Change or die.

I mentioned a while back that a friend had asked for help in selling a couple of film cameras on eBay. Now while eBay may be a conduit for some of the least honest people on earth – the sponsor smartly gets to act as innocent broker sloughing off responsibility for combating fraud on cheated buyers – it is nonetheless one of the more effective venues for getting rid of junk. Chances are good that someone out there wants it.

I admit I was a tad shocked at the dear relative’s lack of loyalty to these fine machines. But I know her to be a wise woman so I started reflecting on her decision.

The two cameras concerned were a mass produced and totally uninteresting (to collectors, at least) Canon Rebel and a much more collectible Kodak Medalist II which, owing to its strange appearance and bulk, makes the grade as an instant display piece. One immensely capable the other, well, just immense.

Arguably you would not want to use either to take pictures. The Rebel is surpassed handily by its digital descendants whereas the Medalist is really not competent in a world of 10 megapixel sensors and fabulous lenses, if you can even find film for it.

Knowing this I realized that my task would not be an easy one; however, as I am a big believer in the old saying that has it that you have to spend money to make money, I fitted the Rebel with two sets of new batteries (one for the data back, the other for the camera) and ran a roll of film through it, the better to show prospective buyers the quality this combination could produce. You can probably say with reasonable certainty that this will be the very last roll of film I will expose in my lifetime.

The Medalist could not be accorded like treatment as I could not find 620 format film in time, but it would appeal to a display collector, I reckoned, rather than someone looking for a daily user. All I did here was to clean it up and take a nice set of display pictures showing this magnificent piece from every conceivable angle.

To cut a long story short, both cameras sold, albeit neither attracted much interest. It’s the low selling price of the Rebel – $65 including new batteries, three rolls of film and a nice Canon carryall – that prompts this journal entry. Here, after all, was a camera that was selling a handful of years ago for what? $250? $300? The one I sold for my friend had probably seen a dozen or two rolls of film through it and was as close to mint as it gets. Like the proverbial Cadillac owned by the Little Old Lady from Pasadena of days past. In other words, thanks to digital, the Canon, a camera of great flexibility and yielding fine negatives, had depreciated some 80% in the blink of an eye.

It occurs to me that this sort of thing doubtless happened in previous generations where a technological breakthrough had obsoleted or bankrupted a predecessor technology.

Old man Gutenberg and his press did a number on all those Benedictine monks who had the market in illustrated manuscripts well and truly cornered. Being a pretty smart lot, however, (and I admit to bias here, having been educated by them), they went where the money is. Meaning booze. Benedictine Dom Perignon invented the cork stopper, making transportable champagne a reality and the now unemployed Benedictine artists transitioned to making Benedictine liquer, making many happy and themselves rich. Nice transition. And say what you may about religion, there’s a lot right with a bunch of chaps that knows a good liquer or glass of champagne.

That was then, this is now. An illustrated Benedictine manuscript fragment

In medicine the local barber gave way to penicillin, the surgeon and his anesthetics. The latter, in turn, is fighting a losing battle against smart pharmaceutical chemists who are rapidly obsoleting the scalpel with their targeted drugs. Amen for that.

The Ford Model T did a number on the horse and buggy business. You now enjoy a horse as a recreational avocation, flaunting the key rule of not owning something that eats as you sleep.

The light bulb did it to candles. The latter now serve as a backstop when lightning hits the local generator and provide continuing work for the local fire brigade and insurance adjuster.

Newsprint is where film was a few years ago. Meaning scared and about to die. The computer with a properly targeted news reader application will allow a user to digest hundreds of stories daily where in the past he might read that many on a topic of choice in a week.

Hundreds of stories at a glance. The NetNewsWire news reader on an iMac.

The main street movie house is in the early throes of death, replaced by the DVD which, in turn, will soon yield to downloadable movies. No need to leave the armored compound you call home.

The iPod killed the CD.

Those are some of the big wrecking technological changes that immediately come to mind. Back to the topic of photography.

