Monday Column: Analogue Photography as Escape from Digital World - Part II

Last Monday column I wrote about analogue photography as escape from digital world.  In this column I will tell about things in analogue photography that differentiate analogue photography from modern digital world and which I love.

 

You are already familiar with all sorts of digital and electronic helps and shortcuts found in modern digital and not so modern analogue cameras. A few classical photographic electronic helps found already in cameras made in 70-ties and before. We are all familiar with metering in our cameras, P, A, T (S), and M modes. Aperture and shutter speed is controlled electronically from mid-seventies Canon AE1 camera or maybe even before that. Now days you have face recognition, smile shutter, all kinds of scene modes that help consumers, amateurs (not that I underestimate amateur photography and “casual” photographers) and people who know nothing about photography except phrase “smile” or “cheese” and then they press shutter button in one move, all way down... There are all sorts of these so called scene modes; from helpful like portrait, landscape and action, to downright bizarre ones like candlelight, sunset, food, party, or even pet scene modes. And then are so-called effects, for people who are not familiar with post production, like B&W and sepia, or effects that simulate some legacy film emulsions, or even pin-hole effect, and so on... Better I don’t write about live view and video in modern cameras. Sure I missed plenty of them.

 

Electronics, firmware and hardware are developing in very high pace. So every year we have new “useful” features. Some are turning out useful and most of them really are not. Some of this year’s “new photographic” features are: Wi Fi incorporated in camera, so you can control camera by your phone, and wirelessly transfer images, camera equipped with phone android operating system, so you could benefit with all sorts of application, useful or not, for your camera. And also you can share freshly taken photos on your favourite social network... But feature that stroke me most is that on one of new camera that was presented from giant in consumer electronics at Photokina last week. It is called Auto Portrait framing function. When it’s enabled the camera use face detection to locate your subject, crops the image based on a rule-of-thirds, and resample the picture back up to the same resolution as is the original shot. Effectively camera decides about framing instead of you!!! Where this is going I think don’t need to tell.

So whatever these are useful, helpful and needed photographic tools, I prefer a purist way of taking photographs. With all manual and mechanical way of controlling my camera. So when I’m taking pictures and they didn’t turn out in the way I wanted to, it’s only my fault. I prefer working with my light meter, manually turning knob to specific shutter value, turning the aperture ring on selected f stop, zone focusing and manually rewind the film... And then, when I press the shutter button, it’s a pure mechanical joy!