After getting the MX-1 and another XZ-2, I started pulling cameras out of the box I was going to sell to KEH. I pulled out the Panasonic Lumix LX7, a red (so red) E-PL6, my old E-PL7 and the relatively new E-PL10. That's all the cameras. Still a bunch of lenses and grips and stuff in there. Probably should figure out what to do with all that pretty soon.

Anyway, it's been fun shooting with them a little bit. Having not used them in months, it's like having a new camera again, which is a fun experience. They all have their little quirks. The feel of the grip, the sound of the shutter, the way the LCD flips (or doesn't).

People emotionally invested in the iPhone, and Apple the corporation, enjoy extolling the virtues of the iPhone camera(s). After the cpu, the camera is the biggest new feature of any new phone. And why not? A phone is boring. It makes calls. It receives texts. Boring!

But a camera can make art.

And people do make art with their phones.

But they're phones. Phones that have little camera sensors and lenses built in that are put there to sell more phones.

When I shoot with my phone, it's because I don't have a camera with me. And mostly it's to document something I need to remember. Or to blow up some text that's impossible for me to read otherwise.

Apple's been adding more cameras to their phones to offer additional focal lengths because you can't make an interchangeable lens phone, and you can't graft a power zoom onto one and still stuff it in your pocket.

Just press your greasy finger on a fake button on a screen and a computer makes a noise that supposedly sounds like a shutter and takes a bunch of data from one of those sensors and puts together something that some programmer thought would be a pleasing image for you. And most of the time, it's fine. Maybe even great.

And for a lot of people, that's the only camera experience they're ever going to know.

I know I don't care for the way my iPhone images look. They don't look like photos. It's kind of like when I watch movies in that super-smooth 120fps, HDR mode that always looks like some weird video thing rather than a movie (24fps, thank you very much). For the record, the best iPhone camera in terms of the images it produced, was the iPhone 7. After that, they all started looking weird.

I know this makes me sound like an old fart, and that's fine because I am an old fart. Kids are shooting film now, I think, not because it's "cool," but because you get to experience making something.

That's what makes it "cool." It's an experience, not some sterile electronic, algorithmic data manipulation performed in "machine learning" units.

Now, film is too much work and too expensive for me. I'm old enough to appreciate digital. But I think all the folks shooting film these days understand that a phone is not a camera. Which is heresy to all the Apple apostles.

I love how the sound of the shutter is different on nearly each of the cameras I own. (The compacts all have leaf shutters, which pretty much all sound alike. Nearly silent.)

The only shutter sound I recall not liking was the E-PM1, Olympus PEN mini (first version, 12MP sensor). It was a racket that sounded like it might destroy itself. But I did love the images it made. People used to bitch about "shutter shock," and I did notice it from time to time. You'd get kind of a double-image, motion blur thing in the vertical axis; but it didn't happen often enough to be a big deal to me.

But there's a whole tactile experience that comes with holding a camera (trying to hold it steady, though image stabilization has largely made that a non-issue these days), dialing in some exposure compensation, or program shift, or changing the aperture of the lens, pressing a real button (Yeah, it's an electronic switch, not a mechanical trigger anymore.) and hearing and feeling the shutter make the exposure. (I'm not a fan of electronic shutters, though they have their place.)

That's the experience of using a camera, not a phone. A device designed and intended to produce images. Nothing else. Whether you call it "making a photo" or "taking a picture," it's you and the device intended for that purpose, engaging in a process, a kind of communion, with the device and the scene and your eye.

Now excuse me but, get off my damn lawn!

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:53 Sunday, 10 December 2023