Digital changed photography more than any technological change since Kodak’s ‘You press the button, we do the rest’. Actually, that was not so much a technological change – after all Kodak was selling cameras pre-loaded with roll film which technology had been around for a time – as it was a brilliant marketing change. Place the customer first (something Kodak has long since forgotten) and the world will beat a path to your door. In like manner, the iPod made better that which already existed, made it easy to use and made it sexy. The photographer uses the latter as a temporary storage device for his digital pictures which are overflowing the storage card in the camera on that extended trip. When he’s not listening to his tunes or watching movies on the same device, that is. So now Apple has changed that old Kodak dictum and it reads “Your press the button, you do the rest”.

And with this change in photographic technology I believe a new behavioral set of circumstances has come to pass. Namely, that brand loyalty is, for the most part, a thing of the past.

In the old days a serious photographer was a Leica man or a Zeiss man or a Rolleiflex man (sadly, few women were allowed into the club). Later he became a Nikon or Minolta or Pentax or Canon man. Or woman. He swore by Kodak or Agfa or Ilford film. For his dad, it had been GM or Ford. They had not let him down in the past and were not about to do so now, having grown with him.

Look at the exquisite care Leitz, for one, took with transitioning its many happy users from the anachronistic screw mounting of lenses on bodies with simply awful viewfinders and ergonomics to match, to the fast and infinitely more capable bayonet mount and magnificent finder of the Leica M. Though the first bayonet Leica, the M3, came out in 1954, Leitz was releasing the latest in its line of screw bodied cameras as late as 1957, finally discontinuing it in 1960. Forward lens compatibility was also assured – what better way to preserve the value of that investment? – so the M body was one millimeter thinner, allowing a screw to bayonet adapter to be fitted while preserving infinity focus. And gradually those old pipe smoking fuddy duddies at the camera club came to realize that maybe a lever film advance and the world’s best integrated view/rangefinder weren’t such bad things after all.

Their modern descendants are the same folks who deny the reality that film is in its last innings. But Leica, in its clever marketing, had managed to preserve a past generation of users, making them upgrade, and attracted a whole new generation who saw the M for the superbly capable instrument that it was. Brand loyalty, in other words, was well used. Whether they get away with it again with the ridiculously overpriced and soon-to-be-obsolete Leica M8 remains to be seen. They had better watch out – those M bayonet patents are long expired.

Now fast forward to 2006. At the beginning of the year I was a Leica M loyalist of some 35 years standing. Newer Ms had come along – truth be told none were as well made as the M2 and M3 I had been using for all that time – but there was no reason for ‘upgrading’, if an upgrade it really was. I tried an M6 and found the rangefinder worthless pointed into the sun. Those on the M2 and M3 worked fine. That’s what happens when accountants take over from engineers. The lenses got better and better, true, so I upgraded those, but when something better came along it would clearly not be from the house of Leitz, or Leica as it had become. It happened to be from Canon in the guise of a (barely) affordable full frame sensor in the EOS 5D DSLR which instantly obsoleted all my medium format gear. I couldn’t sell the latter fast enough before it became worthless. Bye bye, Rollei.

And had you told me that I would make my daily user a camera which was made by a consumer appliance maker – the Panasonic LX1 – and that this would replace none other than the vaunted Leicas, well, I would probably have had serious doubts about your sanity. And that was just a few months ago. Panasonic had made a better mousetrap, Canon had made the best, near grain-free sensor in the business and brand loyalty simply made no sense. So when my friend wisely wrote to me, in response to my email agonizing about selling the Leicas, with just three words, I knew there was more than a grain of truth in what she wrote.

“Ain’t Change Wonderful?”

Let’s extrapolate that thinking for a moment. The other day I watched a brief Sony promotional video on YouTube where a charming Sony technologist was extolling the virtues of the new Sony Alpha A100. I have spoken highly of this camera, based on its paper specifications, in the past, not least because it is a rebadged Minolta with Sony’s capital and genius behind it. What do you think the smart Japanese engineer said on that video? Why, he took a leaf straight out of Leica’s book. “Just think”, he said, “there are six million Minolta lenses out there that will fit our camera”. Respect the past while selling the future. It was not lost on me, either, that each of those six million lenses had just got two new leases on life, courtesy of a digital sensor and a vibration reduction mechanism built into the body of the camera.

