A thousand poor decisions

Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Pentax, Minolta, Konica, Yashica, Zenit, Zorki and Praktika - what do they all have in common? Poor decision making - that's what! Now who, you might be asking are Minolta, Konica, Yashica, Zenti, Zorki and Praktika? They're all camera manufacturers that failed to adapt to digital and perished as a consequence.

Agfa, Kodak, Ilford and a thousand other companies had just one product - film and failed to adapt to digital. Agfa vanished, Kodak went bankrupt (twice) and Ilford is in its death throes. Just like the current MLM fad, Lularoe (who sell overpriced leggings in vomit-inducing colors and patterns), they'll be gone soon.

Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Panasonic and Pentax are waiting for the grim reaper to arrive to take them to the deathly museum of perished companies. The same reason everybody else perished - failure to adapt to the market and failure to identify what it is that the market really wants.

I've been into photography since my first camera back in 1973 that was given to me by my late aunty and late grandmother. That was a Kodak 126 Instamatic. It took cartridge film in a square 35mm format. I loved that camera though my parents were not too impressed with the cost of film and developing.

Over the years I've used various cameras and followed developments in the camera world fairly closely until about ten years ago when it seemed that camera companies were failing to innovate. Pentax was a classic example - they would keep re-releasing the same camera with slightly changed functions and with a new model number every year or so. It was the same blessed camera! Niko, Canon etc pretty much do exactly the same thing albeit on a longer timeframe.

It's all been a case of milking the market. Slowly increasing ISOs until there are so many zeroes they had to make the display wider to accommodate them. In practical purposes there's no need for these ludicrous ISOs. They went for ludicrous shutter speeds until they reached the limit of the technology. Again, there's no need for it. If 1/1,000 isn't fast enough to freeze motion then 1/16,000 isn't going to do it either. It's all become pointless feature clutter. The same with resolution - ever higher resolution that provides nobody with anything worthwhile. If the photo isn't good at 8 megapixels, it's not going to be any better at 800 megapixels.

For some strange reason and I'm not sure why, manufacturers have been slow to realise that ISO, shutter speed, fantastic lenses and more megapixels are not what the public wants. Sure - ask one of the people that post on those ludicrous online discussion groups that abound and they'll spout the most exotic requirements and why it's essential. The problem is that all these "features" have taken away from cameras the very thing that made them fun and usable.

If I bought a film camera I had 4 things I could set - shutter speed, ISO, aperture and focus. That was it. It required no great big manual to explain how to access these features. In fact, most cameras didn't have much of a manual. Now if I buy a camera, the manual has become so huge that it's like a car manual - and how many of us read car manuals?

Cameras have been bogged down by flash trash. Scene settings - why on earth would anybody want to fumble their way through a hard-to-read and equally hard to navigate menu on a pokey little screen to put their camera in "sunset" mode? Or at a party - to put their camera in "mother-in-law" mode?

I have several cameras. I have an XT that I bought new, 12 years ago for a massive price and which is now unsalable but which produces excellent images. That has scene modes, I have an Olympus I bought secondhand for next to nothing yet which had originally been some ludicrous price just five years before.That has a really terrible menu. I have a 15 year old Canon S1 IS compact that nobody would ever buy. That has scene modes too.

So why am I against "scene" modes? Simple - the kind of person that would have used scene modes is the kind of person that would use a phone instead of a camera because it's simpler to use and more inline with what they actually need and want. Scene modes have no place on a camera.

Then there're all the "features" - none of which anybody ever needs. The camera companies are just not listening to their users. They're listening to the product worshippers from camera sales groups. Most of those people love technology and talking about technology but probably never do anything other than taking a photo of their dinner and posting it on facebook with their phone camera.

I went to take photos of the eclipse with my Olympus. I did reasonably well. Digging through the menu for the controls was a real challenge though. Uploading the images was a challenge. Charging the battery was a challenge. These are the things manufacturers are ignoring. Nobody but nobody wants more complicated fancy electronic features on a camera.

What do I want in a camera? I want something small - the Olympus is nice and small. I want something I can easily upload photos with. I've not yet seen that feature on any camera. I want something I can charge easily - I've not yet seen that feature either.

To transfer images I have to go to all the performance of pulling a memory card out or connecting a data cable to a computer. I can't just sit it beside my iPad and let the iPad transfer the images across. I've not seen a camera that can just be placed on a Qi wireless charging station or plugged into a USB port to charge. This is how electronics are charged, these days.

