Cameras and Photography Explained

I look all around me and see people making bad decisions. Decisions that negatively impact their life. I see it in politics, I see it in money handling, I see it in car/home choice, I see it in all kinds of shopping. 

Let me start with a pretty clear example. It's impossible to get accurate information about gambling and lotteries—every supposed statistic seems to disagree with another—but suffice it to say that just in the US people are likely spending in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year in hopes of striking it rich via betting. My definition of a casino is a building into which you walk with a dollar and walk out with 85 cents. Why would you even walk into such a building? Oh right, it has a volcano, fountains, gondolas, or something else that seems interesting and makes you believe you're in a different country (time period, planet, whatever). 

Why am I writing about gambling? Because it's pretty much the definition of making a bad decision. The expected outcome is stacked so deeply against you that it's the equivalent of a hail mary pass when a touchdown probably won't win the game for you. On the other side of the coin you'll be putting into the gambling slot machine, the Big Companies enticing you to part with your money are taking in Big Bucks. Even Disney is into gambling now, with ESPN BET. And in it to the point where I was surprised to see a commercial for ESPN BET where the on-air personalities were touting the fact that they had betting accounts. Oh dear, nothing can go wrong with that, can it?

We're coming up on the time of year where photographers make many bad decisions. My prediction is that the photo industry will have a very good final quarter this year, and it's because you're overbuying to your actual need. More pixels? Yes, please. Faster frame rates? Give it to me. Wide aperture lenses? Oh, gotta have that for my snapshots. 

Curiously, this week I answered a number of emails from long-time DSLR users who are starting to think they're being left behind with the same basic answer: stick with what you have. You haven't outgrown it, and you haven't identified any way in which your photography will get better with a mirrorless camera. 

The irony in me writing that you probably don't need any new gear is that I have to keep up with the latest and greatest in order to provide clear, accurate, and rational advice. That's not lost on me. But my decisions about gear to acquire for long-term testing are business decisions, not a personal "I gotta have it" choice. 

So, before we get into the actual holiday buying period, let me get you prepared for it. Here's a set of things you should think about and come to terms with before you start clicking the Submit Order button:

• What's holding you back? Your photography is at some level. What, if anything, is holding that back from moving to a higher level? As I've noted many times before, it might not be gear; you'll often get better faster with instruction, experimentation, and practice. Take the time now to do a level-headed, honest evaluation of where you are photographically, what you want to achieve, and what's really holding you back from getting there. You might be surprised at how little photo gear makes that list.
• Are you still a child playing Ask Santa? Oh to be young and carefree again! I remember perusing all those catalogs and making wish lists and believing that all those things marketed at me would change my life. A few did, but it turns out that they weren't the ones I wrote Santa asking for ;~). Is your love language receiving gifts? If you answered yes and you're giving yourself gifts, what does that say? Note that for "receiving gifts" to have a meaningful impact, the thought put into it is as important as the gift itself. Make sure that anything you're just out and out wishing for is meaningful, not just a cry in the dark for a random reward.
• How new does new have to be? New things get old. Sometimes incredibly fast. Are you just wanting something new for new's sake, or did a just-released product actually fix a problem that you're currently experiencing? It's important to make this distinction. Marketing departments all over the world are spending large amounts of time and money trying to convince you of the former. The smart decision is always predicated on the latter. 
• Will there be a cascade effect? I noted my advice to some DSLR users, above. Buying something entirely new—e.g. mirrorless for a DSLR user—tends to trigger a cascade of buying. It's not just a new camera, but maybe you decide you should try (or require) some of those great new lenses, oh and you'll need new batteries and cards and plates and... Some purchase decisions are indeed just a singular purchase decision. For instance, buying an 85mm prime to fill out your set of primes. Other decisions have this tendency to snowball, and rapidly. I can't tell you how much money I've watched people waste chasing a dream camera, constantly switching mounts and triggering repeated cascades of additional buying. Did their photography get better? No. Heck, in a few cases, I would say that their photography got worse, which triggered...wait for it...yet another cascade of buying. Oh, and don't forget that when you go from 12mp to 45mp you're probably going to find you need a new computer, new software, more storage, ad infinitum. Any purchase that triggers cascades needs to be evaluated very carefully, much more carefully than a singular, isolated purchase does.
• What's your budget? If you have a vault's worth of disposable income and aren't into wealth building, perhaps you can ignore this item. But even for those well-endowed folk it's probably wise to sit down and put a realistic number on what you'd consider spending this year (and in full support of the previous bullets). Moreover, if you don't have the cold cash to buy outright and are instead triggering debt, then you're probably getting ready to make some really bad decisions. It's okay to take on debt for something that will produce future earnings/wealth/growth, but just taking on debt to get something now because you want it is quick way to send your money to others and get nothing of use back for it. Cameras and lenses depreciate, so they're not wealth builders sitting on shelves, you need to use them for a business purpose to make wealth. Be especially wary of the 0% interest for 12 months type of offer. That's still debt, even though most people talk themselves into believing it isn't. Those offering such deals know you better than you do. When you don't pay off the full price within the time period, you're suddenly saddled with even higher than normal interest rates. Oops. I'd say this: if you have enough rainy-day savings above and beyond your for-emergency savings to pay back a 0% interest loan, then go for it and keep track of that interest's expiration date. Using other people's money is a wealth-building exercise. But if you can't say that you've got enough savings both for any emergency and to pay back the interest-free loan, you're headed into bad decision territory.

