Jock Elliott
Hall of Famer
- Location
- Troy, NY
My wife knows I have maybe waaay too much Walter Mitty in me. I love reading about Henri Cartier-Bresson. I imagine myself immersed in a scene, Leica in hand, 50 mm lens, ever alert, expertly capturing the Decisive Moment with my rangefinder.
Reality is much different. I love my zoom lenses. The zoomier the better. And I have noticed something about my photographic technique.
To get there, we have to roll the calendar back over a decade to when I got my first digital camera, an Olympus D-550, a three-megapixel point-and-shoot. I noticed almost immediately that I was shooting more usable pictures, a higher percentage of keepers. And I think I know the reason: with the tiny, postage-stamp sized rear screen on the D-550, I was seeing the image as the camera was seeing it. The rear LCD displayed the image in a flat, two-dimensional rendering, pretty much as the final viewer would see it in a print or printed on a magazine page.
By contrast, when I was looking through the pentaprism of my film SLR, I was seeing through the optics of the camera, seeing the depth of the scene, pretty much as the eye sees it. When I look through the optics of an SLR or with my naked eye, I can get fooled; my eye can get sucked in by prominent feature or detail of the scene and – even worse – can ignore some obvious flaw in the composition (the powerline running like a spear through Aunt Mildred’s head).
I have the same problem with optical viewfinders – I can get sucked into the scene and ignore important stuff. But the rear screen helps me to see the scene more dispassionately and as the camera sees it. I tend to notice more often (but not always) that Aunt Mildred looks like she has been skewered. As a result, even though I like the idea of the optical viewfinder on the Canon G12, in practice, I almost always compose using the rear screen.
With the FZ200, I find I typically use the electronic viewfinder except when I am shooting pictures of airguns for my blog. I can hold the camera against my face and with my elbows braced against my chest, and with the help of the on-board stabilization, I can shoot high-zoom shots with pretty good success. Again, though, the EVF gives me a flattened, two-dimensional view of the scene as the camera sees it, and I think it helps me to compose better.
So, has anyone else had a similar experience in using EVFs, OVFs, rear screens, pentaprisms and the like, or am I in need of deep therapy and powerful chemicals?
Cheers, Jock
Reality is much different. I love my zoom lenses. The zoomier the better. And I have noticed something about my photographic technique.
To get there, we have to roll the calendar back over a decade to when I got my first digital camera, an Olympus D-550, a three-megapixel point-and-shoot. I noticed almost immediately that I was shooting more usable pictures, a higher percentage of keepers. And I think I know the reason: with the tiny, postage-stamp sized rear screen on the D-550, I was seeing the image as the camera was seeing it. The rear LCD displayed the image in a flat, two-dimensional rendering, pretty much as the final viewer would see it in a print or printed on a magazine page.
By contrast, when I was looking through the pentaprism of my film SLR, I was seeing through the optics of the camera, seeing the depth of the scene, pretty much as the eye sees it. When I look through the optics of an SLR or with my naked eye, I can get fooled; my eye can get sucked in by prominent feature or detail of the scene and – even worse – can ignore some obvious flaw in the composition (the powerline running like a spear through Aunt Mildred’s head).
I have the same problem with optical viewfinders – I can get sucked into the scene and ignore important stuff. But the rear screen helps me to see the scene more dispassionately and as the camera sees it. I tend to notice more often (but not always) that Aunt Mildred looks like she has been skewered. As a result, even though I like the idea of the optical viewfinder on the Canon G12, in practice, I almost always compose using the rear screen.
With the FZ200, I find I typically use the electronic viewfinder except when I am shooting pictures of airguns for my blog. I can hold the camera against my face and with my elbows braced against my chest, and with the help of the on-board stabilization, I can shoot high-zoom shots with pretty good success. Again, though, the EVF gives me a flattened, two-dimensional view of the scene as the camera sees it, and I think it helps me to compose better.
So, has anyone else had a similar experience in using EVFs, OVFs, rear screens, pentaprisms and the like, or am I in need of deep therapy and powerful chemicals?
Cheers, Jock