Facebook and Instagram

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The dot com bubble all over again?

It can’t have passed you by that Facebook bought out its biggest photo-sharing rival, Instagram, for $1bn (£626m) recently.

I’ll start by making it clear that I don’t like Facebook and I don’t like Instagram. Facebook is everything I hate about social media, not to mention the fact that it’s everywhere you go online. Every page now has a ‘Like’ button and tells you, if you’re already logged in to Facebook, who else likes the page you’re on. Creepy.

I don’t like Instagram because it implies that a photograph is only worthy of being a good shot if it is heavily overlaid with retro/vintage-style, faded or unnaturally coloured filters. I don’t think it does anything for photography, much like Lomography. Occasional use isn’t so bad, but for every photo? It just doesn’t sit well with me.

Someone on Twitter amusingly pointed out that Kodak, who spent a century perfecting images, is now bankrupt yet Instagram, which makes a point of adding those imperfections back in to the final image, is worth $1bn.

I understand Facebook have bought access to 30 million users, which is sure to increase dramatically now that the Android app is available, but it’s seems a) like a ridiculous partnership and b) a massive over-spend.

After the news of the purchase broke there were many tweets from people suggesting that they would be closing their Instagram accounts, followed by numerous blogs offering advice on how to copy your image from Instagram to your computer. For me it was the catalyst to delete my Facebook account.

I used Instagram for a brief period of iOS camera app testing but stopped using it after discovering that their copyright and photo usage policy was not wholly in favour of the user. See my post on copyrights here for more information. (I should point out that I have not contacted Instagram to respond to my thoughts on their policy. This will come in a future post.)

How long before the Instagram experience becomes properly Facebook-ised? Facebook have said that Instagram will remain a separate entity, but they surely have to make that $1bn back at some point? Will it be ads? In-app purchases for new filters and effects?

It’s easy to see why so many people are scratching their heads over the future of their favourite photo sharing service.

I for one will most certainly not being going back to Instagram or Facebook.

Long exposures

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I have been wanting to do some really long exposures for some time. I used to be able to when I had a D700 as it was easy to find a cheap cable release.

In the last couple of years I’ve only had a D40, Panasonic GF1 and G1 that would be sufficient replacements.

However, the D40 has no cable release port and the Panasonics only work with a £60 Panasonic-branded release. Sorry but it’s not worth that much.

I picked up a Nikon infrared remote a while ago for my D40 and haven’t really used it. I have tonight found out that if I set the D40 to bulb mode, the remote enables ‘time mode’ on the camera.

Essentially it’s an alternative to bulb mode. Bulb holds the shutter open for as long as the shutter button is held down. Time mode opens the shutter upon the first press of the button and closes it upon the second, thus allowing for any length of time for the shutter to be open on the D40.

I want to try star trails without going outside so I’m going to try shooting with a 135mm lens, or possibly the 500mm mirror lens.

I’m thinking that I’ll use my 10-stop neutral density filter to get some exposures in the minutes, rather than seconds.

This opens up a huge amount of possibilities which I intend to exploit this summer when I can be out at night and it be a bit warmer!

Update: I think the 10-stop filter was a bit much. I need to experiment with shutter speeds and apertures to get the right balance of exposure. Maybe I’ll try a 3- or 4-stop filter next!

I Really Want…

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Dangerous words for a photographer. Gear Acquisition Syndrome, as some call it, is a catalyst for stifled creativity.

I can’t shoot x because I don’t have y and z. Yes that’s zipped around my mind a few times and it’s never healthy.

At the moment it has entered my consciousness a little because this month’s photo club subject is ‘Unposed People’ and suddenly NONE of my cameras are suitable for street photography.

The Trip 35 isn’t accurate enough at focusing.
The Panasonic GF1 doesn’t have a decent viewfinder.
The D40 isn’t discreet enough.
I wouldn’t be able to focus quick enough on my FE.
The FM2n is manual exposure and I’ll miss loads of shots.
The Canon S95 is too slow.

All true statements but also utter bollocks. I ran two rolls of Superia 200 through the Trip on Saturday and it was perfectly acceptable. I’m obviously just looking for excuses.

