Have you ever stopped to consider how much of your daily life has been preset? From stored passwords, to phone contact lists, to our Rokus, even our car seats, we build our habits into our devices.
We are enclosed by those habits. We eliminate decisions and rely on choices made long ago.
For me, photography has been a habit. After studying photography in college, my first job was as a reporter. Early on, happy circumstances allowed me to both write and for the Cape Cod Times, and photography became an obsession. Even when I was promoted to director of photography, I still shot constantly. But I had a falling out with the camera, a gut feeling that I was in too deep, that the lens was a glass wall acting as a barrier to the experiences around me, and I shifted back to writing. Then, after a 20 years hiatus, I was once again a director of photography – at The Day of New London, Conn. – and returned to the most rewarding pursuit of my life.
Habits of hands and mind created a photo comfort zone, and I used all the shortcuts and presets on my mirrorless camera. My camera handling became fairly unconscious. But the past two weeks of my Kent State multimedia course broke that cycle. To fully absorb the basics of camera operation, we were required to make photographs to demonstrate 10 different camera and composition techniques – all in manual mode – no presets, no habits. (The photo gallery is above.)
I moved to an Olympus mirrorless years ago, mainly because of the camera’s compact size, but it was reassuring to know that it had big boy camera features for setting exposures. But just as you load all your favorite apps and settings into your phone, I quickly set up all the defaults and relied on my trusty settings, shooting in Program mode (the P on the dial), setting the quick menu so I could access the ISO setting quickly, and developing muscle memory to access Exposure Compensation, since I like to underexpose by .3 or .7 stops.
So it was a shock last week to find myself on the frigid, wind-swept streets of Manhattan trying to teach my hands to forget what they had learned. Don’t touch that dial! Yes, the camera was able to shoot in a full manual mode, but it certainly wasn’t designed for that.
The Olympus has a wheel dial on the back, as many do, with push points at 12 o’clock, 3 o’clock, 6 o’clock and 9 o’clock. To set your manual exposure, you first set the top camera dial at M for manual and then pick your ISO on a viewfinder menu. So far, so good … But then the exposure settings must be performed while looking through the viewfinder to frame the light to be captured. Untrained fingers must grope for the spots on the dial by touch. No peeking!
To set exposure, push up at 12 on the wheel dial on the back to bring up the settings in the viewfinder. To set shutter speed, push at 12 and 6 to raise or lower the speed. For the aperture, push 9 and 3 to open or close the aperture. At least the over/under on the metering displays in the viewfinder, and the saving grace is “live view,” a feature that makes the image in the diopter match the final image, not the actual ambient light.
Manual mode was certainly a lot easier on my 1970s vintage Canon F-1s, mechanical cameras that worked even with a dead meter battery. On those cameras, you set shutter speed on the top dial when dialing aperture on the lens itself, aligning two moving elements in the viewfinder to match the light meter readings.
By the second week of using manual mode on my mirrorless, I was a bit more accustomed to the drill, but with eyes watering from the biting wind in Manhattan’s canyons, my favorite sport of street shooting had me yearning for my presets. As always, I did a lot of shooting in the museums of New York (Giacometti said the people are more interesting than the art in museums), and the indoor setting helped my fumbling fingers.
In the end, it was reassuring to remember that, yes, I know how to work this thing, even though I sensed it would have been easier if I had no habits, if I were picking up this camera for the first time.
And, since I was planning on buying a new camera body while in New York, the experience led me to select the model with the handiest controls – even for manual mode.
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