I recently talked a lot about photographic equipment, and my annoyance with all kinds of nonsense I’ve recently seen on the Internet about how Leica or Fuji is “special” because it has “that something” or encourages you to take pictures with how cool it is and how you form a synergic relationship with it, unlike Sony or Canon which is “just a tool”. I get it, it’s a real phenomenon and I’ve personally experienced it, and what’s interesting is that it literally never happened with the kind of equipment you would expect. It didn’t happen with Leica, which is the first camera I shot with, or Minolta, which is probably the only camera brand I’m sentimental about because it was the one I used for, well, decades. It wasn’t Olympus E-1 which was justifiably praised as ergonomically great. It wasn’t the Canon 5d.
Fuji Astia 100F, EOS 3, EF 85mm f/1.8
It was Canon EOS 3, the camera that was widely criticised for being “too electronic”, with lights and whistles and what not. That was the first camera with which I experienced camera completely vanishing from the process of taking pictures. I didn’t have to thumb-wind film like I did with Minolta X-300, which made me remove my eye from the viewfinder, since I use the left eye to focus (I’m highly ambidextrous, but I use left parts exclusively for certain things, and right parts for others, for instance I use mouse with my right hand and touchpad with my left, and so on), I could do absolutely everything on the camera without breaking eye contact with the subject through the camera, and the autofocus was scanning my eye with a laser to decide what I’m looking at and choose the appropriate AF point. Also, everything was extremely fast to the point of being instantaneous and seamless – AF, film transport and so on. Unfortunately, I got it about the time when film was solidly on its way to history, in 2006, but it was absolutely the best camera I ever used at that point, film or digital. Returning to the 5d felt like going down at least one quality class, but it was digital and the pictures it produced were amazing, so I didn’t complain.
The worst experience I had with cameras recently, on the other hand, was with the Mamiya 645. I shot a few rolls of film with it, decided it’s heavy, clunky, required lots of adjustments on my part and acquiring muscle memory in order to be proficient, and it was a poor fit for my style. I returned to the Olympus E-PL1, which is also an ergonomically awful camera because it doesn’t have a viewfinder and autofocus is horrible, with a feeling of relief because it was so much better than the Mamiya, and the image quality of the Olympus was actually as good with my Epson 4990 flatbed scanner. The problem with those bad cameras is that they make the experience all about themselves. It’s no longer about you, what you see or feel, but about what the camera can do, what it’s good at, how heavy it is, how much of a nuisance it is, and I think it’s exactly that which eventually forms that Stockholm syndrome relationship with equipment, which is hard to use, makes you work hard to adjust to its quirks and nonsense, and is also expensive, so when you actually manage to jump through all the hoops, you get an endorphin rush as if you achieved something.
I recently took a picture with the Sony A7RV and the FE 35mm f/1.4 GM in sunset, and it’s one of my recent favourites because of how well it captures the feeling of clarity and peace, of a day coming to its end:
Sony A7RV, EF 35mm f/1.4 GM
I saw the light, the colours and the motive, framed the composition, pointed the AF to the plane with the branches and some leaves and made it somewhat parallel to the sensor in order to get the dept of field at f/1.4, and squeezed off the shutter. The camera was out of the way and just did its thing to a degree I haven’t experienced since EOS 3, although A7II was also similar, barring autofocus which is a nuisance. I think EOS 3 and A7RV actually do the things people ascribe to Leica and Fuji – they get out of the way and become an extension of your will and intent to the point that you lose awareness that you’re using a camera at all. It’s just that they don’t put you through boot camp and try to break you in in order for you to be allowed to just take the pictures you want to take without putting the damn camera on a shrine because you dedicated half your life to learning how to work it. I think that’s why the hipsters hate certain cameras and brands and say they are “just tools”. It’s because those cameras don’t lock them up in a basement and beat them until they call them “daddy”. They just do what you ask them to, and if the results aren’t good, you don’t get to say “ah, but you don’t know how many hoops I had to jump through in order to get that”. 🙂
Every single photo I took with EOS 3 was incredibly easy to take, and regardless of the fact that I got to shoot only a few rolls of slide through it, on those rolls was an inordinate percentage of my all-time favourites. Sony seems to be very much like that. It just gets out of the way and does its thing, and this allows me to get into my thing. And, believe it or not, “my thing” isn’t dealing with camera’s bullshit. It’s capturing the moment and the feeling.