I would however quite like a rangefinder camera. A Leica is way out of my price range but I would be more than happy with a Voigtlander R4A (*cough* it’s my birthday in June *cough*) and a 35mm lens.

For those that don’t know, a rangefinder camera has a small body, no internal mirror box and uses a focusing method unlike an SLR in that you don’t look through the lens. In the viewfinder there is a small patch in the middle which essentially has two images on top of each other. When you focus with the lens one moves across the other and when they are aligned the image is correctly focused.

Having no mirror box means that the camera can be smaller than an SLR and also allows for a shorter lens to film/sensor distance which in turn makes for smaller lenses.

Rangefinders can be a bit weird if you’re used to SLRs. Composing through a viewfinder which doesn’t show the actual framing of a shot that will appear on the film/sensor is disconcerting. There are frame lines in the viewfinder which give an approximation of your composition but if you use a lens for which there is no frame line, you’ll also need an external viewfinder. You could end up having to look through one finder to compose and one to focus. Not very fast then!

That said, pre-focusing can help for street photography and with a wide lens like a 21mm or 18mm the depth of field would be fairly huge – enough not to worry about focusing too carefully.

If I had the cash I would get a Voigtlander R4A, a 12mm and a 35mm and go shooting. As that would set me back a couple of grand I think I’ll make do with my £49 Olympus Trip!

New kit

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I bought a new piece of kit for my photography recently. I’d love to say it was a Nikon D800 or a Leica M9 but alas no, it was something far more useful for its price.

I’ve waited so very long to decide once and for all whether I ‘needed’ a tablet PC. I’m very lucky to have a 2010 MacBook Pro and wouldn’t be without it. That said, there have been many times when I’ve wanted portable computing in a form bigger than the iPhone.

I looked at inexpensive Android tablets and the iPad and just could not make my mind up which would be best suited to me. I didn’t want to buy an iPad in case it left my MacBook Pro mostly unused.

7 March 2011 came along and Apple announced their new iPad. Not an iPad 3 by name but 3rd generation nonetheless. I hoped there was going to be a 7- or 8-inch version at a lower price but it didn’t materialise.

So instead I bought an iPad 2.

What? Yes I know, it sounds bonkers as there’s a new iPad out but I’ll tell you why the 2 is better suited than the 3.

1) Price – the iPad is always £399 for the base model with wi-fi and £499 with wi-fi and 3G. I don’t see much point in having one unless I have 3G as I want to be able to access the Internet out of the house without having to find a wi-fi hotspot. However, paying an extra £100 for the privilege is a bit much! So, when the new iPad went on sale, the previous incarnation dropped in price to a much more respectable £429 with 3G. Psychologically, to me, it felt much more justifiable to spend £70 less for what is still an excellent bit of kit, even though a newer one is available.

2) Eyesight – my eyes are rubbish. I appreciated the difference between the display on the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 4, but I honestly don’t think my eyes are good enough for a display higher in quality than the iPad 2.

3) My MacBook Pro – I didn’t want to leave it redundant just by buying a tablet, but even more so by having a retina display iPad of approximately 3 megapixels! I do all my photo editing and sorting on my MacBook Pro. I’m certain that a 2048×1536 display is excellent, but it would have made the laptop screen look poor by comparison.

4) Niggles – the overheating, the longer charging time, the increase in app size for retina graphics: all these little things add up to potentially being irritating with the new iPad. The probably aren’t in the long run but for me there’s nothing wrong with the iPad 2 at all. I don’t regret buying it one bit. In fact my only regret is that I didn’t buy it sooner!

So now I have a portable photo viewing and editing machine that I can also play videos and music on, browse the web, use twitter and write this blog with. Perfect.

Maybe I’ll get an iPad 5 when it comes out…

Copyrights

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Sharing your photos online is fantastic, especially if you’re starting out in photography and want to discuss everything about settings, cameras and lenses with like-minded people. It’s great for constructive criticism, meeting new people, sharing ideas and getting inspiration for new projects and shoots. For this something like Flickr is excellent as you can sign up for a free account, upload up to 200 photos and start getting involved with the community side of photo sharing.

You do of course have to be careful with copyrights. As with publishing anything in the public domain, copyright becomes an issue if your photographs are used without your permission.