So one day soon someone comes along with a sensor as fine grained as Canon’s in a much smaller package (it does not have to be full frame if the quality is there). The camera has vibration reduction built into the body, not the lens. The viewfinder has focus confirmation for manual focus lenses just like some Pentax DSLRs. Now my tired eyes can see when things are sharp as the little light comes on. And the mount will respect the legacy of the past by being Nikon or Canon or Minolta or Pentax, or even Leica M. For all those tens of millions of lenses out there. And maybe that brilliant manufacturer somehow obsoletes the flapping mirror and pentaprism with a crisp, straight through electronic viewfinder with no ghosting and high contrast. So much cheaper and more reliable than all those mechanical parts.

And what do you think I will do? Why, dump the Canon and move on, of course.

As they say on Wall Street, “If you want loyalty, get a dog”. And I already have one of those.

Bert the Border Terrier. Loyalty personified, unless a cookie is involved, that is.

Kodak managed both in one go.

A friend is cleaning house and came across several cameras from the dark ages. A couple which needed a mechanic’s attention went to a nerdy friend (who could not take a good picture to save his life), the one with the micro-tool kit. The other two came my way for auction on eBay, where they will be listed this weekend.

One is prosaic. A 35mm Canon Rebel. The plastic content in this electronic wonder is so high that when I first took it out of the box it almost flew out of my hand. It’s that light. Both the camera and date-imprint batteries were shot so I replaced them (have you priced lithium batteries recently? Phew!) and ran a roll of Kodak Gold 200, provided by aforesaid m-i-l, through it and thence to WalMart for a CD ‘print’. All seems well and despite being made from the purest cheddar, the camera showed itself to be remarkably effective. Autofocus is snappy and exposure automation just so. I went through this little routine to maintain my standing as one of the three honest sellers on eBay. You know how that goes. When I say ‘works perfectly’ I have to first know that is true. It’s a nice piece but strictly a throw away camera in the sense that there is no heirloom value or exquisite engineering to ponder. In that respect it resembles most of its digital successors.

The other, however, is something quite special. Going by the splendid name of Kodak Medalist II, it’s no exaggeration to say that this tool, nay, weapon, competes with San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge for uncompromising solidity. The American military was winding down when Eastman Kodak unleashed this beast on the world in 1946 and I suppose there must have been lots of aircraft grade alloys lying around ready to be recast into more peaceful tools.

The Medalist II (if it competed anywhere, it was in weightlifting where that Medal was earned) takes eight pictures on now defunct 620 film, sized 2 1/4″ x 3 1/4″. Technicians exist to convert it to 120 if needed, but to my utter amazement, B&H still lists 620 flm in several flavors, including Ektachrome, Portra, Tri-X, T-Max 100 and 400, Plus-X (!) and Fuji Velvia! Anyway, this camera makes a big negative.

What’s so unusual about handling this boat anchor, excuse me, camera, is the contrast it presents with my experiences in medium format. Heck, my first medium format camera was a Kodak – I was seven and it was a Kodak Brownie …. yes, you guessed it, 620. One speed (‘clack’) and three apertures, comprised of a drilled disc which was shifted using a lever, but it was as cool as it gets if you ask me. After that I proceeded to twin lens Rolleis, the massive and infinitely capable Rollei 6003 SLR and the sweet Mamiya 6. But none of those could pass the test the Medalist would discharge with aplomb.

It’s the Korean War. You are a Life photographer. The picture you just took of the North Korean terrorist aggressor may be your last because he is armed and you are not. But, his gun jams. With lightning thinking, you whip off the little bugger’s helmet and administer a fatal blow with the Medalist, doing the fallen enemy justice with one more exposure carefully focused on his cracked skull. Now you simply could not do that with the effete Rollei twin lens reflex or anything else in that format. Not until the Nikon F arrived, in time to document America’s first defeat, was there a camera of comparable heft.

Let me illustrate.

