The shooting experience

In the past, I’ve written about our own emotional/ personal motivations, concepts of idealised hardware and even why hardware itself can be a strong creative motivator. I’ve also talked about the appliance-camera and the ideal format. We’ve defined the concept of a shooting envelope – i.e. the breadth of scenarios under which a camera can deliver most or all of its maximum image quality potential – and the degree to which that’s operator dependent (i.e. heavily). I’ve even talked a lot about what makes sense from a commercial and business standpoint, but I don’t think I’ve ever really examined the experience of the process as a whole – as an enthusiast and hobbyist and somebody seeking enjoyment in both the journey and the results. That’s the purpose of this article.

Firstly, the included images were chosen deliberately to illustrate one point: the concept of transience. The arrangement of subject elements or light didn’t hold for very long; in some cases, the whole scene was almost in continuous flux. Though it’s taken as given that time is not cyclical as we experience it*, and any given set of events and spatial arrangements happens but once – the speed at which said events unfold can of course change dramatically. A studio scene, for instance, is considered static because we can set it up exactly the same again at will. A sporting function or explosion is not, given that events are both causal and may also be destructive. Photography as an art form is arguably at its strongest at the two extremes: when the scene can be set up precisely to reflect the vision of the artist, and when the event is much too transient to observe properly with the naked eye. In both situations, the image fundamentally presents to us something which we cannot easily see otherwise. Without belabouring the point, this is important: if a camera does not enable us to either translate an idea, preserve a moment or present something otherwise unseen: it isn’t very useful as a tool, no matter how pretty or expensive or high-resolving it might be.

*It may well be in other dimensions or to other frames of reference, but that’s beyond the scope of this article and this site.

Shifting gears a bit, let’s talk about shot confidence: how certain are you that you will ‘nail the image’ when you hit the shutter? Moreover, how certain are you that you will be able to get the maximum output out of the system**? Some cameras are better at this than others, and sometimes these parameters change depending on the specific setup. For example: whilst M4/3 has a generally high confidence level, it’s a function of the peak system output not being that high, DOF covering for small focus errors or subject motion between focus lock and capture, and a small sensor meaning light, small lens elements – that can move quickly and focus quickly. The sensor size and resolution is conducive to high readout rates, which in turn means high CDAF speeds. Distilled to its greatest extreme, a very small sensor with fixed focus lens is high confidence – but low potential. On the other hand, you have something like as H6D-100c: if you pair that with say, a manual focus CFE 5.6/350 Zeiss Superachromat from the V system and attempt to shoot that handheld in marginal light, then you’ve got extremely high potential but zero confidence: you’re really asking for trouble. On the other hand, add a tripod and a couple of Broncolor strobes, and you’re talking something else entirely: potential andconfidence.

**For those who argue that sharpness, resolution etc. doesn’t matter – then I’ll argue you should probably buy the most responsive, highest-confidence camera you can, instead of chasing other intangibles. For the rest of us, if we can have it all – why settle?

I think you can probably see where I’m driving with this: what we’d ideally like is high confidence and high potential. Fortunately, what makes the equation simpler for most is that confidence is quite well correlated to potential: the higher the potential, the lower the confidence under most situations – much like a performance car. The caveat is that if you know you’re only ever going to drive on a track, then slicks are fine – but not if you live somewhere tropical that might result in regular deluges. I’d suggest approaching it in this fashion: decide what your most demanding output level is going to be (social media, 4K monitor, small print, large print, super large gallery print etc.) and then go from there. Select the highest confidence system for your specific needs, and do so objectively: even if you emotionally feel you like camera A more than camera B, in the long run, you’ll probably come to appreciate camera B more if it delivers. (A long time ago, I came to this conclusion with my D800E long term review: rational love. It was not a camera that I had any emotional attachment to, but I came to appreciate for its reliability and ability to consistently deliver under a wide shooting envelope.)

The whole topic of confidence rolls up nicely again into the overall shooting experience: if you’re pretty sure you’re going to get the shot, that implies a lot of other ducks must line up correctly too: ergonomics/haptics, responsiveness, autofocus (or manual focus aids), lens quality, shot to shot time, power on times etc. There are a lot of individual parameters that we need to focus on when designing or optimising a camera: for example, whilst high burst rates are nice to have, I’d rather have a burst rate matched to buffer flushing time so that you don’t land up with a long wait after a burst. And I’d much rather have consistent responsiveness – shutter lag, AF lag etc. over just about anything else, but at the same time – if you have a perfect shutter where you can really feel the break point, you might find yourself not needing burst modes at all. Here’s an example: there are compacts that can do 20fps bursts, but you never use them because it’s so fiddly to engage and you land up with caveats like blackout, long buffer clearing, no AF or AE; yet on the other hand, manual film cameras like a Hasselblad V never feel restrictive – because one’s inputs are instant; the camera responds at whatever speed the operator is capable of. Missed shots are not because the camera wasn’t ready or was locked up in some electronic process.

The more complex cameras get – the more important intelligent design and default configuration choices become. The recent D850, for instance, has no fewer than 53 custom functions (not even counting submenus, some nested three levels deep, or other configuration menus) and ~34 external controls (some are capable of multiple functions, for instance the D pad, joystick or drive mode selector). It is insanely configurable – if you cannot make it do what you want, go back and read the manual – but at the same time, intensely confusing if you have not used it for a while. This results in a weird situation: high confidence with familiarity; low confidence with infrequent use. You can however pick up an X1D and pretty much know exactly what it’s going to do based on the home/status screen. The tradeoff is it does less, but at the same time I have to ask myself how often I’ve needed quiet continuous shutter with bursts and multiple image bracketed sequences plus AF tracking. (The answer is never.) We could, for instance, get around the camera shake problem by setting a high default auto ISO shutter speed multiple, but make it adjustable should you want to change it – but by default, there’s no need to. The default configuration out of the box should be the optimal one, not an arbitrary one (as so often happens now). It should almost guide you as to how best to shoot the camera to give the highest confidence result. I have no idea if the other companies think about this, but given the way the cameras are set up (and sometimes controls are duplicated) – I’m not so sure. But I know that we have to: ultimately, if the shooting experience isn’t good, then we simply won’t want to take pictures. MT

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