Flickr allows the photographer to choose what usage terms are attached to each of their photos, ranging from “All rights reserved” to the Creative Commons licence. Furthermore, users can sign up to allow their photos to be purchased through Getty Images. All this gives the photographer the best way of protecting what’s theirs. Users can also choose how their photos should be made available, aside of the copyright policy; settings can be changed to allow the original, full sized photo to be downloaded by anyone, just friends and family or no-one at all.

Flickr gets 5 out of 5 for wholeheartedly maintaining photographers’ rights.

Instagram is a smartphone app that has become hugely popular thanks to being free, easy to use and delivering great, arty shots. In keeping with the modern online lifestyle, Instagram shares to Twitter and Facebook and also has its own stream where people follow other Instagrammers and can ‘like’ them and such.

However, Instagram’s copyright policy really irks me. Here is their policy in bold with my interpretation and comments in italics.

Proprietary Rights in Content on Instagram.

Instagram does NOT claim ANY ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post on or through the Instagram Services.

This is great; your copyright is not being violated by Instagram trying to pass your photos off as their own.

By displaying or publishing (“posting”) any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content not shared publicly (“private”) will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services.

This scares me. They don’t claim any ownership of your photos BUT they will happily publish your content anywhere without having to ask you first. Not only that, they will even modify it if they so desire. By how much? Surely modification means that it is no longer your original work? The upshot is that you don’t pay to use the service and in return you forfeit your right to have a say in what happens to your public content. I don’t know how that’s right.

Some of the Instagram Services are supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions, and you hereby agree that Instagram may place such advertising and promotions on the Instagram Services or on, about, or in conjunction with your Content. The manner, mode and extent of such advertising and promotions are subject to change without specific notice to you.

That’s fine. They’ve got to make money somewhere; would anyone really use it if it required a subscription? Probably not.

You represent and warrant that: (i) you own the Content posted by you on or through the Instagram Services or otherwise have the right to grant the license set forth in this section, (ii) the posting and use of your Content on or through the Instagram Services does not violate the privacy rights, publicity rights, copyrights, contract rights, intellectual property rights or any other rights of any person, and (iii) the posting of your Content on the Site does not result in a breach of contract between you and a third party. You agree to pay for all royalties, fees, and any other monies owing any person by reason of Content you post on or through the Instagram Services.

It seems they are saying that you must be sure that no copyrights are being breached and all royalties are paid before they use your photos in whatever way they wish without paying any royalties or reserving any rights. Audacious.

The Instagram Services contain Content of Instagram (“Instagram Content”). Instagram Content is protected by copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret and other laws, and Instagram owns and retains all rights in the Instagram Content and the Instagram Services. Instagram hereby grants you a limited, revocable, nonsublicensable license to reproduce and display the Instagram Content (excluding any software code) solely for your personal use in connection with viewing the Site and using the Instagram Services.

This reads as if they are licensing your photos back to you. What?! So you upload the photo, you have to accept that they can use it in whatever way they please, then they licence the it back to you to use in a limited capacity to reproduce what’s yours but only for personal use. Presumably they would frown upon you using Instagram for commercial purposes. Notice that it’s revocable: i.e. if they’re not happy, they can revoke the licence for you to use what’s yours.

The Instagram Services contain Content of Users and other Instagram licensors. Except as provided within this Agreement, you may not copy, modify, translate, publish, broadcast, transmit, distribute, perform, display, or sell any Content appearing on or through the Instagram Services.

That’s fair enough. Basically don’t use other people’s works.

Instagram performs technical functions necessary to offer the Instagram Services, including but not limited to transcoding and/or reformatting Content to allow its use throughout the Instagram Services.

Although the Site and other Instagram Services are normally available, there will be occasions when the Site or other Instagram Services will be interrupted for scheduled maintenance or upgrades, for emergency repairs, or due to failure of telecommunications links and equipment that are beyond the control of Instagram. Also, although Instagram will normally only delete Content that violates this Agreement, Instagram reserves the right to delete any Content for any reason, without prior notice. Deleted content may be stored by Instagram in order to comply with certain legal obligations and is not retrievable without a valid court order. Consequently, Instagram encourages you to maintain your own backup of your Content. In other words, Instagram is not a backup service. Instagram will not be liable to you for any modification, suspension, or discontinuation of the Instagram Services, or the loss of any Content.

