For all my love of technology I have come to the realisation that I spend an awful lot of time swearing at it, in its many shapes & forms. But what recently surprised me is quite how much of that swearing is done at my camera.
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| Yeah, that's right, focus on the gravel. I'm sure it contains some rare and fascinating aggregate. |
I love my digital camera. For too long, since some grit destroyed my last-camera-but-one and a combination of a go-kart-related injury and me losing it in a bar did for the last one (OK, so on balance losing it turned out to be more fatal than my mate running it over), I had no camera other than the one hiding behind the screen-lock and loading time of my phone; so to regain the familiar presence of a point-and-shoot snapper at my hip was a feeling of freedom and reassurance that the world was once again mine to capture (in a presently non-giant-robot-related sense). Although there's no beating a huge, expensive SLR for quality of shots or the simple beauty of the composure, I don't want to have to do the agonising maths entailed in deciding whether to bring something like that along with me whenever I step out of the front door. Am I likely to want it? Can I carry it around all day? Will it be safe? Will I lose it? Will (as happened to a devastated friend of mine) I put it down a little too close to a candle and melt my £300 telephoto lens? Nope, I wanted something I could just tuck into my jeans pocket every day and go from opportunity to shot in less than 10 seconds. And that's exactly what I got. So why does it frustrate me so much?
Because it's bloody stupid, that's why.
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| I bet she's taking a good picture. Damn her eyes. |
Don't get me wrong here. This camera represents the most I've ever spent on a piece of photographic equipment and it has the bells and whistles to show it. It's shock-proof, dust-proof, waterproof (to 5 metres), has a telescopic internal optical zoom (that means no projecting lens to get grit stuck in it), a touch-screen and a switch-on-to-shot time that means I rarely miss a thing. Yet when, in the run-up to buying it, I noticed a photographer friend of mine scowling at his (he'd bought the same model for much the same reason as me, although to supplement his existing SLR) and asked him if he'd recommend it, I was baffled by his reply: "This camera has almost everything I wanted. And I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy." Well of course I ignored him, didn't I?
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| I'm a sucker for a special feature. |
You see, apart from an "intelligent" (woeful) "touch-to-focus" system, my camera (as with many more recent models) boasts a "superior auto" facility, in which on-board software cunningly identifies what it thinks I'm trying to take a photo of and automatically adjusts its settings accordingly. In fractions of a second it will adjust the settings to take into account light levels, colour saturation and even more complex things such as the presence of faces, horizons or moving objects at different depths of field (although it has such an adorably loose definition of what constitutes a face that it brings to mind the various infant face-recognition experiments of the 1970s & 80s - and has taught me a new word: pareidolia). The problem is, it's just good enough to be infuriating. Sure, it's fantastic if you want to focus on your friends for a quick snap, or catch an opportunity-shot of some vandals running away from smashing up some bus the other day (see picture), but if you want to try something more ambitious you're back into the realms of chance. Because, for all its "intelligence" (or even "superior"ity), it's all just software looking at what's in front of it and taking a punt at what it thinks you might want.
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| That's the last time you'll smash up a 57 on a Friday afternoon. |
Right now, well into the second century of photography, the best way to take a photo is still to spend half your life savings on a box of mirrors and glass, go on a photography course and learn how to tweak your apertures and focal lengths yourself by turning physical dials. Sure, for art exhibitions and weddings I completely understand this, but what you should be appreciating is the photographer's eye for composition, lighting and focus, rather than their ability to phycially tweak their dials in the right way at the right time. The thing is, SLRs are no longer the only cameras capable of taking such shots, when nowadays even mobile phones are packing high-resolution cameras; the problem is getting out of the realms of chance and into getting the shot you want rather than what you end up with after you press the button and your camera guesses what you meant.
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| We'll never know what this was meant to be. |
Modern digital cameras have tried to overcome the technical difficulties of photography by introducing a baffling array of "scene selections" that pre-configure settings such as lighting, colour-saturation, shot speed and aperture, or even by including a manual focus option, but often the action of finding and configuring these takes long enough that the moment is lost, even if you can find the appropriate one and aren't forced to work it out through trial and error. I found, with an old camera, that I could take excellent "motion-streak" photos by setting it to "night mode" with a slow flash and a long exposure. My new camera, of course, has a much better "night mode", which uses advanced software to carefully remove this effect, thus improving actual night shots and ruining my burgeoning artistic endeavour. What if I wanted it blurry, dammit?
