My dream camera will probably not be achieved in my lifetime, but I believe that it will indeed exist someday.  I cannot say what form it will take, nor what technologies will be required to enable it’s functionality.  Perhaps an implant in the brain will be required.  For what I imagine to be the ultimate camera is akin to simply(?) digitizing the mental image formed by all of those pesky neurons in our brains, and the ability to transfer the resultant data to any device (or person, perhaps) of our choosing, activated on demand by our conscious thought.  Imagine, the mental imagery that we record might be the amalgam of visual input from the eyes, augmented by the sensual inputs of our emotions, and colored by the historical perspective of our memories!  Wouldn’t that be cool?

While we await the future, and all of the fanciful technology that it promises to drag along with it, we are still embedded in the present, and the technologies available to us in the here-and-now.  Today we are faced with an enormous array of choices as we pursue our photographic interests.  There are decisions to be made regarding digital or film cameras, lenses, formats, and peripheral equipment.  Every person who picks up a camera and endeavors to take a worthwhile photograph will have his/her personal definition of the perfect camera, based upon their own personal photographic aims and expectations. This post is about my personal search for a camera that would fulfill my own photographic aspirations.

My first real camera (if you don’t count the childhood home-built “pinhole” cameras, or Kodak Brownie cameras), was a camera that I bought in 1968 in order to photograph a backpacking trip into the Sierra Nevada high-country.  This was to be a three week trip, so my backpack would be weighted down by necessary provisions, thereby leaving me little allowance for a camera of any appreciable size.  Knowing little about cameras at the time, I ventured into a camera store and explained my needs to the salesman.  He sold me on this little beauty, called a Rollei 16.

This seemed to be the perfect camera for the trip.  The virtues of this camera were its diminutive size, along with the excellent optics produced by Carl Zeiss – Tessar.  The salesman sold me the camera, a case, a bayonet mounted teleconverter, and 10 rolls of film.  The total weight of these components was under 2 pounds.  This camera had an automatic exposure system, via the selenium cell pictured on the left, and could focus as close as 8″ from the subject.  While not true macro, it did allow for excellent close up shots.  I took it with me on that backpacking trip, and exposed all ten rolls of film.  I took the film in to the photo store to have it processed, and they told me that it would have to be sent to a special laboratory for processing, as it was a non-standard size film.  “Oh,” I said.  “How long will that take?” I asked.  “About three weeks,” was the reply.

When the three weeks were up, I picked up the slides from the camera store, and asked the clerk for ten more rolls of film for the Rollei 16.  He informed me that the film for the Rollei 16 was actually a type of double-sprocket movie film that was split in half and loaded into small, proprietary plastic cartridges, which were available direct from Rollei by mail order!  I went home and put the slides into my Dad’s slide projector, gathered my family around, and turned on the projection switch, anticipating the roar of the amazed crowd as they viewed my photographic masterpieces!  Instead, I was greeted by the sound of creaking chairs as the audience struggled to get close enough to see the amazingly puny images projected onto the screen.   The size of the film was extremely small compared to even a 35mm format, as shown below.

The mounted slide produced by the Rollei 16 is pictured on the left, and a slide from the 35mm format is pictured on the right.  Besides projection problems, the small area of a negative precluded prints of any reasonable size.  It is the same problem of scale that eventually went on to doom the future 110 film format.  While the camera performed admirably for the purpose that I had intended, the lack of film availability and processing difficulties, along with the problems associated with the small film format led me to abandon it as a photographic tool.  I only used it on that one backpacking trip, so it is perhaps my worst-ever camera purchase.  On the other hand, it is worth more on eBay today that I paid for it back in 1968, so perhaps it is my best-ever camera purchase – who knows?