Ok, delete if you feel it’s appropriate but I can’t help but be cynical and wonder what happens if you delete your content voluntarily.

This is what stopped me using Instagram. I love the photos you can create with it and I love the sharing aspect but the way it stomps all over your content meant that I couldn’t continue using it. Yes I know it’s free and you really do get what you pay for, but that doesn’t mean you should just give up what’s rightfully yours!

Instagram gets 1 out of 5 for walking all over their users.

Google+ looked to be a decent Flickr alternative, for those who don’t wish to pay Flickr’s membership fees for more storage and features. I uploaded many of my best photos to it before realising what it’s terms of service meant for its users.

Again, here is their policy in bold with my interpretation and comments in italics. I should point out that this is their new policy which will take effect from 1 March 2012.

Your Content in our Services

Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

Excellent. Sums it up perfectly where Instagram uses flowery language.

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.

Again, scary stuff. It’s still yours but they’ll use it like it’s theirs!

The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. 

Ok, so they want to use your content to promote and improve their service. As it’s free, I can understand this.

This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.

Once you’ve uploaded something that’s it – they can use it how they like forever. I would hope that deleting your content makes it unusable to them, but who knows?

Google are taking over the world, one photo at a time, and as such get 2 out of 5 because you kind of expect this from a big corporation.

Facebook apparently has 10,000 more photos than the US Library of Congress. That’s quite a lot. It is the ultimate sharing experience, though as it’s not specifically designed for photos it’s not ideal for drawing the public to your content. Though you can allow your photos to be publically viewable, I can’t see that many will go trawling Facebook for creative and artistic inspiration as they might on Flickr or Google+.

Here is Facebook’s policy in bold with my interpretation and commments in italics.

Sharing Your Content and Information

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

This is a good start. There are settings to allow you to control who sees your content and again yours is yours.

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

This seems to be a common theme, doesn’t it? It’s slightly better here though because the license ends when you delete the content or your account.

When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).

This is fine; anyone with a basic understanding of file management should be happy with this statement. Facebook will make many backups of their site content and can’t be expected to delete your content from previous copies of their servers.

When you use an application, your content and information is shared with the application.  We require applications to respect your privacy, and your agreement with that application will control how the application can use, store, and transfer that content and information.  (To learn more about Platform, read our Privacy Policy and Platform Page.)

Facebook applications shouldn’t violate your information and content but the individual application’s preferences and your privacy settings at least allow you to control how things are shared.

When you publish content or information using the Public setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture).

No problems here. If you make it public, you know what you’re letting yourself in for.

We always appreciate your feedback or other suggestions about Facebook, but you understand that we may use them without any obligation to compensate you for them (just as you have no obligation to offer them).

A nice little earner, if your awesome suggestion gets used!

All in all, Facebook does it quite well. It’s the only site here without a specific photo sharing service; it’s more that photos are on their website and the sheer volume of users presents potential problems to anyone putting their work into the public domain. They deserve 3 out of 5 mostly for being better than Google+ and Instagram, but if you want to use it just for sharing or showcasing your photos, you could do better.

Is there an alternative? Well yes, but it all depends on what you want out of having your photos online. Do you want the full on sharing experience I described at the outset or do you just want an online home for your artistic works? If it’s the former, stick with Flickr as you have the most control of all these services. If you want complete control of everything you do and who can see, copy, access what then the best route is to get your own domain name, web hosting and CMS or blogging software. On my site here there are no copyright violations, no licences to (mis)use content and I know for certain what will happen if I decide to remove any content. It is the best of all worlds, except there’s no community. Damn.

Disclaimer: I am not a intellectual property lawyer, copyright specialist and do not have any expertise in this field. I am a hobbyist photographer with a passion for ensuring what’s mine stays mine. I have interpreted the copyright and usage policies and rules as shown on the websites of the above companies in my own manner and have reviewed them in the way I see that they apply to my photographs. If you have any queries on the individual companies’ policies either contact them direct or seek your own legal or specialist advice.

