Your Camera May be Smarter Than You Are

My photography journey keeps reminding me what a filthy world we live in. Sin, filthy, useless people, and filthy, useless spirits are why we can’t have anything nice.

I would say that over 95% of the shots I take now feature my son. He is the most photogenic person I have ever seen in my life. Before he was born, I hoped he would be a child of God, and I hoped he would be smart and free from physical problems, but I didn’t expect him to be extremely good-looking and photogenic. Everyone hopes their kids will look nice, but it wasn’t something I thought about much, and as for being photogenic, which is a completely different thing, who considers that while waiting for a baby to arrive? Maybe shallow celebrities.

I like using my blog to share the things I do, but it’s not working for photography. Because my photos generally feature my son, I can’t post many here. I already had one sick idiot stalk me by reverse-searching a photo of my son which I put on a forum, and on top of that, there are the pagan kooks who go to Christian sites to get photos of people they can curse. And then there are the pedos.

I deleted my Flickr account. I removed photos of my son from forums without warning the mods so they could get in the way. Now I am very reluctant to put any shots up here. Maybe I’ll start again. I am not sure.

Upshot: here I am, writing about photography without posting photos. Again.

Anyway, I learned something interesting which could help other photographers. If you own an Olympus/OM camera and you are getting one blurry shot after another with autofocus, you need to turn off “release priority.”

I keep my OM System camera on continuous autofocus, so it is constantly trying to focus on whatever I shoot. That’s great, but it gave me a false sense of confidence. I thought the camera would always do its best to focus before I shot. That isn’t true.

When you shoot in release priority, the camera’s prime directive is to shoot as soon as you push the button; no delay at all. If the focus has drifted, tough. You get a blurry photo.

The purpose of release priority is to help photographers get clear shots of moving subjects. Imagine you’re shooting an athlete doing the long jump. You’re at the end of the pit, and he’s flying toward you. You push the button, and the camera shoots a rapid flurry of photos. Autofocus can’t keep up, so you use release priority. At the end of the day, you sift through the shots, and you hope there is one good one that is in focus.

That’s how it was explained to me.

If this is correct, then release priority will work against you nearly all the time unless you’re shooting things like flying birds. It explains why I’ve gotten so many awful, unusable photos with my OM-1II. I changed my camera’s setting to focus priority, and now things are much better.

OM System cameras are very weird. They are niche cameras for unusual people. They are very tough; you can take one out on a windy day on a sailboat and then bring it home and rinse it off under the sink. They are the absolute best for macro. They are great for wildlife photography because you can have a very long lens that doesn’t weigh 15 pounds. They have all sorts of computational features Sonys and Canons don’t have. But you really have to study up in order to use one.

My camera came with an excellent 12-40 mm lens. I’m going to get another one because this one is just too long. It shoots like a 24-80 mm full frame lens, and that means no wide-angle shooting. Some people would say 24 mm is wide, but it’s not. I have 9 mm lenses for my A6700. To get the same angle, I would need 6.5 mm on the OM.

I decided to try a Panasonic 8-18 mm zoom. It’s pretty fast, the image quality is very good, and it doesn’t weigh a ton. It won’t go as wide as I would like, but it will be considerably better than 12 mm. When I sit at restaurant tables with my family, I sometimes have to lean back to shoot them at 12 mm. With 8 mm, things should be much easier, and I’ll get that nice, dramatic wide-angle look.

I considered getting a zoom that goes up to around 100 mm on the long end (like 200 mm full-frame), and I may do it to round off my kit, but I almost never want a lens that long. Of course, that may be partly because I rarely use long lenses. Maybe if I had one for the OM, I would fall in love with it.

I’ve been getting fantastic photos, even with the phone. My son makes it easy. I told someone that if I were shooting a young Christy Turlington, I would get more duds than I do with this kid. When I go through raw photos, the hard part isn’t finding good ones. It’s deciding which good ones I want to develop.

Because I was frustrated with the focus issue, I went to a forum, and once I solved the problem, I posted a magnificent photo of my son. Right away, people started telling me I had cropped it wrong. It showed a chair to his right, and it showed a fair amount of his kitchen. I told them the composition was intentional and that I was only asking for help with focus.

Photographers are herd creatures, so it is frustrating to deal with them. They get certain ideas in their heads, and they turn them into the law of the Medes and Persians; everyone must obey at all times. When it comes to portraits, which means any photos that showcase people, they think every shot has to be cropped closely, and every background has to be blurred.

Anyone who thinks every portrait has to be cropped closely knows nothing at all about composition. That is obvious and indisputable, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time explaining it. I shot a photo of my toddler son, for people to look at 50 or 100 or 500 years from now. I shot it in my kitchen, in the house where he is being raised. I want his kids to see the chair and the background. I want him to look at it when he is old and remember that kitchen. That can’t happen if I mindlessly cut the background out.

The same principle applies to blurring. If the background is too blurry, no one will be able to identify anything.

It amazes me that people pull out these rules and apply them to travel shots. “I went to Paris. Here I am in front of the Eiffel Tower. But you can’t see it in the background because I cropped most of it and blurred it out, so I might as well have taken this shot in my bathroom.”

You spend $10,000 on a trip, and then you blur out everything you paid to see. Yeah, that makes sense.

Remember the famous WWII VJ-Day kissing photo? Of course you do. What if the photographer had cropped out the crowd and buildings and blurred every background feature that remained? It would have been ridiculous. A rude sailor assaulting a nurse on the street.

Go look at Vivian Maier’s photos of people and try to find one with heavy bokeh (background blurring) and the background ruthlessly cropped. Good luck with that.

OM cameras aren’t the best for bokeh, and for travel and family portraits, that’s fine. I want to make my OM my travel camera because it’s tough and light and takes great pictures, and any bokeh issues it has won’t matter much.

These days, you can use software to add blurring, so it’s not that big a deal if your raw photo doesn’t have it. Is it fake? Well, sure, but so is in-lens bokeh. Photography is art. Everyone manipulates images. Even your phone never gives you raw photos unless you force it. Every shot is heavily manipulated before you see it. Does that make you a fraud? Come on.

I use Photolab a lot, and it keeps getting better. It rescues noisy photos without making them look fake, so I can shoot in bad light and still get great results. It lets me brighten things I want to emphasize and darken things that are too prominent. It will probably have fantastic fake bokeh soon, because they improve it all the time, but for now I have Lightroom. Am I wrong to use these tools? The results look more like what I saw than the original photos.

Here’s a good life lesson: if you’re doing something original and useful, you shouldn’t require other people’s approval. If what you’re doing is original, they are not doing it. If they understood it, they would be doing it already, and you wouldn’t have to come up with it yourself. Expect to be criticized and laughed at, like Beethoven, Galileo, and Tesla. If you listen to people who can’t understand what you’re doing, you will quit and remain just like them.