I had no idea

Wow, is this a different camera. It is a different way to interact with the world than any camera I’ve owned. I have never used a camera that is so easy to play with. The key verb here is "play".

When I was considering a casual point-and-shoot camera, I wanted features that I thought were non-negotiable in a digital camera. RAW format capture. CF card storage. "If you’d bought a camera a year ago, yes, you could have had that," Swann at Glazers told me. "Not now. This is where the line is drawn now between the consumer and the prosumer cameras." I had to recalibrate my requirements on the fly. What do I think I know about these cameras? "I need a camera with no shutter lag." Not an issue anymore. Swann steered me to the Canons, both for the lens quality and the compact profile. Images that I could do a lot of post-processing to—that isn’t part of the equation anymore. And that, I am finding out, is the point.

When I started "playing" with it, I realized that this was not a camera in the way I had thought of it for the past 45 years. This was a groundbreaking interactive device to organize the user’s encounter with reality. Making art is about limiting and reorganizing one’s perception of the world within defined formal constraints. This camera makes it profoundly easy to do that.

This is a sea change in the process of making images. The craft of photography has been, until now, a process of learning the abstracting nature of the medium through a long set of processes that have a big effect on the outcome. Looking at the unborn image on the LCD is looking at an image that has already passed through most of that gauntlet. The crafterly task is organizing ones response to the cornucopia.

Of my first hundred exposures I threw out 80. It doesn’t mean those 80 were a waste. They were a key part of the process that got me to the keepers. There is a wonderful proflicacy to this way of working that is quite liberating.

I think I’m going to have a lot to talk about in the next few days.

Comments

[Paul Norheim]

I enjoy reading your blog, which contains a rare mixture of understanding complex things (equipment, digital processing etc) and a not less profound appreciation of simplicity, joy and beauty.
This makes me curious about your experience with your new compact camera - obviously simplicity is the name of the game. Perhaps these small cameras offer a simplicity simular to film cameras (like the Leicas, or old SLRs), but on another level?

Paul Norheim