First there’s a double helical focusing mount which would do the Ferrari engineers proud. Is that beautiful or what?

A touch of lubricant on the alloy surfaces and all is sweetness and light.

Then how about the rangefinder which is surprisingly accurate?

And then the strap lugs, a design borrowed from the chaps who forged the Golden Gate.

And that neat distance and depth-of-field scale on the top plate:

Granted, the engraving quality would drive the boys at Zeiss and Leitz to the men’s room, but heck, it’s easier to clean blood and guts from than the chic stuff they made in Germany.

And lest you think that all this mass hides a lousy lens, think again. The five element, coated Ektar is not to be sneezed at.

As for the camera back, remember those magnificent tailgates that Detroit gave the world in its station wagons? The ones that would swing to the side or swivel down? Well, Kodak was there first for they designed a camera back that could be swung left or right, depending on which catches you released, or removed all together for cleaning. Just the thing after whacking that twit from Pyongyang. Too bad the Nikon F designers weren’t watching.

And don’t be fooled by that little red window with the sprung cover. Its sole purpose is to key the first frame; thereafter, the internal toothed shaft counts exposures automatically using a shutter interlock to preclude double exposures. You still have to cock the shutter manually, but intentional double exposures are delegated to a separate lever to the right of the eyepiece. Nothing wrong there.

OK, so the Medalist is no Leica M, trading mass for class, but my goodness, what a magnificent showpiece.

Now, Kodak, how about recreating some of this design genius in your contemporary wares. Surely, all the great industrial designers do not reside at Apple?

All competition is good.

Buried in Samsung’s obtuse USA web site is mention of their new GX-10 DSLR.

They propose to roll this out at Photokina in a week’s time, and while it is nothing more than a Pentax DSLR with the badges changed, it’s good to see more entrants into the high end of consumer digital photography.

I recall when Samsung first started exporting their products to the US that they were a joke – sort of like early Hyundai cars or, if you want to go further back, early Hondas and Toyotas. Well, they look like they ‘get it’ so this is welcome news indeed, not least because they do shake reduction right. That means it’s in the body, and works with all lenses, rather than being in the lens.

A little something to go with your Rolex and gold chains.

None other than the gold plated, bejewelled Minox DC1011.

If you have to ask ‘How much’, you cannot afford it, which is probably just as well.

Why the world needs more Jonathan Ive-like engineers – or Leica M2 viewfinders.

As this is a very long entry, in the true ergonomic spirit here’s a sound file of this piece that you can listen to or move to your iPod for use in the car, precluding the need to read and maximizing the use of your time. It’s just over thirteen minutes in length.

When I graduated top of my class from University College London’s engineering school in 1973, not least of the classes I look back on with unalloyed joy was the one taught by Professor Alec Rodger. Already an old man, Rodger was the dean of occupational psychology – what we now call ergonomics – in the United Kingdom. His pioneering work on man-machine interfaces in WWII and subsequent studies of men in confined areas (he had himself locked in hard-core Brixton prison for six months to study the inmates!) made him the number one man in the field on the other side of the Atlantic.

I contemplated ergonomics as a career but there was no money to be made at it in a country that regarded engineers with disdain trending to dislike, and accorded the same status (and pay) to a laborer bashing in railroad ties as to the guy designing turbines for Rolls Royce aircraft engines. So I took the easy way out and became a finance guy. Do what you have to do for a living and enjoy your hobbies in your spare time.

Ergonomics are very much on my mind as I design the new eBook I am working on with a fellow photographer. The look and feel of the screens, the colors used, the menu system – all vital to an enjoyable reading experience. As if taking the pictures for the book was not hard enough….

Which segues naturally into some of the lousy ergonomics of things that plague us daily.

Ever tried to open a Coke can without getting sprayed?
Ever tried to work that remote with dozens of rarely used buttons in the dark?
Ever locked yourself out of your car?
Struggled to get a lid off a jar?
Tried to open the new box of breakfast cereal and actually get the re-closeable slot to work?
Been deafened by your electric shaver?
Scalded yourself on the water from the hot tap?