I learned some good lessons from that experience, and also intensified my desire to share what I experienced in my world with others around me.  Photography seemed to be an excellent form of expression and documentation, so I began to study all I could find on the subject.  I began using my Dad’s Nikon F to learn photographic techniques, and soon I purchased my own camera, a Minolta SRT-101.  Soon I discovered that I wanted to take macro shots, so I bought a 50mm macro lens.  Available lighting never seemed sufficient, so a strobe was added to the kit.  For general nature photography, I found that I needed not one, but maybe two or three different telephoto lenses, which then forced me to add a tripod to my photographic kit.  One day I read a book on wide-angle photography, and it intrigued me so much that I had to sacrifice a paycheck to buy a wide-angle lens.  But my equipment bag runneth over, and I had no room to add the new lens to my ever growing photo kit.  To lighten the load, I decided to buy a moderate wide-to-telephoto zoom lens, to replace the multiple single-focal length lenses that I carried.  When a friend who had requested that I take some publicity photos of him complained that the resulting images were not sharp enough for the purpose, I added an 85mm portraiture lens.

Eventually, I graduated to a Minolta XK w/AES Finder, which was Minolta’s foray into the professional “systems camera” realm.  In addition to everything above, a motor drive was now part of the photo kit, as well as an array of focusing screens for various and sundry purposes.  Ultimately, my scuba diving interests intersected with my photographic interests, and the resultant madness eventually led to scenes such as the one below, where it takes a truck to haul the photographic equipment of just three photographers!

Enough, already, enough!  I’ve had it with having to lug tons of equipment in order to get a photograph.  Wouldn’t it be nice if some camera company would engineer an all-purpose camera that was not dependant upon a mountain of peripheral accessories in order to take the most frequently encountered shots?  When Olympus announced it’s new line of cameras dubbed ZLR’s (Zoom Lens Reflex), I was intrigued.  The concept of an all-inclusive camera, wrapped around a quality fast zoom lens, integrating on-board flash and an integral motor drive was a step forward in photographic technology, one that dovetailed nicely with my photographic style, which was quickly gravitating towards compact, general-purpose, and portable cameras.  After allowing a sufficient amount of time to allow this genre of camera to mature and prove itself, I took the plunge and purchased an Olympus IS-3 Zoom Lens Reflex camera, as shown in the following photo-

This camera incorporates a fast, high quality 35mm-180mm zoom lens, an on-board flash, motor drive, various user selectable focusing and metering methods, along with full manual control.  The lens features true macro focusing capabilities, and produces images with excellent sharpness and resolution, and very low distortion.  While this camera might not compete well in benchmark tests against more traditional single lens reflex (SLR) cameras, the portability of the camera, as well as the inclusion of all major modes of shooting in one easy to transport package, more than makes up for it’s shortfalls relative to it’s SLR cousins.

The main shortfall of this camera for field use is the size and weight of the unit.  While a 180mm telephoto is considered to be a long range for a prime lens, it has too short a reach for a good many nature shots.  To solve this problem, Olympus optical engineers designed a dedicated add-on teleconverter for this camera, which transformed the lens to a 300mm telephoto unit.  But the addition of this auxiliary lens element added a great deal of weight and length to the camera, as seen in this next photo.

This camera proved to be a pleasure to use, and I captured many good photographs with it, however, it also grew to be a large, cumbersome kit to lug around everywhere I went.  The rule of thumb for a handheld telephoto shot is that the shutter speed should at least match the reciprocal of the lens focal length.  With the 300mm teleconverter, this would call for a shutter speed set at 1/300th of a second, preferably faster.  When this is not possible to accomplish, a tripod must be used to avoid loss of picture sharpness due to camera shake.  So a tripod became a necessary accessory in the use of the teleconverter.  My camera kit thus became camera, teleconverter and tripod.  Portability went out the door, and as a result, it began to be a piece of equipment that was left on the shelf at home more often than not.  But, in it’s own way, it was a step closer to my goal of owning a portable, all-inclusive, full-featured camera, ready to capture most images I would want to take.

