My pal and colleague at NESOP, Heratch Ekmekjian, took me out for breakfast at the Deluxe Town Diner in Watertown yesterday. We pulled into a spot on the street, he turned off the engine, and the automatic door locks engaged. I made an exaggerated attempt to get out of the car by pulling on the handle rapidly and repeatedly, and, seeing that this didn’t seem to bother him much, I upped the ante a bit.
“This is what’s wrong with everything. We’ve let technology complicate the simplest of processes. This is just like image-stabilized lenses and autofocus. I can‘t get out of your damn car.”
Relax. This is not another middle-aged neo-Luddite rant. I do have a point. Or at least a destination.
I love digital photography. I love the fact that the camera confirms the technical and aesthetic quality of what I’ve shot instantly. I love the fact that I can go from recognizing a picture opportunity to admiring a big, beautiful print in about as much time as it used to take me to drive a roll of film over to my color lab. I love the fact that for the first time since 1975, I do not have to own and maintain a darkroom. And I love that red racing stripe on my Nikon D200.
But something has always bugged me about autofocus technology in general, and image-stabilized lenses in particular. I mean, how hard is it to focus a lens?
“It’s pretty hard.” Heratch replied. We were seated in the diner at this point, looking at menus. The pancakes are so good they’ll reduce you to tears, so of course I went for the ham and cheese omelet. Heratch went sunny-side-up, as usual. Our coffee mugs steamed.
“It’s tough to manually focus a digital camera, because the focusing screen is clear, not like the ground glass screens we had on our film cameras. They’re usually also smaller and sometimes dimmer, too, so I’m glad to have autofocus, since I mostly shoot events in low light.” He waved to somebody he knows. Heratch knows everybody.
“I shot weddings with a Hasselblad and a manual flash for five years.” I said, pausing to let a momentary bout of nausea pass— it happens every time I remember those dark days. “You couldn’t focus that camera visually and still get spontaneous-looking candids. I hyper-focal focused everything from 7-10 feet away [this means I used the lens’ depth-of-field to establish a zone of sharp focus], made sure I stayed in that range, looked at people over the top of the camera, and, Voila! Perfect exposure, perfect focus, perfect ‘decisive moments’, all in very dark rooms with the most basic technology. We don’t need no stinkin’ autofocus!”
“Sure we do. It all works together now. Focus, exposure, flash, everything. It’s all integrated, and once you have it all set up right, it’s a wonderful thing.”
Our food arrived, and I dug right in. Heratch, however, poked an egg with the corner of his toast, then paused with the dripping bread suspended in one hand and a fork in the other. He continued.
“I could never get the hang of hyper-focal focusing. When’s the last time you saw a usable depth-of-field scale on a digital lens, anyway?”
“Those great new Zeiss ZF manual-focus prime lenses all have D-O-F scales.”
“New? They look like something I couldn't afford back in 1978. And they’re made by Cosina in Japan. They’re about as much ‘Zeiss’ as microwave ovens are ‘Polaroid’. C’mon, you love the digital stuff as much as I do.”
“Maybe.” I sulked. I was half-finished with my breakfast while Heratch was still grinning at me with his soggy toast hanging halfway between his plate and his mouth. “But I won’t buy an image-stabilized lens. Never, ever. No way. No how.”
“You would if you were shooting a night game from the pit at Fenway Park. There are a lot of world-class photographers using IS glass, and you know it”. He finally took his first bite of toast, triumphantly. Like I always tell people, Heratch is not a man. He's a state of mind.
“It’s hard, all of this stuff is, you know?” he said, suddenly uncharacteristically solemn.
We sat quietly for a bit. I thought about how, if I ever found myself in the pit at Fenway, my image-stabilized lens would pick that moment to malfunction. That little vibrating lens element would refuse to shut off, and in frustration I would rip it off my camera and toss it on the dirt in front of me and watch it vibrate out onto the playing field and I’d wind up getting banned from baseball. I thought about the new consumer cameras that recognize faces in a picture and automatically focus on them. I thought about plenoptic technology, which someday may allow photographers to focus a picture AFTER it’s taken, with software. I thought about it all, about how many years I’ve spent learning how to make interesting pictures with a camera, and about how difficult it had been to face the fact that much of it became irrelevant with the advent of digital photography. Then I smiled a little bit.
“We changed, though. We learned it, and we continue to learn it. I’m more turned on by photography now than I’ve ever been. We don’t have to buy into all of it, just the stuff that helps us do what we do better, right?”
“Right. Let’s get out of here. I have to go into Harvard Square to buy some chipboard. It’s good for mailing high-res photo CDs to clients.” I wondered if Heratch had ever heard of FTP.
As we approached his car, he poked the button on his remote door release and the car alarm chirped loudly. I immediately thought of the commercial I had just seen about the new Volvo that has a “heartbeat detector” on the remote control, so you can get a heads-up about whether someone has broken into your car and is lurking in the back seat ready to brain you with a sledgehammer. But don’t get me started.
“I hate that alarm,” he said. “Whenever a truck goes by the house at a certain speed the damn thing goes off, at all hours of the night. I want to see if they can disconnect it somehow.”