Of course you have. All examples of bad ergonomic design.

I was reminded of these frustrations when reading about Jonathan Ive. Most have never heard of him. Yet when I tell you he has been the designer of the exteriors of most Apple products for two decades, aided by his famously obsessive boss, Steve Jobs, I think you will agree that Ive – a self-effacing publicity-shy Englishman – is the greatest ergonomic engineer of modern times. The original, fun iMac with its translucent colored casing, the G4 iMac with the ‘screen on a stick’, the iPod with the inspired click wheel, and, coming soon, the iPhone which will finally make a cell phone easy to use, well, you get the idea. He has also attacked the remote control with Front Row, using a screen and a simple remote to control your gear.

All of this naturally got me thinking about ergonomics and cameras. As with other areas of design, there’s more bad than good, but here is a short list of stand-outs – good and bad – that I have encountered over the past few decades of taking pictures. My comments are focused on the simple desire that the machine that is the camera offers as little interference with the job of taking pictures as is possible through good ergonomic design.

First, some real stinkers.

The advance lever on the Leicaflex SL. Unless you have fingers like ET, there is no way you are going to advance the film with one clean stroke at eye level. First, the stroke is way too long. Second, the lever, if released, will fly back to a flush position with the top plate as the detent is too weak. And finally, in doing so, it will whack you in the eye. A clear stinker amongst stinkers.

The baseplate on the Leica M. First, the tripod bush is at the extreme edge rather than in line with the lens. Second, when you are snapping away in the rice paddies of Cambodia or wherever, and run out of film, you have to find somewhere to put the removable baseplate while you futz with the removable take-up spool and try to thread the new film into that horror. Then grasping the baseplate by its thin edges, you try to place it over the end peg before swinging it shut. You would think that after 50 years (the first M came out in the early-1950s) they would have learned to get this right. But no. Not a bit of it. What do you get when you shell out megabucks on the new Leica M8 digital? Why, a removable baseplate of course! You have to remove it to get at the card or battery. OK, so they got the tripod bush moved, but someone at Leica needs to have a discussion with a baseball bat-wielding user.

The removable back on the Nikon F. Nikon stole this one from Zeiss and its famed line of Contax and Contarex cameras. The sole purpose, best as I can tell, was to make the Leica M user feel good as every Nikon F user was dropping his baseplate in the mud of some war torn location.

Jump to the twenty-first century and nothing changes. Or maybe it does – for the worse.

Has anyone at Canon actually tried to use the LCD screen on the 5D in daylight? They might like to try, as it’s simply useless. Anything more than room lighting and it washes out. Not so great when you are trying to make some change in its interminable menus – another ergonomic disaster. And, adding insult to injury, there’s a dumb on-off switch which has two ‘on’ positions just to keep you confused (the second allows exposure compensation to be set but you would never work that out from the instruction book) and a myriad of small, confusingly labeled buttons to get in the way of picture-taking. Oh! and lest I forget, strap lugs so poorly designed that you wonder why they bothered, unless they were trying to match the design of the equally inept, not to mention gauche, camera strap provided with the 5D.

The advent of digital cameras has seen some new lows in ergonomics. In a flashback to the days of hi-fi, manufacturers have decided to compete on who has the most menu options. What they should be doing is competing on the basis of who has least. And what’s with the trend to getting rid of viewfinders and replacing them with unreadable screens? You either glue one on or snap away not knowing what the devil you are pointing the camera at; which, I suppose, may be appropriate for the majority of users. You see them everywhere, holding the camera at arm’s length (great for shake reduction) squinting away, trying to make sense of it all. Add interminable shutter lag on most of these cameras and you have nothing so much as a costly paperweight. Heck, suddenly that Nikon F back doesn’t seem so bad.

So what about the great things, the things Alec Rodger and Jonathan Ive would have been proud of?

