Smart New Hot-Shots

Cameras Still can't think, but they have gotten pretty smart. They have achieved a medullalike intelligence that lets them regulate certain reflexive functions all by themselves. This does not give them command of such higher considerations as aesthetic judgment--you still supply the real brains of the outfit--but at least the mere necessities of photography can be relegated to (continued on page 224)Hot-shots(continued from page 136) the mental netherland of automation. The electronic smarts of cameras, however, having evolved over just a few years, are not as universal as the biological counterparts that took a million times as long. While your automatic system behaves according to a plan approved and standardized throughout the species, different cameras reflect the fact that at the present stage there is still more than one way to shoot a cat.

Take exposure, the phenomenon that has many people laboring under the belief that photography is confusing. Just because the bigger f numbers refer to smaller openings, and just because their arithmetic makes 11 half of 8, which is half of 5.6, and so on, are not reasons to construe anything mystical to exposure. It's really so simple that even a computer can figure it out--which one does routinely in some two-dozen fully automatic 35mm SLR models presently on the market. Their automatic settings supply the utter simplicity of a snapshot camera; aim/focus/shoot being the quick-as-you-say-it minimum necessary for technically perfect pictures. Meantime, unlike the Instamatics, the 35s provide the precision and the artistic flexibility attendant to the most sophisticated picture-making instruments ever made.

Interchangeable lenses (including fish-eye, wide-angle, telephoto, zoom, perspective-control, macrofocus and other special-purpose optics), motorized film advance, through-the-lens exposure metering, and so forth, are the trappings that accompany even the least expensive smart 35s. With exposure automation thrown in, they can command virtually any shooting situation as fast as you can press a button, yet they require from you little more mastery of photographic technology than did the old Brownie.

That is partially because the latest 35mm models make their calculations according to what is called the center-weighted system: The meter reads the entire picture area but gives primary emphasis to the central portion. The presumption is that the snapshooter will compose his shots with the main subject in or about the center.

Thus, if you photograph a friend standing in a park, you can be confident that the camera will expose your friend in the picture center, giving secondary consideration to the brighter sky above and the darker soil below.

Center-weighted readings are also called averaged readings, which some critics say is a euphemism for compromise. But the compromise works in the vast majority of circumstances to such an extent that some smart 35s clearly are meant for full-time automation. Manual exposure overrides are feasible, strictly speaking, but the range of the photographer's control is severely limited with several of the cameras. The Fujica AZ-1 has just three shutter speeds that can be established nonautomatically, while the Pentax ME and the Yashica FR-II each have only one. And though the Minolta XG-7 works with all of its shutter speeds set manually, it does so without any aid from its exposure meter. The use of the XG-7's meter, and the full range of these other cameras' shutter speeds, are available strictly for automatic operation.

But there are moments, such as at the beginning or end of the day, when shadows are long, that you'd want to control the camera settings yourself. Thus, all the smart 35s allow the photographer to override the auto exposure system.

Exposure-correction dials are the most common means of doing this; they induce an immediate recalibration, so that the automatic exposure settings will be correct for a subject in minority lighting.

Then again, you may want to deliberately misexpose a shot in order to achieve a special lighting effect, perhaps. For that, you should switch to a semiautomatic mode of exposure setting and use your built-in light meter to determine the exposure settings that you'll make by hand.

How much latitude to amend automatic exposure do you need? The answer depends upon the kinds of things you plan to shoot. If your objective is the straightforward documentation of your life and times, you can probably count on unadulterated automatic settings. But if anything creatively more complex than snapshots looms as a possibility, you should consider cameras that have full manual overrides.

While you're thinking about the subjects you most often shoot, you should also think about the style of exposure automation they might call for. There are two styles available: aperture-priority automation and shutter-priority automation.

In an aperture-priority camera, you pick the aperture setting you want and the exposure system causes the shutter speed to slave to your choice. This can be used to influence the appearance of your pictures, for exposure is not the only thing affected by aperture settings. Depth of field--or the range from here to there within which objects will be in focus--is more extensive at small aperture settings, shallower at larger ones. Sometimes it improves a picture to throw the background out of focus, which can be done by using a large aperture and its limited depth of field. Aperture-priority cameras combine exposure automation with this particular potential of user control.

