It seems that every Christmas Santa dips into his electronic goodie bag and hands me a digital  Panasonic camera. Christmas 2008 it was the estimable LX3; last Christmas he he brought me a Panasonic GF1 with a 20mm lens. Just one these excellent machines might end up being the main instrument but for now, like Wyatt Earp, I’m a two gun man.

I learned a while ago that when cameras or lenses are the subject of discussion all hell breaks loose and an army of strange people emerge from the woodwork, all of whom seem personally offended when you have an opinion about equipment that differs from theirs. So I usually manage to stay away from camera discussions unlike my much braver friend Mike Johnston over at The Online Photographer ( http://www.theonlinephotographer.com) who often fearlessly leaps in with invariably interesting comments and thoughts about photographic equipment, new and old. Mike also has a new GF1  and he recently said: “The more features something has, the less in control of it I feel.” I couldn’t agree more, to the point where I’m diving into this contentious topic once again, amplifying my previous rant ( A Christmas Rant) ) despite the inevitable flak.

There is no doubt these are wonderful machines that give you every opportunity to express yourself photographically. There is also no doubt that  Panasonic has a cadre of engineers that seemingly delight in seeing how many features they can cram into very tiny boxes. One pictures them sitting before electronic graphs with two lines flying away in opposite directions, never to converge: one says number of features; the other line is called camera sensor chip. More into less is the motto of these determined engineers, and one senses they are frustrated by the fact that the human hand dictates the size of camera bodies instead of sensors. The other limitation that they generally ignore is the number of parameters the human brain can comprehend before deciding to take a picture  – I would say speaking for myself  that that number has already been well exceeded.

The logical culmination of this engineering madness is to take choice away from the photographer by making the camera  completely automatic. In other words, full circle: we’re back to the Kodak Brownie of 1900, the original point and shoot. “you take the picture and leave the rest to us”. But this won’t be your grandmother’s point and shoot or even your father’s which limited themselves to deciding a few parameters such as white balance, focus, shutter speed and aperture. On the outside of this machine you’ll just see a large shutter release button but on the inside the equivalent of many mainframe computers will be busy whirring away making billions of calculations. Is the subject a moonlit night in the tropics, a Caucasian baby, a beautiful African-American woman? The camera will decide what makes the best  image of all of those possibilities  and the only decision left to you will the most basic: the act of pointing. You’ll still have to point, to show the camera what you’re interested in seeing, but once that’s done, the nano-computer will take over and make what it considers the best photograph from any given arrangement of light and form. If it doesn’t like where you’re standing it will insert a frame suggesting possibilities it prefers. What if you disagree with its choices? Sorry, there’s no room for manual controls in this camera – besides who wants manual control other than a few dinosaurs mired in the bygone days of free-choice photography?

Of course the idea that the machine makes the photograph is as old as photography itself. Kodak began early to implant this idea, most notoriously by placing footprints in front of scenic vistas so the photographer would know where to stand for the good photograph.  And Kodak was not the only one. The ‘mirror with a memory’ entranced many into thinking that it was the machine that made the art, not the artists and it took many decades before people realized it was the mind directing craft that determined the quality of the photograph. And there are still some tough survivors out there: camera clubs pursuing the holy grail of pictorialism, and magazines like Popular Photography still promoting the belief that it is equipment which makes good photography.  And now we ‘re in the digital age -  as technology becomes ever more amazing, the designers of these machines seem less and less inclined to leave the image decisions up to the photographer.

There are many modern technical innovations which have made for better photography such as auto focus, auto exposure, auto white balance, and image stabilization, to name a few. Nevertheless, there are many others which seem to exist only to show off the brilliance of design engineers.  I would argue that a significant number of these  features are simply bewildering to the novice and makes for an unnecessarily steep learning curve. Back in Paleolithic times I owned a Leica 111f. Despite the fact that this was one of the most beautifully engineered cameras ever made, the instruction manual  was only about 50 pages if I remember correctly. How to load film, set f stops and shutter speeds, a list of accessories and lenses. That was about it. The instruction manuals for the Lumix GF1 runs 203 pages. I once asked a student to bring in her Nikon DLSR camera manual so we could work on a problem she was having. She hauled a brick out of her bag twice the size and weight of the camera itself.

Why a near-infinite number of exposure and color sets when all is said and done there isn’t that much difference between them? In one of the Lumix settings, the camera tries to persuade me that certain colors are ‘nostalgic’. What’s the problem , you say, just ignore that judgment if you don’t agree with it.   Yes,  that’s the professional’s response but if am a beginner I might think to myself: maybe the camera’s right, you have to have that color set for true nostalgia. There goes independent thinking, experimentation, and judgment, the basis of meaningful photography.  And then we have the absurdity of some of these settings which apparently make ethnic judgments – it has been reported that some of the face detection modules recognize only Caucasian skin tones. What’s next? A “negro” setting?

So basically  we have camera manufacturers  deciding what makes a good picture by essentially removing control from the photographer and giving it to the in-camera computer. The Lumix has at least four portrait settings, two of which assert that a good portrait is a head and shoulders image with a very shallow depth of field. You would never know that there are many brilliant portraits which break that rule but to the camera there is only one way which also happens to be the most trite way.

Breaking all the rules forty years ago ago: Lee Friedlander’s

portrait of Nina

Of course, to repeat, the experienced photographer, professional or advanced amateur, can ignore all these distractions and use these cameras to make meaningful images. My GF1 is a marvelous machine which is rapidly becoming an intuitive extension of my eye. But all too many novices are grateful to leave the important decisions up to the camera. The result is they will end up with technically brilliant photographs which will look like all the other pictures made by cameras instead of photographers. Good photography is made by an eye connected to a mind; the camera is simply an intermediary between the two; a means to an end. When you substitute a machine for the mind the result is usually bland mediocrity. I hate to say it ( said he, putting on his football helmet and getting under the bed) but if you don’t believe me look at dpreview.com’s new gallery section.  Prime examples of how mediocre photographs made by cameras instead of minds can be.

As long as we’re on the subject of cameras, I came across an arresting example of how photographers value equipment, in this case a camera which has been elevated to the status of a holy relic.

Here are pictures of Garry Winogrand’s Leica M4 camera, courtesy of used camera dealer, Stephen Gandy, and his site, cameraquest.com There is something inexpressibly  sad about seeing  this machine with all its imprints of Winogrand’s hand, if not his eye. There’s a ghost stirring there in the faint imprint of sprocket holes on the pressure plate. As with all authentic relics, an aura of the artist remains. I feel if I picked this Leica up and looked through the viewfinder, I might for a split second see a wisp of a masterful Winogrand image.

Apparently the camera is still being used by its current owner. Stop! This is not just any camera. You want a Leica buy one from Mr. Gandy. This is a machine into which a major American artist poured his heart and soul. Donate it to the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, the home of the Winogrand archive.