The superbly designed Leica M2 range/viewfinder

Simply no question about #1, which I contend was the single greatest step in camera design before Kodak came up with the cassette loading Instamatic. The Leica M2 range/viewfinder. Not, not the M3 with its ever-present, clunky 50mm frame. And nothing from the M4 or later with multiple frames appearing at one time. Ergonomics 101. Never confuse the user with choices. No, the M2 got it so spectacularly right that it ranks as Number One in my book of ergonomic achievements. First, you only see the frame you are using. Sure you can switch in others temporarily, but they mercifully disappear when you let go of the toggle lever. Second, the frame lines are thin and unobtrusive. Third, they are almost electric in the way the are seemingly projected on the subject. Fourth, they move automatically towards the lens as focus distance falls, correcting parallax. Fifth – and this should probably be first – is that magnificent rangefinder. Its sharp edges allow focus by looking for broken lines at the periphery and its bright center allows normal coincident image focusing. Genius. Ive would be proud.

Leica got it ever so right again with the wind on lever to advance the film. From the early double stroke version in the first M3s (dictated by the belief that too rapid film advance would cause electrostatic sparks owing to the early glass pressure plate which held the film flat) to the later single stroke which still permitted a multi-stroke ratcheting action (something the Leicaflex SL sorely needs) it was almost perfect, and certainly beautiful to look at. Leitz’s design studies showed that, much as Ive does today, they had tried dozens of different designs before settling on the final one. Later, with the M4 they made it even better by adding a swiveling plastic tip. The looks were gone and the tip has been known to break off, but the feel was as right as it gets. No ET fingers needed, either.

Contax made a huge advance in the late 1930s with the integrated range/viewfinder in the Contax II and later cameras. The rangefinder patch lacked the sharp outline of the Leica M, so only coincident image focusing was possible, and there were no brightline frames, but it was a miracle of optical engineering for the time.

Leica M rangefinder bodies and the Pentax Spotmatic, an early TTL metering SLR, share the prize for how the camera feels in the hands, even if the Pentax’s lovely to behold advance lever had too long a throw. Both fit the hands just so – small hands, large hands, it makes no difference. The sheer sensuality of the fit is a master stroke of ergonomics.

When it comes to focusing lenses, many have tried to fix the problem of having to grip the focus ring from below; for the rangefinder user this is mandated as he must avoid blocking the finder window, and all users benefit from the enhanced stability conferred by a below-the-lens focus grip. Tell that to the poor folks trying to see their digital LCD screens at arm’s length. Leitz had some nice efforts with their 50mm and wider lenses where they fitted a small tab, the idea being that the user would grasp the camera firmly with both hands and focus with an extended left index finger under the lens. Of course, many users didn’t get it and you still see them focusing their 35mm lenses – which lack a conventional focus collar – by gingerly grasping the little lever with a detached right hand….

Zeiss tried a transversely mounted focus ring on some of their exotic lenses for the Contarex (much as they tried the focus wheel on the earlier Contax), but it was a gimmick slated to fail. The user needed a third hand to make sense of the arrangement. Leica made a magnificent effort with their long follow-focus lenses – first the 400mm and 560mm f/5.6 Telyts and later the more compact f/6.8 variants. Focusing is by a trombone action with a release button operated by the left thumb. Remarkably effective as long as you keep the trombone properly lubricated to avoid stiction. Once autofocus came along the need for any attention to manual focusing pretty much fell by the wayside, though some smart DSLR makers allow manual override by providing a traditional focus collar. Very nice to have. The one on my 200mm f/2.8 Canon ‘L’ lens is a joy to use, by way of example, and comes in very handy with moving subjects. Too bad they got rid of the built-in lens hood.

And speaking of lens hoods, well, they are largely obsoleted by modern lens coatings and rarely well executed in any case. Once again, Leitz with its inverted, funky looking hoods for the 50mm and shorter lenses made a good go of it, even if the hood could no longer be reversed on the lens for compact storage, but whoever designed the monstrosity that masquerades as a hood for the magnificent, compact 21mm f/2.8 Asph Elmarit, should be shot. The one for the 35mm Asph Summicron, by contrast, is a wonder to use and behold. Whether it’s actually of any use I’m not so sure.

The best lens hood ever – for the Leitz 35mm and 50mm lenses

So there are a few thoughts on ergonomics.