But there comes a time in every photographer's life when his pictures' appearances benefit from his ability to control the shutter. An example would be an Indy 500, with cars zipping past at Lord knows how fast. From the bright sun of the open track, they may regularly duck into the shadow of the grandstand. Here you'll accept any depth of field you can get (and a car that is in focus on that side of the track will also be in focus on this side; once a subject is more than 20 feet away, all distances are equal as far as most lenses are concerned), so shutter speed becomes important. It must be fast, lest those speed demons outrun the camera and become a blur on film.

That situation calls for a shutter speed pre-established to be fast enough--maybe 1/1000 of a second--to freeze the action, and a lens whose aperture obediently gears itself to suit. That is what shutter-priority automation supplies.

In the hullabaloo between aperture-priority and shutter-priority advocates, the greater amount of nose thumbing gets done by those who favor aperture priority, for the greater number of manufacturers see things their way. Only six camera models shun aperture priority: three by Konica, two by Mamiya and one by Canon.

But what's that you say, you can envision yourself working in situations that call for aperture priority now, shutter priority then? No problem. For though most cameras offer one type of setting or the other, at least two--the Canon A-l and the Minolta XD-11--offer both, selected at your discretion.

The Canon A-l also features an exposure mode called Programed Exposure, for you folks who can't decide between one priority and another. Here the camera makes up its own mind about which combination of aperture and shutter settings suits various levels of light. The fact that the method works well should allay any anxiety about Big Brother being delivered to you in a black box.

Smart cameras seek their intellectual equals in the accessories they work with, and for that reason you will find various makes of electronic flash units nearly as clever. That is, they adjust their own light output. How? Well, they make some light and, while they are still making it, they read some that has bounced back from the subject. When they see the right amount, they automatically turn themselves off. The whole transaction is completed, you might say, at something just under the speed of light.

While electronic flash units are merely practical, motor drives (or autowinders) also add to the romance of photography. There is no question that the chunk-zitt sound effects of a motorized SLR add macho to picture taking; and few of even the most devoted artistes would deny that dressing for the part is some of the fun. In the meantime, the motor drive automatically advances the film when your thumb is too weary to operate the manual-advance lever. It also works nicely when you must work one-handed, the other hand being engaged in another activity, such as hanging on to something for dear life. Motor drives, in short, make you seem a photographic man of action at all times, and they let you be one when you must. While motor drives are accessories for most, a few cameras are suggesting a new trend by having permanent motor drives. An advantage of the integral motor is that it tends toward a smaller over-all package than a camera with an accessory motor attached to it: Contax recently announced a motorized pair whose proportions are only marginally different from those of their otherwise similar, compact RTS model.

Automatic cameras once were an oddball breed distinct from regular 35s, but now everybody's selling automatics. If a seal of approval were necessary, it came in the form of the FE, the automatic model from the standard-bearer of 35mmdom, Nikon--and the automatic field itself has its own nonstandard embellishments. The Leicaflex R-3, for example, has a spot-metering system that is interchangeable with the center-weighted, so that a small central portion of the scene can be the exclusive influence in contrast light. Meantime, the Olympus OM-2 has two systems of metering, one that sets the exposure just prior to snapping the picture (like the others), the second taking over during the exposure (in case the light changes during the fraction of a second that the film is exposed). Aside from such rogues, the general methods of automatic operation are along similar lines.

Photography is a technological art and, as such, its technological developments influence its artistic content. Motor drives, for example, take the burden of capturing the "decisive moment" off the photographer and place it on the camera. It fires enough frames that the moment has to be in there somewhere. The fleeting, summarizing expression may therefore become a more frequent sight in each individual's photography. Similarly, several of the automatic cameras make it easier to use extended time exposures of one second or longer. An outcome may be a more extensive exploration by photographers of nighttime and other low-light scenes, where lengthy exposures are required.

The real virtue of an automatic camera is that it can adjust itself for spontaneous action; and it can let you stay with the action without need to fool with the camera. It offers the closest-to-perfect implement to photographers who work in journalist-style settings. If this describes you and your shooting intentions, the sagest advice is to buy an automatic camera, keep an extra set of batteries on hand and shoot merrily away until such time as cameras become even smarter.