Lympa Log - Leica R lenses on Olympus E-330 DSLR

Photos and Text © Gary Todoroff  2006 All Rights Reserved

Although the photographs on this page are not connected with the text, they were taken with M6 and R8 Leicas and the Olympus C-8080, so sort of qualify as a page in the "Lympa Log". In any case the photos tell a brief story of the United States Coast Guard, where I have been priviledged to be a photographer with the Coast Guard Art Program since 1999.

I hope the photos will entice you to look, and then to read some thoughts about the future of digital cameras. Then, maybe there is a photo-text connection, when I recall the Coast Guard motto, "Semper Paratus" - "Always Ready", which is how digital cameras should behave, too!

Camera as computer

When a camera can address 4gb of RAM, store 20 megabytes in a half second and provide a color monitor that rivals LCD's of a few years ago, then let's face it, the camera is a computer.

So, camera as computer – why not? It has much more processing power and memory than the early mid-range computers I programmed. Way back then, those computers had help screens and a friendly human interface – why can't the camera have the same? And especially why not the hotsync approach where the PC can provide a very easy interface to setting the camera?

DSLR cameras have been slow to shed the film-in-the-body camera design. SLRs had the prism in the middle because you needed both sides of the camera to hold the film canister and the take up spool. Why still the hump in the middle of the camera? Hats off to Olympus for putting the prism in the side of their camera and getting rid of the ugly hump. The compactness of this new DSLR leads to more creative possibilities. I've hefted a few moderns DSLRs – talk about isometric exercise! Something is wrong when digital cameras become larger than their analog predecessors. Only cameras seem to have taken the opposite track of all other digital devices that steadily become smaller, not larger.

Olympus not only bucked the bigger-is-better trend of DSLRs, but has also given us the ability to view a potential photograph from perspectives other than just through an optical prism. That LCD Live View screen, which flips at various angles, has given me pictures I could have otherwise never done (see the helicopter lighthouse "periscope" shot). Now if only that screen would rotate too, giving portrait mode LCD flips screen view.

But why stop with an LCD that flips and twists? Wireless is the future, right? Why not put the LCD in my glasses, right there in front of my eye, no matter where I point the camera? Just transmit the image a couple of feet from camera to me. Who is working on that right now? It makes perfect sense to me that such a function could be done just with the technology available right now. Let's see it! Instead, non-Olympus professional cameras have not even taken the first step away from the traditional film body design. Indeed, this is still your father's Oldsmobile, Canon and Nikon!

So many other functions could be implemented for unheard of capabilities in photographic creativity. Other minds can conceive what mine has not. Good example – a recent software program allows for online editing of images using a symbolized loupe on the monitor to quickly magnify any photographic thumbnail on your screen light box. Now I've been using that function for years with a loupe over a few rolls of slides on the darkroom light table. Why has it taken so long for such an obvious function to be implemented on the PC? We've all been stuck in the drop and drag, open another window, drill-down one menu ladder at a time, petrified way of thinking. But someone said, why not move a loupe over the computer screen just like on light table, scanning multiple images in a few seconds, Why was there this functional step backwards for so many years on computer screen viewing of photos? This was definitely one of those “why didn't they do this sooner” inventions. Will we be saying a few years from now, "remember back when you actually had to hunt menus and turn dials instead of just talking to your camera!?"

Again I wonder, how many engineers actually take the time to look at how people perform functions. Sometimes I think we got so enamored with pretty colors on the screen and moving a mouse around, that we forgot to really study the human-machine interface. The DSLR seems on the brink of amazing capabilities in photography, if only people will imagine a camera without film and other restrictions. And think of the camera as computer.

On the other hand, take the telephone clip connector, called technically the RJ-11. Take the inventor and erect his statue! Give him lifetime pensions with monthly free travel anywhere in the world that the RJ-11 connector has ever been used! You all have seen this connector – the end of a phone cable that is asymmetrically obvious to both sight and touch. You all have heard the positive ‘click' indication of a solid connection. That connection stays solid, too, until you want it disconnected with a simple push on the tab and pull of the cord. Many novices have even made RJ-11 cables from the plastic connector, telephone cable and a $10 tool from Radio Shack. It's really simple. Has anybody tried making a USB connector?

The stuff that really works well, we don't think about too much – flip-top soda pop lids, light switches, turn signals, RJ-11 connectors. Other interfaces like VCRs, modern alarm clocks, and DSLR menus leave us gasping at the complexity. Simple stuff like USB connectors, we put up with, but waste time. A clean and simple interface, like something that could be done on digital cameras, will be a wonder to behold when they get it right.

I am typing this right now on a modern Airbus jetliner heading to Washington DC. On the way into the plane, I glanced in the cockpit, There was an electronic screen monitoring the aircraft, showing doors that were open, highlighting navigation charts, and who knows what all. I bet the pilots learned that visual interface quickly and would not go gladly back to the analog maze of dials and meters. That visual representation of aircraft information was something that you or I could understand after some quick training. Simple icons efficiently displayed the complexity inside the machine. Today's cameras have the digital guts to communicate to us that way too, if only the designers had the guts to step outside the box.

                 This foggy photograph over the shoulders of Coast Guard pilots landing their HH-65 helicopter happens to be titled "Minimum Visibility", oddly appropriate when discussing the LCD menu interface on most digital cameras. . .