Entering The Digital Era

In 1999, Retta and I decided to sell the trawler Lorelei that we had been living on for the past five years.  Our plan was to sell the boat, and then begin our search across the country for a place to sink down roots.  We knew that having a photographic record to jog the memory would be a valuable tool in deciding where to live, and having digital images of our vessel would help us in creating a web site dedicated to marketing the boat.  This was the motivation behind the purchase of our first digital camera, a simple Kodak 1.1 mega pixel point-and-shoot camera.  My experiences with this little camera were instrumental in selling me on the advantages that digital photography had to offer, and also served to highlight the disadvantages that existed in the consumer digital camera offerings.  Here are a few disadvantages I encountered as I surveyed the consumer cameras available at the time.

Price – in the earlier days of consumer digital cameras, cost was a major consideration.  The simple 1.1 mega pixel Kodak camera sold for $500, plus accessories.  The price of these cameras rose geometrically with any increase in pixel count, and professional grade digital cameras were priced in the thousands of dollars.

Ease of use – the early digital point-and-shoot cameras did an excellent job of providing easy automatic exposures under most common situations.  But any deviation from automatic settings required time-consuming and clumsy navigation through layers of menu trees in order to change default settings.  This, in my opinion, is one of the primary shortcomings of most compact digital cameras.  There are certain camera functions that I like to control on a shot-to-shot basis, such as exposure compensation, metering method, flash settings, and the like.  The SLR style camera has evolved over time to place these all important camera controls at the photographer’s fingertips.  Watch an experienced photographer manipulate his camera, and you will see a similarity to a musician playing a fine instrument.  An excellent camera allows the photographer the ability to fine-tune camera settings in the blink of an eye, enabling him/her a greater chance of capturing that once-in-a-lifetime image.  If you examine the majority of consumer digital cameras on the market today, you will find that ability sorely lacking.

Quality optics – one thing will always be true in the world of cameras, be they film-based or digital, large or small, complex or simple.  An image can only be as good as the quality of the lens admitting light into the camera.  No matter how many whiz-bang features a camera has, if the optical quality of the lens is inferior, the image will follow suit.  Because of this fact, I have come to believe that the photographer should shop for the highest quality lens that fits their needs and budget, and then purchase the camera which operates that lens.  Consumer grade digital cameras have been pretty disappointing to date on this point, especially those offerings coming from consumer electronics companies, as opposed to the offerings from the traditional camera manufacturers.

In the seven years that have elapsed since I acquired the Kodak consumer camera, much has changed in the digital camera landscape.  The change that has had the largest effect on me is the development of a new category of digital camera, called a prosumer digital camera.  These cameras are an attempt to produce a camera with professional grade quality and features, but one that is aimed at the advanced amateur market.  These cameras depart from the traditional SLR format, yet retain many of the features that have made that format so popular today.  But the defining feature for me is that the form factor these cameras take follows along with my long time search for a full-featured, compact and portable camera with high quality optics.  When I finally got a chance to see the Nikon CP8800 VR, pictured below, I was sold.

In one lightweight, palm sized package, Nikon has produced a camera with a 10X optical zoom, which has the 35mm equivalency of a 35mm-350mm zoom lens built in.  The lens is produced to the usual high quality Nikon specifications, and features a vibration reduction (optical stabilization) system, which reduces or eliminates the need for a tripod in most situations, even when shooting in the full telephoto range of the lens.  The optics of this camera produce astounding macro shots, and the speed on the lens, at f2.8, is quite fast for a 10x zoom.  To see an example of the power this type of camera brings to the field photographer, see my previous post The Power of 10X Optical Zoom VR Mega-Pixels.

An important aspect of this camera was the thought that the Nikon engineers put into the camera controls.  There are buttons on the lens barrel to control focusing and lens VR options, as well as numerous other control buttons and dials situated strategically around the camera body.  Functions such as exposure compensation, flash settings, focus lock, exposure lock, ISO and white balance are quickly adjusted with the push of a button or the spin of a dial.  Rarely will the photographer have to wade through the extensive menu structure of the system to change common settings on the fly.

At 8 mega pixels, this camera will produce image files of sufficient size to meet any of my requirements, and the large pixel count allows for a decent measure of creative cropping, without sacrificing image quality.