Revitalised

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A new year, lots of new resolutions that last mere days. I didn’t bother with any as I don’t see an arbitrary point in time as the catalyst to start afresh.

Having trudged through January,

always the darkest and dankest month, and fought off bronchitis during February, now is the time to get back into my photography in a big way.

Whilst idle with bronchitis I did muster the energy to have a look through my camera kit and give some of the more used bodies a bit of a clean. Nothing major, just a few cotton buds to lift the dust buried in the cracks and grooves. My black FM2n bodies look clean and sleek whilst the FE is bright and shiny. The FE is still missing a screw, but then aren’t we all?

So what’s next? Well I’m going up to Nottingham in a couple of weeks so will no doubt take my FE and possibly an FM2n as well, so I can use two lenses without having to swap. The 50mm f/1.8 on the FE and the 24mm f/2 on the FM2n ought to do it. I shall probably stick with Ilford XP2 400 black and white film as it’s what I’ve got the most of.

I said I’d be getting back into it in a big way, didn’t I? Well maybe not that big, using just two SLRs and a few rolls of film, but it’s been so long since I did any proper shoots that this will feel big by comparison.

I also need to get back into street photography. The Olympus Trip 35 I have is perfect for that. It’s small, easy to use, discreet and super fast to shoot with. I’m thinking Trafalgar Square, the South Bank and the intermediary areas for some reasonably good shots to get me back in to the swing of things.

Normally this is a time where I would be pining for new kit, but who wants a Nikon D800 with hundreds of annoying menu items, buttons and far too many megapixels when an FE, a 50mm and a roll of film will more than suffice?

Tilt/Shift

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It annoys me when i see people writing about tilt shift to create images that appear as miniature models.

The term Tilt Shift refers to two types of lens movements to create two completely independent effects and shouldn’t be interchanged.

Tilting a lens adjusts the angle at which the plane of focus hits the film or sensor, thus increasing or reducing depth of field without changing the aperture size. This is especially useful for landscape photography where the aim is to get as much of the scene in focus as possible without introducing long shutter speeds or diffraction.

Large format photography has always had the ability to tilt as the lenses and film backs are always moved independently of each other, with a concertina bellows between them keeping the light out.

In 35mm photography it’s always necessitated a large and expensive lens to create these effects and so hasn’t been as accessible to the general user.

Shifting a lens is mostly used to correct perspective distortion in architectural photography. With a regular lens, when you tip a camera upwards to include as much of the building as you can, it appears to fall back away from the camera due to perspective. A shifted lens compensates for this. Again it is possible to do this on a large format camera with no special apparatus.

The problem I have is with people’s use of the terminology. The Internet seems to be awash with “Tilt shift” images, real or photoshopped, where the effect is actually only the result of a tilt.

Can we all just get it right now please?

It’s alive!

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I bought a used Nikon FE recently for a mere £29. It had a “No guarantee” sticker and appeared to be faulty as it would only work on the 1/90 shutter speed and part of the prism, by the Nikon lettering, was out of line. Also, the light sealing inside the camera door had previously come away.

One new set of batteries and a new screw to fix the prism later and it was working ok. I’ve run a roll of Fujifilm Superia 200 through it and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. The wind-on lever is a tiny bit loose but it doesn’t feel like it’s about to break or anything

The Nikon FE is ideal; it’s aperture priority, doesn’t get in your way and just lets you shoot. The meter is the best I’ve used, even more so than the F4 it seems, and I can see that it’ll get a lot of use.

In general use it’ll work best as a second body to my FM2Ns; the FE with a 50mm, 85mm or 135mm lens and an FM2N with a 24mm or 28mm. Wide angle on the FM2N for slower picture taking, i.e. to allow time to meter properly, and standard to telephoto for snapshots on the FE where I don’t have time to think about the shutter speed.

I’m intrigued to try the FE’s excellent meter against a roll of Fujifilm Velvia slide film as I’ve had nothing but trouble with it in the past.

Have you found a bargain that’s worked out to be one of the best camera buys you could have hoped for?

 

Photo of Nikon FE used under the Creative Commons licence. Original, taken by Mike Odoño, available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ingredienterb/3844439066/

The ultimate camera

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I’ve already talked about the perfect lens and how it doesn’t exist.

