The Online Photographer has recently posted A couple of items questioning the automatic modes on cameras, in particular Fujifilms face recognition technology where Mike Johnston says
If You Think You Need This, Kill Yourself
… and …
I call this last type “WYAFY” technology, for “wipes your ass for you.” (‘Kay, that’s not inflammatory.
I know these things are written partly with humour (?) in mind but I’m afraid my reaction is who put you in charge?
Why shouldn’t manufacturers and consumers be drawn to features such as these? Who cares if you don’t think much about them? Just because you or I do not find a use for something does not make it useless. To answer Oren, yes people do use scene modes, uh, why do you think they keep including them?
Need I remind the experts over at “theonlinephotographer” that sometimes people just want to have nice looking pictures? Have they never heard of adding features just for marketing benefit?
Some people don’t actually like the process of taking a photograph but enjoy the results. If facial recognition works for that great, otherwise not so great. Some people like having gizmos that “do wizzy stuff”. If it makes photography or camera-ownership for some people more fun then that is fine too. In the end the customer should be the judge in my opinion, not some guy on the internet.
My belief is a camera owner should be able to cover their lens in marmalade and it should be ok for, say, Nikon to release a camera with an auto-jam-smearing feature. There are enough serious things to get narked about.
3 Comments
Yeah I think while I do enjoy the process of taking photographs what got me into it in the first place was looking at them, and actually when you think about it, holding them in your hands. In a print all you have is the end product. Without EXIF who knows what process you went through to get the result? Should it ever matter?
I wouldn’t go into a gallery and ask to speak to the photographer about his/her settings and procedure before purchasing a print so it probably doesn’t matter at the fine art end of the equation ether.
I agree, Chris. There are photographers who think about equipment a lot of the time. A subset of these photographers denigrate those with lesser methods or equipment – or those who concentrate on having fun behind the camera – or those who care about the final product more than having a certain level of purity in regard to method and equipment. Great blog.
I agree with Chris, and also with Jim’s comment. But, as a digital engineer, I would like to add something else.
These are camera features that were engineered years ago. As time goes by, chips get smaller, faster, have more capabilities, and require less power. Therefore, keeping the portrait modes and such on a camera adds almost no expense any more (for the camera companies). It basically costs them nothing to keep them in there, and they have more features to market.
This is also related to why I think companies like Canon and Nikon release ‘marginal upgrades’ to cameras like the D70s is when compared to the D70. Simply put, chip obsolescence. I never saw documented proof of this with the D70s/D70, but I’ve dealt with this where I work.
Where I work, we constantly have to deal with chips becoming obsolete. Sometimes this requires a new layout of the circuit boards, and hey, while we’re in there let’s add this, or take away that…
But mostly what you refer to here just comes down to plain old fashioned snobbery. Some guys don’t think a camera is a ‘real’ camera if it has these automatic modes, but boy if you tried to take away their auto focus or the ttl light meter or whatever they would be cryin’ like crack babies. If they were as hard core as they like to think, they would all be using 40′s era Leica’s and stuff like that.
In my D70s, I set it up for max saturation and other things to give me that saturated look of the slide films I used to use, but instead of going back into the custom settings and making half a dozen adjustments, if I just want to take a snapshot of my daughters around the house, I simply turn the dial to the portrait setting, the camera sets itself for lower contrast, lower saturation, etc. I then take my photo or photos of them and switch back to manual or shutter priority, the ones I use the most, and have my vivid settings back.
I LOVE the new technology and the abilities to switch this and that to adapt my camera to the most appropriate setting. The picture is the thing for me, NOT how I got there.