I suggest that you go into the upcoming buying season with a clear plan that answers all of the above questions. Be aware that the camera companies are going to try to disrupt your plan! You'll find them offering discounts on things you didn't expect a discount on, offering bundles, even putting out a few last minute new products to tempt you. The way you avoid making a bad decision is by knowing your real situation and needs, plus being prepared. 

Don't put that preparation off. Make sure you can answer all my above questions now, well before the camera makers start fishing for even more sales with holiday special offers.

* Yes, that's an Alan Sherman reference.

I mentioned the DJI Osmo Pocket in the "Future's so Dim..." post, and this got a number of responses popping into my email InBox. It's worth deep diving into the problem a bit more, because it's essentially the same problem that the camera makers have been fighting for some time: "good enough" wins.

We've seen this "good enough" thing pop up in technology after technology. For example, despite the audio on early Compact Disc (CD) having some distinct technical issues compared to traditional tape and LP recordings, what was heard by the consumer was more than "good enough" while the convenience factor was higher. While the CD frequency range had a pretty harsh brick filter on it, that occurred above most folk's direct hearing and tended to only impact harmonics that most people weren't even noticing. Moreover, there was no more LP "popping" or tape "hissing." CDs were smaller than LPs, more robust than tape, didn't have to blipped mid-album, and weren't fiddly in getting to the first track or doing anything after the last track. It was easy at the time to predict that CDs would dominate music publishing.

You're probably already recognizing that smartphones were kind of the same thing: "good enough" photos with a higher convenience factor. Good-enough-with-convenience is a pretty winning combination, historically, so it was easy for me and a few others to predict back in 2007 that the world was about to change for photography. At the time—a month after the iPhone was launched—I was sitting on the slopes of Kilimanjaro with a newly installed cellular system ringing the mountain pretty much all to myself and...I was able to send "good enough" photos in real time to my family. Oops. 

The young these days are posting to SnapChat, Instagram, and Tik-Tok for the most part, and there's another bit that's coming into play: devices that can do that for video that are just as "good enough" and even more convenient than any previous method of dealing with video. The DJI Osmo Pocket is probably the best of those choices at the moment, thus my mention of it.

GoPro managed to be one of the leaders into this realm, but didn't seem to ever realize that the function would be more broadly applicable than just action sports. That Nikon virtually copied GoPro with the KeyMission shows that Nikon didn't actually understand the market that was available, but instead saw the market as "competitor's product." That's a big no-no in tech. If you shoot your R&D wad 100% at an existing product, you are by definition at least a year and probably two or more year's behind. 

