Driving Your Camera

[Les Sparks]

What a great article. Covers lots of the things I hate about my digital slrs and miss from my old film Minoltas. Hope that camera designers are paying attention.
Thanks Sean.
Les

[Ben Rubinstein]

The thing is if you prefer your DSLR to act like a manual old style camera then with both Nikon and Canon (mid level and up) in manual mode you have one wheel for aperture, one for shutter, a dedicated wheel for exposure compesation when using an auto mode, a dedicated iso button, a dedicated focus button and a shutter release. Using any of the above you have an indication in the viewfinder of exactly what you are doing. Which is more than can be said for an M9 where unless you remember exactly what you had set, you need to remove your eye from the viewfinder to see which aperture or shutter you just changed to.

As such taking Sean's list for a dedicated control at hand with practically every DSLR from both Nikon or Canon since DSLR's were invented:

Focus: Check!
Aperture: Check!
Shutter Speed: Check!
EV compensation: Check!
ISO: Check!

However few buy a DSLR to use it like an M9. Most want the high end automation which these DSLR's provide. As such I'd say that Canon's suck. Even the georgous 1D/s III requires you to take your eye from the viewfinder to change most settings because it's all button/menu based. Nikon's have a decided advantage here (how I would love having spot metering available with a switch!) however the mode setting is stuck in a menu. Why? I change modes constantly when shooting events (Manual/AV/C mode), I want to be able to do it as fast as a blink. My 5D allows this but the 1Ds III didn't and neither do any Nikon.

Canon proclaim that the control setup of their 1 series is to stop you changing modes by mistake. I've got a simple answer, the mode dial of the 60D with a button in the middle to release the dial for rotation. Some say the Nikon bodies are too cluttered, I can see their point but you can reach practically any setting and change it far faster than with a Canon. I'll never forget my mentor who I apprenticed with shooting dancing at a wedding, forefinger turning the zoom ring and pinkie constantly changing the focus from regular to continuous. Good luck trying that with my canons, by the time you've changed it and confirmed (which he could do by feel) you've lost the shot anyway. With my 1DsIII I ended up disabling everything but M/AV and Evaluative/Spot on their respective menus just to speed the blinking menus up when I was changing in a hurry!

I wonder whether EVIL viewfinders will be the eventual answer, a full readout of what you're changing as you're changing it without losing sight of the scene or your basic settings, it would flash up 'One shot' or 'AI Servo' as you rotate the dial or switch but without losing you the scene and your shutter/aperture settings. To be honest it wouldn't be so hard to do now with current viewfinders but the manufacturers love to keep features from us don't they..

[Stefan.Steib]

I really appreciate this article. It is by far one of the most underestimated aspects of the workflow although it probably is THE MOST important part.
Image quality is important, but what is it good for, if the picture was never made as the scene changed during the setup ?
This is the reason our HCam was made with all the buttons on the camera being directly connected with one single function, hardwired and absolutely clear.
Anybody can use this immediately without reading a manual.
We also have  included a 1/4 step aperture which (as it is electronically controlled) offers unprecedented exactness of repeatability and finetuning
(we could do even 1/8 steps but we thought this is too much, although we can revoke this with a changed firmware).
The slider is coupled with the aperture and the shutter, if the slider is to the finderposition the aperture and the shutter are automatically opened,if you drive the back
to the exposure position the  shutter automatically closes and the aperture steps down to the preselected value.

So in case anyone wants to see this take a look at  www.hartblei.de/en/

Greetings from Munich
Stefan

[allenmacaulay]

What a great article. Covers lots of the things I hate about my digital slrs and miss from my old film Minoltas. Hope that camera designers are paying attention.
Thanks Sean.
Les

My thoughts exactly.

One of the things I like to do is pick up a camera and see if I can figure out how to set all the basic functions (aperture, shutter, focus, white balance, ISO) within a minute or so without looking at a manual or asking anyone for help.  So far I can literally count the cameras where I'm successful in doing so on my hands with fingers left over.  I've failed completely on every Nikon, Canon and Sony DSLR I've ever tried and barely succeeded on a couple of Olympus' MFT cameras.  Samsung's NX series was dead easy to figure out as was the Fuji X100 and Leica M9, the Pentax K-5 and K-R were also surprisingly easy to use.  I could go right from my manual Pen-FT to those aforementioned cameras without missing a beat, here's the camera, here's all the controls and I'm ready to shoot with the camera doing exactly what I want it to do.  That is good design, I can hand one these cameras to my technologically illiterate parents and teach them how to use it within a couple minutes.  That's the way things should be, but it just isn't so.

[stamper]

A good journey man picks his tools carefully for what they can do to help him complete a job. If a tool doesn't do exactly what he wants then he adapts to it's use or buys another that is better suited. Ideally he borrows a tool and tries it out. If he finds that there isn't a tool to suit him he questions his own competency. That is a sign of a craftsman? A poor craftsman doesn't learn to use them to their optimum level and then curses at the tool and then to cover up for his ineptitude blames it for poor performance. The good craftsman adapts and the poor one doesn't. I seem to see a stubbornness in the posts above to adapt. Personally I sometimes struggle to use all of the functions efficiently but I won't vent my anger at the manufacturer who produces a product for hundreds of thousands of photographers, each of them who has distinctly different ideas about how a camera should be designed. The manufacturers must be deluged with ideas on how to design a camera, so much so they design it to their own ideas and hope the masses can adapt?   

[wolfnowl]

Great article, Sean, but comparing my old Minolta SRT-101 to any current digital camera is like comparing a 1930's Chevy to a Chevy Volt.  I definitely agree about the steering wheel and the brake/accelerator pedals, it's just cramming all of those computers and wires and electronic climate control and power seats and windows and... other stuff that (at least some) people seem to want!

Mike.