What is a "perfect camera"?

There is no such thing as a perfect camera. Not in real life, not in theory. You can only tell what you need and what you don't care about.

A lot of lip service is being paid to how the camera doesn't really matter. Pros have repeatedly shown that you can get results with anything. Heck, I sometimes feel nostalgia for the times when I had less gear and took photos I liked more.

Now here comes the kicker:

"The camera's only job is to get out of the way of making photographs."
-- Ken Rockwell

It's ironic that I found this right in the middle of an article about how gear doesn't matter. It does - just not the stuff some people worry about. And not necessarily the same stuff for everybody. The fewer things you have to learn to compensate for with your gear, the better. If what is left is irrelevant to your purpose, you end up with a "perfect camera".

Here's my take for the moment:

• Accurate viewfinder. I don't mean 100% vs. 95% field of view. I mean the same frame format as my target images. I'm a snapshooter. I don't have the patience to learn how to frame for 3:2 prints with a 4:3 camera so I want a camera that can do (and display) 3:2 natively.
• Reliable autofocus. The last time I was able trust visual feedback for everyday use was in a manual SLR with a large viewfinder with split screen and microprism. I want to know that when it blinks "focused", it is.
• Reliable auto white balance. Slightly too cold or too warm is livable but it shouldn't stray into magenta or green tint unless explicitly told so. Not the case with some cameras.
• Good JPEG engine. Raw is fun, no doubt about it. I should know, I've been shooting it a lot recently. The problem is that with my latest camera raw turned out to be nearly a must. I'd rather take "good enough" JPEGs out of the box and only post-process select ones for an extra touch.

It's actually pretty hard to come up with a list like that. You may listen to advice but you won't know what matters to you before you experience it. It's one of those "learn from your own mistakes" things. It took me almost 10 years of using digital cameras to get a clue.

I wonder how this list will change when I buy another camera. :)

Completely random

There was once a poor server from Tulsa
That would give its maintainer an ulcer.
                       With a version of Ruby
                       Only good for a newbie
But regardless he had to make do, sir.

National Geographic documentary MO

* MO - modus operandi

One day some years ago I watched a National Geographic documentary about a meteorite that supposedly had fallen somewhere in the Amazon jungle. The story started with the explorers swimming up the river in boats - and that was pretty much all that the documentary showed. In the last few minutes they finally arrived at the spot, took a look around, noticed all the trees and decided that, indeed, there was a crater but it was now so overgrown that it was no longer possible to investigate anything.

So, basically, in a documentary about a meteorite crater all I really saw was a bunch of guys roughing it in the wild and getting nowhere.

If you think this was a one-off fail, how about this one: In an NG documentary about sequoias - and, again, I wanted to find out something about the subject - there were two storylines. One was about a photographer that was contracted to photograph one of the trees. The other was about two naturalists who were supposed to do some scientific investigation there. The photographer was climbing some ropes to take pictures from the roots to the top. I saw some pretty good close-ups of his brand-new camera. The naturalists, a couple, could have gotten there in a car in a day but they loved trees so much that they decided to go on foot through the forest, which would take them two weeks.

Up to around the second commercial break there was very little about the sequoias themselves beyond how tall and how old they were. But that I already knew - that's why I wanted to know more. I lost my patience and changed the channel, so perhaps there actually was something more relevant later on. I think though that if a documentary doesn't show you something interesting in the first few minutes, it never will.

Third time wasn't the charm either. A documentary about the secrets of cats seemed like a treat. I love cats, in fact I am servant to one (a note to dog people: this is an in-joke). So I watched an American geneticist go to Egypt to find some cats that would be as close as possible to their feral ancestors. Now, I can hardly find any other term to describe it but a show of stupidity. Imagine a lady with PhD going around Egypt's backwater (or is it backsand?) villages and trying to communicate with gestures and slowly-spoken English words what she wanted of the locals. Because finding an English-speaking guide must be hard in Egypt, what with all the tourists and archaeologists and whatnot visiting the country all the time. And because by the time you get your PhD you don't have any brain cells left. Hello?

It was about then that I gave up on NG documentaries, but I still couldn't fathom why they even bothered to produce this crap. I understood this later thanks to my mother's complaints about home-makeover shows. She kept complaining about how they never show any good image of the finished rooms at the end. Instead, they show a few brief flashes, and not even wide-angle ones, but concentrate home owners' reactions.

I got it then: All this stuff is not about what the title says. It's about adventure and emotions. Facts don't sell; emotions sell. Such pity they disguise one thing as something else altogether. And I see more and more shows applying the same MO.

Could I please have some honest-to-goodness documentaries back?

Olympus XZ-1: lessons learned

How about this for the first belated reflection:

I've been using an XZ-1 for almost a year now, which is almost as long as it's been out of production. Camera models come and go quickly these days but lessons learned from past models shouldn't.

Before I continue I should emphasize that I've had largely positive user experience with my XZ-1 and what I want to mention are annoyances rather than failures. I certainly have enjoyed the sharpest lens in my collection, elegant design and much else.

The first annoyance I stumbled upon was a two-pronged issue with the macro mode. For one, the camera doesn't have a dedicated button for cycling through focusing modes, something which I was used to from Canon PowerShots and which I found very practical. Instead, you have to go through several clicks and wheel twists.

The second part of the issue is that the macro mode doesn't limit the furthest focusing distance (again I expected this based on prior experience) which makes it quite hard to focus in some situations. This photo of a dragonfly took me many attempts before I managed to trick the camera to focus on the foreground rather than background:

Still on the focusing subject, I found that the lack of any distance scale in manual focusing mode made it hard to use. The central magnified focus preview just isn't good enough a cue to judge if you're shifting focus in the right direction.

Next up is the white balance which is just too red, even in sunlight/cloudy/etc. preset modes. The above photo was taken using automatic white balance which is even more prone to red shift in pretty much any conditions. XZ-1 is quite consistent here and I've learned to mitigate it in raw processing by moving the tint just a little bit towards green but it's still annoying that I even have to do it.

Two things that reviewers complained about but I find acceptable compromises are the dangling lens cap and the display that doesn't tilt. For me they just don't take nearly as much away from usability as the issues above.