Ironically, Nikon actually was close to the right answer with the Nikon 1, but missed the convenience bit, which today has to do mostly with the accompanying software. This is actually where DJI excels, software. Software propels their drones, stabilizes their gimbals, and connects their cameras. The DJI Mimo app—their equivalent to Nikon SnapBridge—connects near instantly, is stable, updates firmware, controls the camera with remote view, and, of course, allows for files to get to the mobile device quickly. It downloads what you recorded quickly and with a tap, and allows you both post process and trim your video as desired before sending it onwards. The Share menu in the app is direct to Facebook, Instagram, Messages, SnapChat, as well as anything else you can share to via the smart device's built-in abilities (e.g. AirDrop, Mail, and other installed apps on iOS). 

The camera companies keep showing that they don't want to play in the "good enough" arena, yet that's where the volume is. CIPA, of course, doesn't track GoPro or DJI shipments, because they're not members, so this gives the Japanese camera companies the ability to pretend that there isn't a volume of cameras being sold that might be problematic for them. Well here's a statistic for you: GoPro alone sold about 2.9m cameras in 2023. Given that CIPA reports all cameras shipped in 2023 as 7.7m units and that it's leaving out all these "odd-ball" cameras from countries other than Japan, can you see the problem more clearly now?

The Japanese camera companies first ceded a significant part of their former market to the smartphone. More recently they've ceded another significant portion to the action/portable/handheld cameras. Instead of circling their wagons or inventing wagon drones, the Japanese simply think that converting to higher-end wagons will allow them to survive. Meanwhile they seem to continue to think that just giving lip service to getting images off cameras over to the Internet is enough. It simply isn't. I called them out on this over a decade ago, and their response is still more lame than Chinese entrants that didn't exist when I made that call.

So what's happened is that not only have the camera companies retreated to "high end," they've also found that this "high end" is a bit more restrictive than they originally thought. The last bastions of semi-protectable territory have really devolved to wildlife and sports photography, with perhaps a nod at photojournalism (the latter of which is being ignored by the camera companies). That's one reason why you saw Nikon pay so much attention to telephoto lenses in the Z-mount, by the way. It's not that the Japanese companies don't realize what I've written above, it's that they appear to think they're powerless to do anything about it, so they cluster in areas they think there's still some traction. If I'm starting up a new camera company (or running a new Chinese one), I'm already thinking about how I take even that "protected" business away.

Yes, there's room for quality, and large sensor dedicated cameras do have advantages there, but have you looked at the pricing in the quality markets? Consider this article on photo pricing at mefoto, for instance. At the WPPI show (wedding and portrait photographers) earlier this year I made it a point to ask a number of attendees what they were grossing with their attention to high-end capability. While there were a number that reported six figure incomes, I was surprised at how many were mired in something near the average salary in the US (about US$60k). Most people making an average salary don't need to buy high-end gear costing thousands of dollars to do their job, let alone keep upgrading that to stay above the competition.

I'll stick by what I've written previously: 6m interchangeable lens camera units a year is an ambitious goal for the Japanese. Short of a breakthrough in camera technology, it's going to be tough sledding to keep gross sales volume where they are. As I wrote previously, you can't just keep going for higher-and-higher end products to keep your overall sales figures intact. Beyond price elasticity of demand you also have buying fatigue to deal with if that's your long-term strategy. Meanwhile, competitors nibble upwards. We've now got 120mm in a smartphone, so how protected is that telephoto wagon?

Get ready for a Groundhog Day type market, redux, where the Japanese camera companies will keep reliving their nightmare. It'll take creative energy from the Japanese companies to get out of their repeating pattern now.

I was struck by something important to understand during my recent trip to Africa. I was carrying two new (to me) "pocket cameras," the Fujifilm X100VI and the Leica D-Lux8, alongside my usual top-end mirrorless kit. 

Curiously, my initial impression of both the compact cameras changed. When I had unboxed them, I was frustrated with the Leica and familiar with the Fujifilm (uses the same menu structure and controls as the other X models, basically). As I started using both cameras, though, I started to notice little and subtle things about both cameras that began to change my original thoughts about each.

I should point out that my use of and role for a vest pocket camera such as these two models is a lot different than that of my usual safari kit. So let's start there.

