants to make a change to say the ISO setting during shooting. Or the colour balance – as someone who always shoots raw, I have no use whatsoever for the ability to change the colour balance on the camera. Or the shutter speed when you are not shooting in “Manual” (which rather few people do).
Of course getting a bunch of photographers to agree on what controls live on the camera to allow immediate settings changes is more or less impossible without increasing the number of controls to the current level of confusion. Different kinds of photography call for different settings to be adjusted; if I’m shooting landscapes, I don’t want any kind of autofocus interfering (although automatically adjusting to the hyperfocal distance would be handy) and when I’m shooting people I may want to fiddle with the ISO setting (even accepting a bit of noise to avoid motion blur).
Some controls can not only live on the lens, but live there perfectly naturally (as someone who uses old-fashioned manual lenses, I may be prejudiced here) – the manual focus control, and the aperture control. No need for controls for these under the thumb!
The Leica wins here with only a small number of controls without going into the menus – it is perfectly possible for any photographer to pick up a Leica and immediately start using it. Of course the downside of the Leica is that it isn’t as flexible as many modern cameras. And that is something else that is important – cameras need to be as flexible as possible.
That would seem to be a conflicting requirement, but can quite easily be catered for by allowing settings to be changed through the menus on the big LCD panel that appears on practically all cameras. And assigning those settings to a set of user-settings which can be quickly selected using a dial on the camera – perhaps that dial that already selects from different scene settings on existing cameras.
The key here is to allow the photographer to change predefined settings on that dial so those who want full control can have that. Indeed it would be handy if the camera were supplied with something to stick over the existing dial to give numbers instead of pre-defined scenes.
Time to rethink the viewfinder
By which I mean not that large LCD screen on the back of the camera. Whilst that’s pretty nifty for inside shots where keeping the camera as steady as possible (whilst hand-holding) is not that vital, it fails miserably when outside. Too many times the screen is so washed out by sunlight that making sure the composition is right never mind the focus is impossible.
When pretty much the only choice was some kind of optical viewfinder – either through the lens as in an SLR or a separate viewfinder as in TLR or rangefinder cameras – it was quite impossible to do much with the location of the viewfinder. Whilst electronic viewfinders have their limitations, it is possible at last to do interesting things with the location.
So why are all electronic viewfinders nailed to the top of the camera as an optical viewfinder needs to be ? If you are lucky you will get something that rotates from horizontal to vertical – which is very useful, but does not go quite far enough.
The camera (or rather the lens) needs to be positioned to get the shot – perhaps down on the floor for an “interesting” angle. And the viewfinder belongs where the photographer’s eye is. Which is not usually on the floor – and remember that some of us are old enough that we find “interesting” angles difficult to get into.
This could be done quite easily with an EVF attached to glasses with an HDMI cable (or wireless connection) to the camera. And whilst we’re talking about EVF’s, they should be connected to the camera using an open-standard interface, so that EVF’s can be moved from camera to camera.
Open-source The Firmware
Whatever you do with the firmware of a camera, there are those who will not be totally happy with the result. The advantage of an open-source firmware is that anyone who is unsatisfied can hire someone to make modifications to the firmware.
And that may result in the incorporation of features that a camera manufacturer may later realise is a really good idea. So why not ?