"Serious" photography was never easy. Until Eastman introduced dry plates,
photographers had to sensitize their own materials, a real mess. But the
difficulty forced photographers to spend at least a little time thinking
about what they were doing.
As the act of photographing something became simpler and less expensive, it
also became more trivial. The Kodak was the first of millions of cameras
that let the user snap away thoughtlessly. The modern 35mm camera (as
exemplified by the first Leica) * offered a 36-shot load of relatively
inexpensive film that further encourage "care-less" shooting.
That doesn't mean inexpensive photography with miniature cameras _has_ to be
thoughtless or superficial. One can spend just as much time selecting and
composing with a Leica as with a Linhoff. And finding "the decisive moment"
cannot be achieved simply by pressing a button and running through 20 frames
in five seconds.
The problem with digital photography is that it reduces the incremental cost
of taking a photograph to essentially nothing. The photographer thus has
zero motivation for paying any attention to what he's doing. How many photos
remain in the camera's memory, unprinted, simply because they aren't any
good?
The other day I pulled out one of my OM-4Ti's and played with it for a
while. It's an elegant product, as 35mm SLRs go, and as its model number
suggests, it's intended to be the SLR equivalent of a Leica.
The E-500 is nothing like that. It's easy to handle, but grossly outsized
for an SLR whose format has less than 1/4 the area of a 35mm frame. ** There
is nothing "elegant" about it; Olympus's claim that the 4/3 System would
permit compact cameras and tiny lenses seems naive at best, a blatant lie at
worst.
* A number of cameras used 35mm cine film before the Leica. The Leica is
considered the first "precision" 35mm camera with a high-quality lens. It is
arguably the first precision camera of any format.
** Several years ago I bought a Pen F, and was startled to discover that an
OM body is only fractionally larger.
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