The camera contains several wonderful features, such as automatic exposure bracketing, automatic flash bracketing, and my favorite, BSS, or best shot selector.  In this mode, the camera will take three shots in quick succession, and automatically select the best of the three for saving, and reject the other two.  By combining BSS with VR, you have two powerful tools for nature photography – VR to compensate for minor camera movement, and BSS to compensate for minor subject movement.  The result will be a higher percentage of “keepers.”

There are negative aspects to this type of camera to go along with the positive.  The amount of time that the camera takes to write data from the sensor to the Compact Flash card is sluggish.  While setting the camera to burst mode allows motor-drive like sequences of frames to be exposed, the camera cannot be counted on to cycle and be ready for the next shot quickly, thereby limiting its functionality for action and sports photography.  And neither the electronic viewfinder (EVF) nor the digital display can match the ability of an SLR to provide a clear, bright image for focusing or composing your photograph.

I read a post on the Pure Florida blog that FloridaCracker has recently purchased a prosumer digital camera produced by Sony, the Cybershot DSC-H5, which features a 36mm-432mm equivalent, optically stabilized zoom lens, as well as a host of other features.  He is currently learning the features of the camera, and has started to post some of his images for us to see.  I will be anxious to follow his progress with the Sony as he learns of both it’s quirks and strengths.

In conclusion, it has been a long journey from my early foray into photography with the tiny Rollei 16, to the present day photography that I undertake with the Nikon CP8800, and I am certain that this camera will be just another step along the way to my “dream camera” that I have described in the first paragraph.  I have a feeling that the best is yet to come with my photographic equipment.  Now, if I could only learn how to take a decent picture!

Of course, the generation gap that I am referring to is the technological generation gap that exists in the photographic world today.  On one side of the chasm you have new, digital technologies that reduce the visual world to an ordered series of 0’s and 1’s stored within a digital file.  On the other side of the chasm are the traditional photographic technologies that rely on film and emulsion to be the storage media for the image. 

If you are young enough to be a product of the digital era, it is likely that all of your accumulated photographs already reside on your computer, so you will find yourself standing securely on one side of the digital divide.  If you happen to be old enough,  it is likely that all of your accumulated photographs are of the traditional film type, and it may be that you are quite content with the status quo.  If so, then you will find yourself standing equally secure, but on the opposite side of the digital divide.  In between these two extremes, however, are legions of photographers (myself included) who possess both digital images and film images, perhaps numbering into the thousands for each type.  For these photographers, questions often arise as to the best method of moving an image back and forth between film and digital media.

Over the past years, I have struggled with some aspects of the film-to-digital, digital-to-film conversion dance.  Although not an expert in these areas, I have learned a few things from both my successes and failures, so I will share them with you in a seriously serious series entitled “Bridging the Generation Gap”.   Part 1 shall begin where I began my own journey into this brave new world, with 35mm film/slide scanners.

In 1993, there were no consumer digital cameras.  Kodak had just recently announced the DCS 200, based on a Nikon 8008 camera body, but that was a professional 1.5 mega-pixel camera that sold for over $10,000.  Without a lens!  While there might not have been consumer digital cameras, there where plenty of computers around, and plenty of people who wanted to digitize their film-based photographs in order to edit, print, share and archive them. I was one of those people, and so I began my search for a scanner capable of digitizing the thousands of 35mm slides that I had accumulated over the years.

The first scanner I owned was a Nikon Coolscan LS-10e.  This was a 2700 dpi – 8 bit per color channel slide/film scanner that was considered to be of excellent quality in its’ day (1993), and which sold for approximately $2000.  This scanner would produce a 24Mb uncompressed tiff file from a 35mm frame.  I can honestly say that I pushed this scanner system to it’s limit.  I can also say that this system was a nightmare to install and use.  I use the term “scanner system” deliberately, because at the time this scanner was marketed by Nikon, there were three critical components necessary to create a successful scanning environment; the scanner device itself, the computer interface, and the scanner software provided by the scanner manufacturer.

