Hugh Hamilton

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?