Hugh Hamilton

Zen and the art of photography

 I recently had a computer problem. It wouldn’t run flash websites and would crash for no reason two or three times a week. So we went back to the store with it, who suggested replacing the system software in it. Which we did. Which didn’t work. This went on for three or four days until they threw hands up in the air and just replaced the whole thing. There was talk of attempting to replace various pieces of hardware but since the diagnostic software said there was nothing wrong there was no way of knowing just what to replace. Why am I starting a column about photography with an anecdote about computers? Well, to start with, because cameras aren’t really cameras anymore but rather computers with lenses attached. And of course the pictures can’t be viewed anymore without computers.

When I was at University there was a very popular book doing the rounds called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was essentially the story of a man and his son riding across America on a motorcycle and its main thesis was that if you’re going to take advantage of all the wonderful things technology has to offer us, then you need to stop regarding said technology as being beyond your understanding and learn to get down and dirty with it - ie if you’re going to ride motorcycles, then you need not only to learn how to change a tyre, but also how to change a spark plug. He wasn’t advocating we all become mechanics, but rather that we should cease to to regard the machines as magic objects beyond our understanding. That any attempt to grapple with the mechanics of the technology was a step in the right direction. That it was good to understand the inner workings of things that we use. 

At about the same time as that book was becoming a pretty big seller I got my first car (an old VW bug) and it still astonishes me that at one point I (and a friend) actually took the engine apart and put it back together. And it worked. I think it took a few goes. 

Which brings us of course back to cameras. In the film days I had a pretty good grasp of what was involved and when things went wrong it was fairly easy to ascertain the problem. Sometimes you could fix it, sometimes not. When you get down to it, there is nothing more basic than a view camera. It has a lens at one end and a place where you slide in a sheet of film at the other. No mirrors, no mechanics. Some forms of photography were more physical than others - for instance, it is nigh well impossible to use polaroid (of the peel apart kind) without acquiring the ability to clean the rollers so that your pictures came out clean and pretty rather than covered in spots caused by bits of dust and stuff if said rollers were not clean. My Mamiya 645’s shutter used to jam occasionally, and although I’m not quite sure how I worked this out but there was a way of poking your finger into the guts of the camera and flicking it and voila! Pictures again. 

If you so wish you can still learn a little chemistry and go back to where it all came from, with wet plates and cyanotypes, as my friend Chuck Bradley has done with some gorgeous results. 

But nowadays of course its a different story. This is not some anti digital rant I’m going into here, but rather a realization that as wonderful as digital photography is we as users have almost know way of knowing how it works. It is, to all intents and purposes simply magic. Now I know all about pixels and I’ve seen endless little diagrams of light rays falling onto sensors and recording various levels of RGB and I could probably cobble together a flow chart illustrating how it gets from the sensor to the screen on my make, but I’m thinking it would be pretty basic. And probably wrong. If something goes wrong the camera simply has to go back to the manufacturer. Which is why professional photographers always carry a spare camera body. Sometimes several spare bodies. 

To be honest I think digital cameras are probably more reliable than their film ancestors. Less moving parts. Moving parts break. Circuits, as long as they are okay to start with, tend to last. Unless you drop the camera, which of course does happen. Occasionally.

It is true that the big companies like Canon and Nikon actually do a pretty good job of looking after the owners of their equipment now, certainly better than when they made film cameras but they really have to now, since there is hardly anyone else out there but them who can look after their equipment now. When things go wrong now, they go really wrong. Partly because of the sheer complexity of whats going on, but also because taking apart modern cameras nowadays really requires a clean room (one where the air pressure is kept higher inside than outside, so dust can’t get in). Your neighbourhood camera repair place doesn’t often have those.

So in a very real way I guess I can’t check the oil anymore. Or change the spark plug.

And it seems to me that it would take a fairly sophisticated degree for me to learn how.

I can clean the sensor. But hey, these days thats a bit like knowing how to wipe the windshield. And I can give some bloke at the next stoplight a buck to do that.

Many years a magazine ran a story on their ideal camera, one which would have lenses as good as Leica’s, interchangeable magazines and interchangeable formats and an SLR body built like the Nikon F2 (mine once fell off my tripod and fell six feet to the concrete - I picked it up, put it back properly on the tripod and just kept on shooting. Try doing THAT these days). Well, none of that ever happened. Rollei had a go at building a 35mm camera that despite astonishing lenses never got off the ground and things just kept getting more electronic (which sort of negates that F2 toughness. Its hard to cushion circuit boards against the shock of a long drop). And of course the electronics led us to where we are today.....

So what would the ideal camera be today? 

Will there one day be a small DSLR with an f1.2 zoom that stretches from fisheye to a 1000mm and pumps out a hundred megapixel file, so that the travelling professional need get on a plane with no more than his 1 terabyte 7G ipad tucked under his arm, along with about only a kilo or so of high image making machine (lets not forget that it will probably shoot cinemascope quality video too! along with crisp gorgeous sound from built in directional mikes etc etc). And the lights will be tiny LED’s that weigh almost nothing and yet pump out thousands of watts of gorgeous daylight balanced photons.....I can’t see any way of making a softbox or umbrella smaller, but maybe some clever guru will devise some way way of folding a beauty dish into your pocket, since it is the most troublesome piece of technology I am using at the moment, sitting as it does in a bit of an oversized reinforced hat box , too awkward to carry on and a bit small to feel good about it being thrown into the aircraft’s hold......

Can cameras get smaller and retain the quality? Well, image quality, just like in film, is very much tied to the size of the sensor, so theoretically the size of the sensor will certainly limit just how much you can shrink it, but certainly the processing side of most pro gear can be made to disappear as time and technology march on. I have worked on a short film that was shot on a camera that was just a sensor with a lens attached - with a cable running to a laptop that drove the whole thing. But it looked very strange. All lens and umbilical cord really. But there is no reason a still camera couldn’t be that too. Why should we have to upgrade every time an engineer improves a part of the camera? When will the digital camera stop being something that we have to replace every few years?

One of my first jobs as an assistant was to a fairly famous american rock shooter called Larry Williams who came to Sydney to shoot a band called The Models (famous in Australia) and make a music video for The Church (fairly famous everywhere). He had a Hasselblad that was so old and battered he had to shoot with a black cloth over the camera and magazine to block the light leaks. And lets not talk about loading those magazines - it was hard work! But he did great work....and thats because 120 film and a Zeiss lens is a great combination, but now we are enslaved to engineers and Moore’s law - can we not just work out some way of hooking a sensor up to an ipad or iphone or whatever and then attach the lens to the sensor and away we go....any improvements in interface and software can then just be downloaded....and if the sensor gets better just switch it out rather than having to go out and buy a whole new camera every three years....... 

Helmut Newton once said that assistants loved him because he used practically no equipment. A  Hasselblad, a couple of lens and a small portable flash was pretty much it a lot of the time. Terry Richardson apparently goes on location with two cameras, two lenses and two on camera flashes. And a truck FULL of everything known to the industry, just in case. As I charge onto yet another flight, this time checking about fifty kilos of lights and stands and general stuff as well as my incredibly heavy and crammed roll on camera case it occurs to me that at least I have about a third of what I would have had to travel with when I was the assistant so the question does beg to be asked - which way from here?