To explain the shortcomings of the Nikon scanner system, I really must take you back in time and refresh your memory as to the state of the graphics world in 1993.  Apple Computer was the name of the game, and a Mac was the machine you needed to have.  Adobe ruled the graphics/imaging software world, and Photoshop Version 2.3 reigned supreme.  In the PC world, the Intel Pentium chip had just been introduced, and this 60 MHz “screamer” could be had for as “little” as $878.  If you were at the cutting edge, you would have been thinking of upgrading your Microsoft MS-DOS Version 6.0 to Windows for Workgroups Version 3.11.  Woe unto the poor, misguided soul who dared venture into the graphics field armed with merely an Intel/Microsoft based PC.

Why was it so difficult for us PC guys to use our computers for digital imaging?  If you examined Photoshop v2.3, for instance, you would find that the software was originally written and optimized for the Mac platform, and then (poorly) ported over to the PC platform.  Ditto with the scanning software provided by Nikon for the LS-10e.  Originally designed for the Mac, it too was a botched port to the PC platform.  Added to this unfortunate mix was the fact that the Nikon LS-10e driver relied upon a specific Adaptec SCSI interface board to communicate with the computer, and that particular Adaptec board had numerous issues with the extended memory managers that were a necessary part of the PC’s configuration back then.  Despite all of the problems, Nikon and other imaging vendors recognized the huge market the PC represented, so it was “off to market” with whatever products they had at hand.

I could write a a very long article about all of the problems I had with the Nikon LS-10e scanner system, but that is not the purpose of this post.  Suffice it to say that for every scanning session, I had to reconfigure autoexec.bat files, config.sys files, reorder the devices attached to the SCSI daisy-chain, reboot the system, say my prayers, and then scan.  If my prayers were answered, the scan would be successfully completed without crashing the computer two or three times.   When finished scanning, the entire process had to be reversed to enable normal use of the computer.  Add to this the problems encountered, and the time consumed when trying to perform digital editing of a 24 Mb image file on a machine that could only “see” 640k of the file at a time, and you had a scenario in which a person had to be pretty motivated (or have had plenty of free time) to do any serious scanning.  Having said that, the results obtained after exerting all this effort in scanning a slide or negative were excellent.  The Nikon scanner was great at rendering an accurate and pleasing image file for those images that I scanned using it.  But because of the enormous time commitment involve in the process, I never even came close to my goal of digitizing all of my old film-based images.

Two years ago, I decided that the time had come to reopen the book on my slide/film scanning escapades, and so I again ventured out into the 35mm slide/film scanner marketplace.  What I discovered was that the slide/film scanning situation had changed very dramatically since my last foray into the arena a decade ago.   After examining the offerings available, I settled on a Konica/Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV 35mm Slide/Film Scanner (whew… that’s a mouthful). 

This scanner is a 3200 dpi – 16 bit per color channel 35mm slide/film scanner that also accommodates APS film.  This scanner will produce a 70Mb uncompressed tiff file from a 35mm frame, or nearly 3 times the information capacity of the Nikon Coolscan produced file.   The scanner connects to the computer via USB 2.0, so it is simple, quick and readily available to most users.  The scanner is supplied with the scanner utility software as well as a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements.  I paid less than $250 for this scanner in 2004.

My experience with this scanner has been diametrically opposite of my experiences with the Nikon scanner of the 1990’s.  After the initial installation, which involved nothing more than inserting an installation CD into the drive and then plugging the USB cable into the computer, the scanner worked flawlessly.  I have used this scanner to scan hundreds of slides, and it has yet to crash in the midst of the process.  The Nikon Coolscan, on the other hand, would sometimes take two or three rebooting cycles of the computer just to achieve one successful scan.  The slide holder (which can be seen in the photo above) holds four slides at a time.  Now that I have become familiar with the software and have established a usage routine, I can prescan four slides, apply minor image correction and cropping to each image, and complete the final scans on all four images in less than ten minutes.  So at a rate of about 20-25 slides per hour of work, I am slowly making a dent in my digitizing efforts.