Now I’ve been thinking about the perfect camera which only exists in my head but I think is worth sharing.

Body

The body would be an SLR as it’s my favourite form of camera. As much as I love rangefinders, TLRs, and mirror-less digital compacts, SLRs just make the most amount of sense to me. Having bought two of them, they’re that good, I would use the FM2 as the base.

Mount

Since I’m talking about a Nikon body, it would have to be the F
mount. I toyed with the idea of an interchangeable mount to allow the use of
Canon EF and FD, Nikon F, Pentax K, Olympus OM and, if possible, Leica M
lenses but although this is a fictional camera I just don’t think it would be
possible to do.

Light Capturing Medium

Sorry folks – it would be digital. I love it dearly but if I had this camera there would be no need for 35mm film ever again. The Leica M9 uses a Kodak 36x24mm, 18 megapixel sensor and I would use the same specs but get Sony to make it, considering the excellent job they did of the Nikon D700 and Pentax K7 sensors. Additionally I would refrain from including an anti-aliasing filter on the sensor. They’re only useful for preventing moiré patterns and you lose some sharpness in the process.

Lenses

I’ve said above that I would have a Nikon F mount, so basically it would be compatible with virtually every Nikon lens ever made. That means non-AI, AI, AI-S, AI-P, AF-I, AF, AF-D, AF-S and even those odd ones that require mirror lock up.

Nikon made the leap to lenses with no aperture ring in the late ’90s/early ’00s and if this ultimate camera were to be just that, it couldn’t possibly restrict the use of G series (i.e. no aperture ring) lenses. Therefore I would add a control wheel on the back where your thumb would usually rest that allowed the changing of the aperture. A simple readout in the viewfinder would indicate the selected aperture.

All lenses attached regardless of features would operate as manual focus. Auto
focus requires too many extra electronics and if not using AF-S or AF-I would also necessitate a built-in screw focusing motor.

Sensitivity

Since I love long exposures in daylight and handheld photography in low-light, I would set the base ISO at 25 and the upper limit to 6400. There would be no gimmicks to increase the ISO above 6400 into the HI-1 or HI-2 range. The ISO settings would be changed by a control wheel where the current film winder handle is on the FM2.

Shooting Modes

The camera would work in the same way as the Nikon FE does. Set the shutter speed dial to AUTO and it works as aperture priority. Otherwise it’s manual. I don’t need or want shutter speed priority.

Viewfinder

The viewfinder would show 100% of the field of view with no unnecessary magnification. I would use a bright focusing screen configured for a maximum aperture of f/1.2. The surround of the viewfinder would display the aperture, the shutter speed, the ISO and a meter needle similar to that of the Nikon FE but lit up for night work.

Screen and Controls

I would use a 2 or 3-inch OLED screen depending on how well it would fit into the FM2 type body. On the back would be four buttons laid out vertically along the left hand side, for the menu, 
reviewing and deleting photos, and for white balance. This is
 the only setting I would have that uses the screen to alter. Whereas the 
aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings are all physically on the body, I 
find white balance is the thing I set the least on my digital cameras.

On the right hand side of the camera I would have a five-way button layout 
similar to the Panasonic G1, where there is a set/ok button surrounded by
 four directional buttons. On the Panasonic each one of these also acts as 
a way of changing a setting when not in the menu, but since everything is set 
physically on the lens or the ISO and shutter speed dials there would be no 
need to add extra features to these buttons.

Memory

As this would be a digital camera, there has to be scope for storage of 
the digital media. I considered a solid state hard drive of 64 or 128GB but I
 think SD cards are the way to go. The iPad has a camera
 connection kit to allow SD cards to be plugged in – it would be great to shoot on this type of camera and then review, edit and share photos using the iPad.

I would have dual SD card slots on the underside of the camera next to the 
li-ion battery, under a removeable plate. Some modern DSLRs can use two cards, 
one for raw images and the other for JPEGs or one as a backup. I would use one card as a backup to the other and only shoot JPEG.