On this trip I took a pair of Z8 bodies coupled with my two fave safari lenses, the Nikkor 400mm f/2.8 TC VR S, and the Tamron 35-150mm f/2-2.8. Those two lenses give me essentially 35-540mm at fast apertures, with a gap from 150-400mm that I control with vehicle position. The fast apertures allow me to photograph deeper into the edges of the day, as well as isolate subjects from backgrounds when I want to. If I were photographing in Kenya/Tanzania instead of Botswana/South Africa, I might be tempted to move to the 600mm f/4 TC VR S (you can't drive off road in the former, you can often do so in the latter), though that would give me a bigger gap to worry about, with less ability to position the vehicle. 

Most of what I do on Africa trips can be done with my two camera, two lens kit. What can't be done with that really boils down to wider landscape/environment photos and to some degree, macro images. That's where the compact cameras come into play. But they have to be compact, because I'm already juggling too much gear in the front seat of those Toyota Hilux-based vehicles, which have very little space. They're a compact pickup truck converted to safari vehicle, after all. Room in that front seating area is extremely limited, especially since we're talking about vehicles with manual transmissions and a lo-range gear lever. 

Thus, a compact camera, to be useful to me in safari drive mode, needs to fit in a pocket somewhere, typically my vest. Beyond that, it needs to be near instantly available as I take it out of my pocket. 

My first impression of the Leica D-Lux 8 was that they had partly lobotomized the Panasonic LX100 it is based on. By this, I mean that the user interaction with the camera was simplified, particularly in the menus. On the plus side, Leica didn't drop the aperture ring, shutter speed dial, aspect ratio, or thumb dial, all of which are useful to have when I want the camera to do something other than what it was set for. 

At first I was put off by the lack of buttons and the non-standard "menu." Let's start with the former. Beyond being very difficult to find by feel, the two "function" buttons on the back are highly limited in what they can do. This isn't helped by the PDF manual, which is mostly a mess that almost needs a manual to describe what the manual is telling you. Sometimes simplicity in design actually becomes complicated to usage, and Leica over relies upon the screen as opposed to dedicated controls (other than those already mentioned). 

It took me awhile to recognize that the "menu system" is actually a three layer thing, each layer getting you into more sophisticated choices. When you press the MENU button, you're first taken to the top half of the screen, where you pick and set exposure mode, ISO, and exposure compensation (all via tap and perhaps thumb dial or direction pad). Aperture and shutter speed are also in this top group, but you only set them directly in manual exposure mode. 

Below those controls is something very similar to the Nikon i-menu options (though not programmable). Nine slightly deeper controls get exposed here. Finally, the tenth touch area in this section takes you to a traditional five page menu system for even deeper control. 

It was coming to grips with this setting simplification and layering that initially frustrated me. No Back Button Focus is possible, so you have to invert your thinking to AF-L, instead. No joystick, per see, and the small direction pad isn't reliable on diagonal movement of the focus area, so you have to figure out that you can set and use the touchscreen more reliably (which works just fine for right-eyed users due to the offset of the viewfinder). 

The interesting thing is that as I worked my way through these simplifications and got the camera closer in operation to what I wanted, my initial impression started to flip to favorable. Sure, I can't do X, but I've surfaced everything I can do in ways that are pretty immediate and useful. Why Leica defaults to showing the histogram when it has zebra striping, I don't know, but once you track down all these little things and get the camera "set", I never dropped down into the third level of "menus." Heck, I rarely dropped down into the first and especially second level. While forced to a simplicity level I'm not used to, I was still controlling the important things just fine. Camera in and out of pocket taking photos when needed, no thinking necessary. 

Thus, the initial unfavorable impression became more and more favorable the more I used the D-Lux 8.

The Fujifilm, on the other hand, had a bit of the opposite impact on me. 

Yes, we have an aperture ring, shutter speed ring, exposure compensation dial, and also an ISO dial. So the basic controls I might be using are fully exposed in things I directly change. The buttons are just as difficult to discriminate by feel (heaven help me in winter with gloves on), and they have—I can't believe I'm about to write this—way too many options that can be set (nine pages worth, for the most part). Do I really want to program the AEL/AFL button to Grain Effect? Who would?

Moreover, given the complexity of the Fujifilm menu system these days, would I really want to program the Q button—which brings up a grid of 12 things that can be quickly set so that you don't have to dip into the full, brain numbing menu system—to Color Chrome FX Blue? If that really is something you need, just change one of the Q menu items you don't need (though that is a multi-step and somewhat confusing action in itself). 