Quality of Scan Issues

For the type of usage that I have put my scanners through, I can make a few general observations regarding image quality.  The first observation is that the quality of the scanned image is directly related to the type of film that is scanned, regardless of which scanner you use.  The results of both the Nikon and Konica/Minolta scans reflect the fact that grainy films produced poor scans from each.  For example, here is a scan produced by the Konica/Minolta scanner from a GAF color ASA 400 slide film (which is considered a grainy film). 

This scanned image has lost most of the sharpness that exists on the original slide.  Additionally, if you examine the shadow areas at the top, the grain of the film becomes apparent, much more so than when the film itself is examined under a loupe.

And the following example is also GAF ASA 400 slide film, scanned with the Nikon Coolscan.  This photo was taken in Yosemite National Park at night, using a time exposure (notice the stars in the sky).  You can really see how the grain is exaggerated in the sky with this scan.

The second observation is that both scanners produced excellent results when the film in question was a good exposure taken on a fine grained film.  Here are two more examples to illustrate this point.  The first is a photograph taken with Fuji Velvia 50, considered to be a highly saturated and fine grained color slide film, and originally scanned with the Nikon Coolscan:

Notice the deep saturation of the resulting scan, and also notice that there are no grain artifacts in either the background, or in the “skin” of the Spanish Shawl nudibranch.  The following photograph of a Corvette fender (everybody has a photo of a Corvette fender, don’t they?) was taken with Kodacolor ISO 100 film, and it was scanned with the Konica/Minolta scanner:

In examining the photo above, you will see bright saturated color, and no hint at any graininess.  The detail in the images has been retained in the final scan, and artifacts are kept to a minimum.  Overall, I have been very pleased with the quality of the scans that I have made with both of these systems,  but I have been extremely pleased and surprised at the ease of installation and use of the newer generation Konica/Minolta scanner.

As a concluding thought, I would say that the goal of digitizing my collection of slides will probably be accomplished eventually, but not in the near future.  At a rate of 20-25 slides per hour of work, the scanning process is still a slow procedure.  Fortunately, I do not shoot with film anymore, so my collection of film-based photographs will not be growing.  In the meanwhile, it is quite enjoyable to see pictures taken long ago become available for viewing and sharing on a computer platform.

The latest crop of prosumer EVF (electronic viewfinder) digital cameras feature 8 mega-pixel images, coupled with a 10X optical zoom lens.  Some feature VR (vibration reduction) lenses.  If you have never seen a demonstration of the power of this combination of features, you may be interested in these photos.

If you peer at this first photo closely, you will see a group of purple flowers (irises, I believe) that are growing at a distance of 100 feet from where I stood to take the photo.

In the next photo, I have remained in the same location, but now I have zoomed in fully on the iris bushes.  In 35mm camera equivalency, I have zoomed from a 35mm (moderately wide-angle) shot to a 350mm (long telephoto) shot.

The photo above demonstrates the power that a 10X-optical zoom lens brings to the photographer.  Now, if you again look closely at the photo just above, you will see towards the bottom, just slightly off-center to the right, deep purple petals and a very dark iris bud.  Here, let me help you to see it-

What you are looking at here is simply a cropped portion of the second photo, but there has been no enlarging or interpolation involved whatsoever.  It is merely a pixel-for-pixel depiction of what the camera captured on it’s sensor, and is a good indication of the power that 8 mega-pixel images bring to the photographer.

I will exhort you to think this through as you look at these photos again.  In the last photo you can see the pistols of the iris. You can see the detail of the veins on the petals of the irises.  And the image you are viewing was captured by a point-and-shoot camera from 100 feet away, on an overcast day, at 1/48th second shutter speed, without the aid of a tripod!  Think of all the possibilities with these kinds of cameras!

Another quick example.  Retta found this turtle on our patio last week, and so she grabbed the camera and snapped a few pictures of this fellow.

Or should I say, these fellows, because when Retta examined the photo on the computer, she discovered that the turtle had a passenger!

These photos were taken with a Nikon Coolpix 8800, but the point of the post is to plug the capabilities of this breed of camera, and not necessarily this specific make or model.