Picture Controls

These are massively important if the camera is going to
 output JPEGs. Virtually all DSLRs have some form of picture style control but
 rather than have a selection of modes with “Natural”, “Smooth”, “Vibrant” and
 Dynamic”, for example, I would include real life films as templates. I love
 the idea of being able to select “Fuji Velvia 50″ with one shot and
 “Ilford Delta 3200″ with the next. The ISO rating of the camera could be 
set automatically to allow the same sensitivity which could then be over-ridden 
by setting the ISO control dial.

Flash

The camera would have a hot shoe but only configured to fire a flash
gun that’s mounted, i.e. using the center pin. I would want no i-TTL flash
 metering, certainly no pop-up flash, but would have a PC sync socket for 
PocketWizards etc. I know this makes it more complicated, but by having i-TTL 
you have to include menu items or buttons for flash exposure compensation, 
rear curtain/red eye reduction/slow sync modes, flash shutter speeds and the 
like.

Menu

The menu would be kept incredibly simple:

  • Date and time
  • SD card format
  • Picture control selection
  • File format selection
  • Noise reduction toggle

These are all I could think of, though there are probably one or two others
that should be added.

Misc

To round things off, I would have no live view and no USB port. There’s no 
need to have either as live view just drains a battery and a USB port requires 
unnecessary extra electronics and a port on the side of the camera. Don’t 
people have card readers anymore?

Finally I would love the option to limit the camera to 36 exposures with a set 
picture control, i.e. film style, to make it feel like a film camera. After 
the 36th exposure it would reset and allow the film style to be changed.

So there we have it. I would set a price of £1,000 (and since it’s my camera I
would have one for free!) and make millions.

The death of the DSLR

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Well not quite, but we’re not a million miles from it. It’s only a matter of time.

In the early days of digital SLRs they weren’t targeted, let alone priced, at the consumer market and if you wanted digital it would have been a compact of some sort. Canon’s 300D (Digital Rebel in the US) was the first sub-$1000 DSLR and set about a shift in the market, where suddenly your average Joe could just about afford a digital SLR.

Since then all manner of DSLRs have been made available for as little as £300-400 new. Of the traditional camera companies, Nikon, Pentax, and Olympus joined Canon in marketing quality and affordable DSLRs for the consumer and were soon joined by other electronics companies such as Samsung (in partnership with Pentax) and Sony (using the Minolta SLR framework).

Compact cameras have been nowhere near the usability or quality of DSLRs primarily due to the poor quality of small sensors. However, Panasonic, Olympus, Samsung, Sony, Pentax and even Nikon have all released mirror-less interchangeable lens camera systems to challenge the status quo. Panasonic and Olympus have become champions of the Micro Four Thirds system whilst Samsung and Sony have stepped sideways and produced a hybrid of a hybrid. Their NX and NEX systems, respectively, have no mirrors/prisms but retain an APS-C sensor and use lenses smaller than that of their full size DSLR counterparts.

Micro Four Thirds (aka M4/3) took the industry by storm and their cameras sold very well. Panasonic have three tiers of M4/3 bodies whilst Olympus have many variations of their original EP-1, which all appear to be very similar. (I have to admit to not being a fan of Olympus aside of their Trip 35).

The beauty of the mirror-less system is that the lenses are smaller than on full size DSLRs, there is no mirror or prism to bulk out the camera body and since the flange distance (between the sensor and the mount) is a lot shorter than other systems, all manner of adapters are available to use virtually any lens.

All of a sudden people who would have stepped up from a compact to a DSLR are not jumping so far and are grabbing small interchangeable lens systems with both hands. Incredibly there are even those who are trading in their top of the range DSLR systems for smaller mirror-less cameras. Prior to the introduction of the M9, Leica fans were picking up mirror-less cameras and using their Leica lenses as a cheap way to go digital with M-mount lenses without paying over the odds for an M8.

Mirror-less camera systems look like they are the future. Most are reasonably priced, they all allow for the use of third-party lenses of all ages and types and they are the perfect ‘bridge’ between DSLRs and compacts.

My hope is that whether DSLRs or Compact System Cameras end up as the most popular choice, photographers are sure of what they actually need and not what they think they want. The financial pain of buying what you ‘want’ and then switching to what you actually need lasts a long time.

If I could go back to August 2008, I would have bought a Nikon FM3a, a Nikon
50mm f/1.2 AI lens and a bucket load of film.

Don’t do what I did.