The irony is that the X100VI has a virally-triggered appeal to the young and influencer crowd. I'd have thought that Fujifilm would want to surface the things they want to set, which is mostly centered around substantive changes in image quality (e.g. filters and film simulations). If I were buying an X100VI for such an influencer, I'd sit down with them and find what they wanted their images to look like and change the Q menu for them completely. Otherwise, they're going to be scrolling endlessly and maddeningly in the full menus and missing images (or taking longer to get the image they want).

Fujifilm is now at the stage where their menus have sprawled, scrolling parts of the menu aren't always obvious, organization is terrible, and naming is all over the place. Moreover, Fujifilm has never noticed, let alone fixed, accessibility to some things you might use often. For example, SET UP > USER SETTING > FORMAT. Formatting is a user setting buried in another menu item? No, it's something you do pretty much every time you put a card in the camera. It shouldn't be buried. And don't get me started on the "must press the shutter release to wake camera" thing that Fujfilm seems to think is correct. It also doesn't help that Fujifilm violates the "don't mix fonts, sizes, and cases" thing. The menus look and act geeky at best, labyrinthian at worst. 

For a pocket camera I'm not sure that I want the complexity of a full-fledged high-end camera. Given that I had a Z8 with me that had a 35mm f/2 lens on it (Tamron 35-150mm f/2-2.8), as you might guess, the Fujifilm rarely came out to play. One thing I would have liked that isn't present is the ability to virtually zoom (e.g. crop that 40mp sensor down if my subject wasn't filling the frame).  Update: older X100 had this set to the control ring by default. I finally found the setting to change this, buried on the third Camera setting page as Digital Tele-Conv. Interestingly, this can be Off while the function is actually "on" via the control ring. This is an example of menu sprawl, by the way. The engineers couldn't figure out how to simplify or combine menu items, so you end up with conflicting setting information in the menus. 

So, while my initial impression of the Fujifilm was favorable—I can set everything!—as it turns out, for my use of such a camera, Fujifilm hasn't actually helped me much. I found myself using the Leica more than the Fujifilm. 

As I've noted many times before, I don't publish reviews based upon quick and casual use of a product. Initial impressions can be wrong, very wrong in many cases. I assume that if you're spending thousands of dollars for a product—both the products mentioned above are US$1600—you're likely going to be using it for awhile to get value from it. What you don't want to happen is you buy the product, like it initially, then fall out of love with it and stop using it. You're much better off with a product that makes a weaker first impression but grows on you as you use it. 

One issue I've had with the Japanese companies for decades is that not enough of the engineers designing the products are actually photographers who would use them regularly and for purpose. Thus, they often get caught up in the minutiae of iteration and feature additions, and not in the actual usability of the product and suitability to purpose itself. I believe Fujifilm has fallen into this rabbit hole and needs to be extracted. 

None of the above is to imply that the X100VI is a bad camera. It certainly has its pluses, and I might not be the person that it's best suited for, which is something I need to explore more before fully reviewing it. However, it is interesting to note that the X100VI is out of stock pretty much everywhere due mostly to viral and fad-based Internet hype. While it's in a different price range, I'm now going to have to take a longer look at the Leica Q3, which given it's UI design the same as the D-Lux 8, may be a more approachable and usable super high quality "compact" camera. 

Note to other camera makers: (1) If you're going to now return to making a compact camera, make it compact! (2) Compact cameras need their own flexible/discoverable UI/UX, not a replication of the deep and wide top-end DSLR/mirrorless UI/UX. (3) Small cameras shouldn't mean small, impossible to find controls and buttons. (4) Don't go too far with features—e.g. Fujifilm's complex/costly hybrid viewfinder—or with pixels, as those things don't really align with actual usage that well. Finally (5) The way you go viral now won't be to just "make it nostalgic" or "make it in colors." Now you have to actually deliver a product that does a better job of getting images and videos that are compelling to social media better than the DJI Osmo Pocket does (by the way, the D-Lux 8 connects very nicely to my iPhone, and more reliably than SnapBridge).