All this head-in-the-sand attitude is going to get the camera manufacturers is their names added to the list of such illustrious names as Coronet, Fed, Minolta, Yashica etc. I have my 3 cameras plus my tablet/phone. No prizes for guessing I use my tablet or phone far more than anything else for my photography.

Why don't I use my XT? It's big, bulky and needs a computer to transfer the data. Why don't I use my Olympus? Though I can read JPEG images from the card using a card reader on my iPad, it's still not very user friendly. I can't just plug either into a handy USB port to charge.

These days, if I want to take a picture, I pick up my tablet or my phone.

Boom! I just took that photo of my desk. It uploaded to Google instantly and I included it in my blog a few seconds later. How easy was that? Even if all I had to do was to stand the camera on an NFC pad for it to upload to a tablet, that would be something.

The way things are going I can see the tombstones being ordered shortly for Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Panasonic, Sony and Olympus. The lack of tablet support, specifically iPad support, is what's going to kill the vast majority of these companies How long have we had tablets? Was it  2009 when the iPad first came out? Seems to me that 8 years of resting on their laurels should have taught the camera companies something. Plummeting sales means only one thing - the public dont want to buy your product. I share as gees are eggs would never buy shares in a deadbeat company.

The 2017 Solar Eclipse

Not feeling particularly like fiddle-fiddling around with my DSLR, I chose today to use my Olympus PM1 and 14-42mm lens as my camera of opportunity. Being so light and small meant I could use a very old and flimsy tripod that I paid $30 for a few years ago. While it did not perform at all well with a heavier DSLR, it performs well with my lighter mirrorless camera.

The actual eclipse started before I bothered to get out there with my camera. Having said that I was set up and photographing before and during totality. One of my first shots was just a plain ordinary photo of the sun. The moon was taking a bite out of the sun in the first photo but it didn't show up too well.

In the next photo, I tried going to manual mode from iAuto and underexposed a little. The crescent of the moon cutting into the sun didn't show up at all. It's not a bad photograph though.

 Next, I pulled off the mylar sunglasses that my girlfriend had given me to view the sun and put one eyepiece over the lens. That worked well. It's possible to see clearly that a bite has been taken out of the sun. In retrospect I would have liked to zoom in and take another photo but I'll have to wait 70 years for the next solar eclipse in Columbia, South Carolina or go to one of the other locations. I gather there are solar eclipses fairly regularly across the world. The next full eclipse is either 2025 or 2026.

 Having taken a photo like that, the moon ate more of the sun to such an extent that it became really quite dim though not dark. The sky did not turn black as I'd thought it might have. To be honest, the first eclipse I was when I was a very small child. The next was in the years 1990-2005 though I can't recall exactly which year. I'd been living in Britain and the BBC had droned on so much about the eclipse that I was thoroughly tired of it by the time it eventually turned up. Thus, I didn't pay too much attention. I looked and noted it was dark outside but that was all.

Suddently totality happened. Clearly having a polarizing filter on the lens didn't help as evidenced by the reflection of the sun with the moon in front on the front element. It was rather interesting to see everything go darker and rather unique to see light levels that low without any afternoon or morning color cast.

 Looking at the photo I realise that using iAuto I had achieved my goal. The stars are visible in the photo or at least some of the brighter ones are. There are a couple to the right that appear as single red pixels. Those are not hot or stuck pixels - they're real planets.

Enlarging the central portion of the photo it's possible to see a star just above and to the left of the eclipsed sun. For those of a technical disposition, the exposure was 1.3 seconds, f5.6 at ISO 200. Bang went my theory about exposing for 5 seconds at ISO 1600 and f3.5. iAuto saw to that and came up with the goods. Now I've heard a lot of bunk about iAuto and auto this and auto that but honestly, it does seem to make photography easier and makes for better images.

Does anybody remember the old days when nobody used a light meter? I do. I used not to have a light meter on my camera. I used to have to gauge exposure by ambient light. In fact a neighbor and I used to call out exposures then check them on a light meter. We were rarely if ever wrong. Then in came light meters which eliminated bad light estimation. Then came auto exposure which eliminated dark or light photos. Then in came auto-focus which eliminated out of focus images. Then came digital and intelligent programming. 

Given that even the average phone is a splendid camera, I'm highly unsurprised to find most people now take photos with their phones and that professional photographers are finding it harder than ever to sell their snake oil. I see adverts by expensive wedding photographers and wonder who is ever dumb enough to fall for that one. Heck, if they''re dumb enough to pay for photography when their friends cell phone images will be of excellent quality and shared on facebook within seconds then I've got a bridge to sell. That's if you don't prefer to buy blinker fluid or need your car radiator flushed.