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| No, no, no. Look, the light's got all smeared... |
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| There, that's better. This is a Night Shot. Party time. |
You shouldn't need to schlep around a digital SLR the size (and value) of a small child in order to take the snaps that your compact has the ability, just not the inclination, to take. The problem is not that digital compact cameras don't have the settings or features required to take the photographs that we want, it's just that they're too buried in software to be accessible (or, if accessible, user-friendly).
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| Aha! When I focus on the leaf, lock the focus, then very carefully move the camera over whilst maintaining the same relative distance I can... This is ridiculous. |
But that's only a hop and a step away from where the technology needs to be.
Last year the iWorld (and nearly the rest of the world) went iMad for Siri, the sinister in-phone butler that does pretty well at turning "natural language" commands into instructions that it can follow (with some exceptions). So "What's the weather like?" brings up a weather map and "What am I doing on Tuesday, my life is hollow?" returns a non-judgmental look at your agenda. Rather less fanfare greeted Google Goggles, which does its best at recognising objects that the phone camera is pointing at and trying to identify and find links to them. If somebody were to put the two of these things together we're not a million miles away from a "virtual photographer" that can take simple requests about what to photograph and how to do so. How many times have we cursed aloud at our digital cameras over their choice of lighting or focus, when we could be using pretty much the same strings of words (barring the odd profanity) as instructions just as we line up our shot?
"I want to take the picture just as the foot touches the [blue] ball."
"I want to take the picture just as the first person crosses the [white] line."
"I want a picture of the [red] bug with the background defocused [not the side of that bloody leaf again]."
"I want a picture of their faces as they cross the line [not a blur in front of a perfectly-focused tree in the middle-distance]."
"No, I wanted the Sun reflecting on that puddle, not the random arrangement of sticks at the side that looks like an emoticon smiley. Even though that is quite cool."
"Just for once I want a picture of the moon."
OK, so perhaps in the short term we might not be able to engage in such artistic discourse with our little photographic friend, but the software is certainly there to interpret simple instructions regarding colour and even shape, as well as key words such as "horizon" and "person", which would certainly help in several of the situations above. Of course I would fully expect to find myself swearing at my poor, hapless camera as it found itself misinterpreting my words for the n-th time, but at least it would be able to triangulate what I'm saying with what it's seeing, rather than just taking a punt based on the latter.
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| No, you're right. The distorted reflection of that overhanging hedge does hold more artistic interest than this spider walking on the frikkin' water. |
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| Can you see this baby frog poking its head out of the water to take its first breath of air? No, me neither. But the limescale on the side of the tank came out beautifully. |
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| Yes I do appreciate the almost fractal-like branching of the leaf lobes, but I wouldn't have minded a better look at the robin chewing on that live wasp. |
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| Ooh, look! You can actually see the bubbles in the plastic of that bench! |
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| Typical. There you are, carefully lining up your shot of some leaves when a bunch of deer wander in and ruin it. Joke's on them though - still got my leaf shot. |
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| Neither rain nor snow nor performing slug will stay this camera from the swift completion of its appointed duty to accurately document the wood-grains on this floor. |
And who knows, maybe someday not too far down the line we'll be able to wirelessly think our photographic criteria to our digital photographic assistants, or DPAs (to mint a term), rather than leaving all the mind-machine interfacing to fighter pilots and the terminally locked-in. And eventually, once we've finally got the things hooked directly into our optic nerves, we'll have nobody to blame for our botched shots but ourselves, our short attention spans and the fact that all our eyes ever really see is the inside of a bio-storage pod.
Right, I'm going out to the garden to take a photo of that spider web that some inconsiderate arachnid has built right next to a feature that looks like Chris Packham. Wish me luck.
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| Wherever there is an animal doing a thing, there you will find him. |
Dammit.
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