The Missing Screen

This is the second of the longer pieces I promised in the opening post of this series.

I have been circling a new phone for a few weeks, and I caught myself doing the thing. The thing where you assemble a justification you already know is decorative - in this case that the always-with-me snapshot camera might be the actual reason to buy it. So I went looking for permission on the internet, and the internet was delighted to provide: this phone now genuinely takes photos as good as a mirrorless camera.

Then I fell over a video making the identical claim about the Pixel 3, seven years ago.

It was not true then and it is not true now. I still have RAW files from a Canon 20D that hold up perfectly well next to what my current cameras produce, and I can see hard quality differences between those cameras and the snapshots from a reasonably recent Pixel without squinting. Both of those things at once. The sensor in your pocket got extraordinary and it did not close the gap, and the industry has been announcing that it closed the gap on a roughly annual cycle for a decade.

Which is the shape almost every gear story comes in, once you start noticing.

I said at the start of all this that photography keeps being sold to us as something done for an audience, a platform, or a purchase. The first two I have already had my say about. This is the third one.

Vinyl crackle

My favourite specimen is one I own and love. Fuji's film simulations are marvellous, I use them constantly, and the claim that they simulate film is marketing nonsense of a high order.

Put a bit of noise and the occasional pop underneath a digitally produced track and you have not simulated a vinyl record. You have added a reference to one. The grain slider in Lightroom has the same relationship to actual film grain: it gestures at a physical process it does not reproduce and was never going to. It is the same move as the 50mm myth I went after the other day, a decision handed to us as a fact, except that here somebody is holding an invoice. What Fuji has built is a set of very good, very characterful colour renderings with evocative names, and if they had called them that, nobody would have loved them less.

The Leica Look lives in the same drawer for me, along with 3D pop and micro-contrast and whatever the current word is. I am not saying the images do not have a character. I am saying that the character is a lens design and a colour profile and, most of all, the person who chose to buy that camera and therefore shoots a certain way - and that "look" is doing the work of hiding all three behind something that sounds like physics.

None of this stops me enjoying any of it. The gap I care about is between the marketing story and what is true, not between good gear and bad.

Three kinds of Leica commentator

Which brings me to the place where the stories get loudest.

There are three kinds of Leica commentator. One, people with photographic or technical reasons for liking them. Two, people who like them for emotional reasons. Three, people who do not own a Leica, would never buy one, and are extremely keen to tell everybody else how they ought to think about Leica.

Full disclosure so you can weight everything below accordingly: I like Leica, and I put myself in category one. I shoot an M10-D, which needs a word of explanation if you have never handled one.

The M is Leica's rangefinder line, unchanged in concept since the 1950s. You focus it by hand, by lining up a second faint image inside a small bright patch in the viewfinder until the two coincide. There is no autofocus. You are looking through a window at the actual world with a frame drawn on it, rather than at a small screen relaying what the sensor currently sees. The D in mine goes a step further: no screen on the back either, so there is no way to look at a photograph until it is off the camera. That combination exists nowhere else.

Then Leica announced the M EV1, an M with the rangefinder taken out and an electronic viewfinder put in - a tiny screen, in other words, showing you the sensor's view, the way essentially every modern camera does.

The forums were a perfect demonstration of all three categories at once, and honestly quite entertaining. Category one asking why this costs more than a Sony while doing less than Leica's own SL with an M-adapter on the front. Category two answering with Look, Design, Prestige, Legacy. Category three explaining that Leica is a Rolex for dentists with more money than ability. Nobody talking to anybody.

My own reaction was that I did not understand it, and it took me a while to work out why. Every so often the community starts hoping aloud that Leica will build exactly this, and the wish always sounded to me a bit like the sports car community hoping Ferrari will finally offer soft suspension and a cruise setting for the engine management. The constraint is the product. Take the rangefinder out and you have removed the reason the thing exists, and what remains is an expensive camera that does less than cheaper ones.

What the camera does to you

And that is the part the marketing never sells, because it cannot be photographed for a product page.

Shooting fully mechanically does something to you. Not to the files - to you. No screen means you cannot check the shot you just took, which means the walk never stops, which means the next frame comes out of what you were still looking at instead of out of the last one. The rangefinder puts a bright frame in the world rather than a preview of a picture, so you are looking at a scene with an intention laid over it and not at a small television showing you what you already have. I cannot demonstrate any of this in an image. It changed how I shoot anyway.

The same thing runs in the other direction and is easier to miss. I bought an OM-3 a while back and get spoken to about it constantly, everywhere, by strangers. Stealthy street photography this is not. That is not a flaw in the camera, it is a property of carrying it, and it changes what kind of work is available to me on any given afternoon as surely as a focal length does.

Or take the constraint I imposed on myself for a while, shooting out of camera and skipping the edit. I still do not know whether that was a self-inflicted handicap or a development step. My results only ever pleased me moderately and I wanted to fiddle with every single one - which could mean the discipline was wrong for me, or could mean I have years of conditioning to shed and that the itch to fiddle is the conditioning talking. That question is worth more to me than any comparison of JPEG engines, and it is a question about me.

So I will keep wearing it out

A dealer told me recently that my Q2 is worth almost nothing on the used market. Not because anything is broken - because it has marks on it. Apparently Leica buyers, unlike buyers of every other brand, expect a used camera to have been kept in cotton wool and taken out only in good weather, and the moment there is any evidence of a life the price falls through the floor.

Sit with that for a second, because it is the whole argument standing in the open. The resale market is offering me money to treat my camera as an object to be protected rather than a tool to be used. That is a piece of gear reaching all the way into how I behave, and in exactly the wrong direction. Everything else in this post is a story someone told about a picture. This one is a story about my hands.

I was only curious anyway. I will carry on wrecking it.

There is more where this came from. The whole series collects under Photo Thoughts.