So, will I be at the next solar eclipse? I cannot say definitely that I won't though I find the idea unlikely. On the other hand I never ever thought I'd have made the journey from the United Kingdom to the United States of America nor that I'd end up living here. Stranger things clearly having already happened, I might indeed be at the next total solar eclipse. That's going to be either Chili or Argentina on July 2nd, 2019. That would be my mother's 88th birthday had she not passed away last year. Perhaps that's a message from beyond telling me to be there?

The Eclipse challenge

Two minutes of totality. That's not very much! My goal or challenge this eclipse is to try to photograph the eclipse with the stars in the background. This, I shall do with my Olympus PM1 and 14-42 lens. This is an older camera that I purchased secondhand a couple of years ago.

Experimenting with it last year, I found 40 seconds at 128,000 ISO at f3.5 resulted in an extreme over exposure with banding. I've not used the camera a whole lot so you might say it's almost strange territory.

Let's say that was overexposed by 4 stops (it was probably more) then 40 seconds becomes 1.25 seconds. There's no point in stopping down as the lens is focused at infinity and any areas slightly out of focus just won't be a problem.

We can conclude that on a dark night that a good exposure will be 128,000ISO, 1.25 seconds and f3.5. Now bringing that up for those that have a maximum ISO of 1600, we have 3 stops to add to exposure so 10 seconds should do the trick. Thus, your ideal night sky would be 1600 ISO, 10 seconds at f3.5. I say f3.5 because that's what most lenses are, wide open.

In terms of zoom length, unless you want to burn your eyes and sensor into oblivion then stick with wider angles such as 14mm on my Olympus or 28mm on 35mm or 18mm on a 1.5/1.6 crop sensor. With a 1" sensor that would be 10mm. Basically, keep it simple - keep the lens wide open.

As far as tripods are concerned, a decent tripod is a great help. I've shot sky photos with the camera placed on a tree stump, pointed upwards before now and it has worked really well. I'm not quite sure where the sun will be on the 21st (eclipse day) so a tripod or a bean bag will be very helpful.

As far as eclipse glasses and funky filters are concerned, I wouldn't personally bother. There's nothing to be gained from photos of the moon partially over the sun. It's not something a million other people won't put on Facebook etc while thinking they're the smartest, coolest kids in town instead of the dumbest. There's nothing particularly to be gained from watching the moon go across the sun either.

As a matter of fact, I've been through 2 total eclipses before. Two in Britain - the first I was too young to know what it was all about - and one where the media had bored the pants off everybody by blathering about the eclipse 24x7 for the previous few weeks. That one, I was so bored by that I never even went outside to look at it. My dad just tutted over the darkness and switched a light on while continuing to read his book.

My sole recommendation other than trying an exposure of ISO 1600, F3.5 and 10 seconds with a 10/14/18/28mm lens (or whatever the widest your kit lens will do) is to try to limit sensor exposure to the sun. The sun might harm your sensor. Now I'm not that worried. My PM1 cost me $75 secondhand two years ago. If I had to replace it, I'd be looking at about the same price. It's not earth shatteringly expensive.

Speaking of secondhand cameras, there are so many really good secondhand cameras out there that there's little point for anybody to buy new any more (other than to single-handedly and heroically maintain the cocaine habits of the bosses at the camera manufacturers). If I go out looking for a secondhand camera, I can find 8 and more megapixel cameras for next to nothing. The dimwits amongst us have fallen for the "upgrade" scam enough that there are plenty good cameras with hardly any wear, available.

Not once have I ever complained that my 8 megapixel 2007 Canon XT lacked resolution. It has been more than adequate for every task Ive thrown at it. The sole reason I have an Olympus PM1 now is not because of it's 20 megapixels but because of it's light weight and small size. I just found the Canon a bit big and bulky to hump around. It's fine for a studio or something similar but for travel, it just takes up too much space.

They say the best camera is the one you have with you. When I had a smartphone, I always had a really good camera with me. Now I don't have a smartphone, it doesn't particularly bother me. I dumped social media at about the same time as my smartphone quit on me. Neither were bringing me much joy so I canned the expense and time wasting.

If there are any clear nights then it might be a good idea to head out to practice photographing starry nights. If the moon is bright in the sky then photograph that too. Bracket your exposures. You only likely get one chance at this eclipse. Who knows what will happen between now and the next. The moon might fall apart (it is really old), there might be a zombie apocalypse (Voodoo is famous for its zombies)  or even an invasion from Mars (a sample return might bring back energy-based life forms that cannot be detected until it's too late).