I’ve figured out what’s wrong with photography. it’s like a one-eyed man looking through a little hole. Now, how much reality can there be in that?

David Hockney

 

You won’t find me flogging cameras very often but I am heartened by the fact that more and more digital single-lens reflex cameras – DSLR’s – are offering ‘live’view’ viewfinders. Olympus was the pioneer in this regard; some Canons and Nikons now offer the feature as does at least one Pentax camera. But the camera that has recently caught my eye in the Sony a350 because not only does it has a live view screen but the screen is moveable, a very desirable feature which enables you to ‘get away’ from your camera while photographing and gives you angles impossible with the normal framing viewfinder. 

‘Live view’, for those few of you still hiding in your analog photography caves peering fearfully out onto the world of digital splendor, is a LCD screen viewfinder which allows you to see the world in real time.It is a feature almost every point-n-shoot camera has had since the dawn of digital photography but DSLRs for various technical reasons most of which involve the internal mirror, have remained in the dark ages with their tunnel viewfinders until fairly recently.

It is my contention, not shared by all that many, that the live  LCD screen viewfinder is the most radical change in making photographs since Oskar Barnack decided to turn a movie camera into the beloved Leica. Not withstanding the wizardy of pixels, hundreds of image stored on a little card, smile detection, and all the other bells and whistles that come with a digital camera, the one truly revolutionary feature is that little LCD screen which allows you to see the world as a photograph even before you take the photograph. 

The live view LCD screen has given to the world that familiar gesture of the digital age: the photographer holding the camera away from his or her body, a gesture that seems at once contemplative and reverential as if acknowledging the presence of some far-off god. Compare that to the voyeuristic stance of the analog photographer ready to pounce with camera fixed to the eye.  The latter is looking at the world through a frame but the digital photographer is looking at a a picture, an image of the real world, not the real world itself. Now you can look at the world as a photograph, before you press the shutter. In the days of yore you would wait hours, if not days, before you had in your hand a two-dimensional  image of what you saw in three dimensions.

I wonder what Garry Winogrand would’ve made of it: he who photographed to see what things look like in a photograph. With an LCD screen he would’ve wondered no more. Actually, he might have observed that what he was seeing resembled a TV image more than a photographic one and in fact many digital photographs look like stills from television. Which I suppose is not surprising when you consider a camera’s LCD screen is in fact a miniature TV.

Look at this Sony a350 sample picture  ( courtesy of the imaging-resource; photo by Shawn Barnett)

click to enlarge

In the good old days, had I come across this image I would have sworn it was made with a view camera, maybe a 5×7 view. But this picture  (amazing clarity when you consider it was shot at ISO 3200) seems to be a cross between a view camera image and high definition TV. One thing for sure, it has little in common with a 35mm photograph and in fact it reminds me of critic Mark Steven’s words ( writing about Jeff Wall’s light boxes):

 

There’s a certain shininess—that buffed light on computer screens, magazines, televisions, and billboards—that’s become inescapable. It’s juicy, too, and stimulates in us a low, Pavlovian desire.  … a general cultural shininess…the life light of consumer culture …

 

More if I succumb to my own  “low Pavlovian desire” and actually have the camera in hand.


Ps. A reader who prefers to remain understandably anonymous, has suggested that the view camera and the twin-lens reflexes gave you an approximation of a two dimensional image with their ground glass screens, and in fact, the screen of an SLR is also ground glass, or at least it was at one time, but I would argue that while more of an approximation it isn’t a little photograph like it is on a LCD screen. And on a view camera the image is upside down and somewhat murky and often quite misleading in regard to color – a topic perhaps for another day if anyone is still awake.

 UPDATE: I guess it pays to read the reviews. They provide you in advance with that slightly sinking feeling you get a month or two after you get a new camera and realize it’s human after all and has some faults.

In this case several excellent reviews like the one at imaging-resource point out the live view screen only gives you 95% of what the Sony 300 series camera sees.

I came of age when viewfinder accuracy was a must because many of us  believed you only crop in the viewfinder. It was a primary act of seeing as I think we used to call it, versus the secondary or corrective act of seeing which takes place when you crop a photograph. Mr. Weston and M. Cartier-Bresson planted that notion into our impressionable young minds and it stood us well for many decades.

But it’s now it is another century and another kind of photography and I have to admit I often crop an image in the Photoshop era. So maybe I can live with not seeing 5% of the my image. Neverthless its irritating because the whole point of a SLR is you get 100% of what you see. Yes, I realize there are many other advantages to a DSLR particularly for the working stiff but for me the viewfinder is everything…that and the lens too, of course. Speaking of the lens, the kit lens seems to be getting lukewarm reviews also. Sony used to package Zeiss lenses on some of their cameras and my Sony R1 has a fine piece of Zeiss glass. Now I discover Zeiss doesn’t have a lens for this camera in the focal length I prefer ( 16mm-105mm). Replacing the kit lens with a Sony 16-105 will add another $600 or so to the cost …

I also read the regular viewfinder is small and tunnel-like. Not good.  Furthermore the 300 series only uses Sony proprietary batteries at $70 a pop. Not good again.

 Hmm…I hear Sony is coming out with another DSLR later this year, the a900. Maybe I will curb the Pavlovian dog and wait for that one. But I can’t get that strangely prosaic yet fascinating sample picture out of my mind although past experience has taught me that sample pictures bear little resemblance to what comes out of my camera.