Camera Controls thoughts

2023 08 30

So we actually replaced the DSLR we got in the last blog post, with a new, smaller camera. It looks cool. We got a new camera because we really didn't like our DSLR's interface and size, it felt like it wanted us to take it on jobs and get things perfect. And, we also got pretty lucky, it's not common that we have the flexibility to replace something on whim! Quite happy with it.

Ever since we've started using this camera, we've begun to forget the woes of camera size. Today, though, we were reading the wikipedia pages for the higher tiered version of our camera, and realised, the cameras in the photos look huge!!

Before we got our camera, we were really unsure if we wanted to get the higher tiered version. Both of them were about the same accessibility, and the higher tiered version also had a really shiny finish and is water resistant. It is also bigger. We were really concerned about size and shape.

the primary reason we didnt like our dslr was literally just because of the experience using it, and a huge element of that, for us, was the size of the camera. it didn't fit in our shoulder bag easily, and had a weird shape that made bringing it with us difficult. We didn't want to have to specifically empty our bag just to fit our camera in it, or bring another bag just for our camera, so we had to always wear our camera on our body, with the neck strap, which, wasnt healthy.

and we were looking for cameras that were smaller, and also cooler and more fun.

quartz suggested we try fujifilm xt1, after we said we thought its xt100 was cute and that we wanted something fun. the xt1 is the higher tier version of our camera, the xt10. so we took a look!

The higher tiered version, which I'm gonna call the pro model, actually has surprisngly similar max width and height dimensions to our DSLR. the size differences between them mostly come from depth, with the dlsr being signficantly deeper, and also the form factor.

the photos and videos of the camera online were really hard to judge. People would say it had a good size, or was comfortable, or something, but to us, sometimes the camera would look very big, or very small, depending on context!!! and, based on our experiences, we knew that max dimensions alone wasn't entirely indicative of how accessible feeling something was. form factor is also very important! The form factor is how the camera uses that space. some cameras are just boxes with a camera inside it, whereas cameras like our dslr, had their own unique design that was less space efficient.

we decided that, it was probably impossible for us to know for certain without actually using the cameras. we decided to just get the one that was the most accessible, which ended up being the xt10.

when we got the xt10, we distinctly remember feeling how the size felt perfect. it like, there was nothing wrong with its size. it was well sized for what we wanted.

after using it for a good while, we've kinda forgotten what it is like to have to use a camera that is too big for us.

until we read the wikipedia page for the pro version of our camera, and looked at the pictures. we also looked at the different model versions that came afterwards.

Omg. Omg omg it looks so big there is so much extra space everywhere. Now that we've begun using our camera, we can't imagine cameras being any bigger than it. but they do exist! lots of cameras exist that are so much larger! the pro version of our camera itself looks so, like everythign, is bigger. it's like a 3ds versus a 3ds xl. like like if youve only used one thats just how big that console is for you and you dont think anything of it. but then if you suddenly are exposed to the other one its like, holy shit,,, is the difference really that big??

Honestly, because we are happy with our camera, we think the differences are cool. we have a camera we like and we just think the differences are neat. we have cool girl autism. Cool to get autistic about the surpirsing differences! It's like, the same camera as ours, kinda, but, but everything is slightly different, just enough. it stimulates our brain. like there's so much more empty space between the dials on the camera, and there is more axis variation in their locations, and the dials on the pro version also are designed noticably differently from our version. It's cool.

Looking at the different controls has also gotten us thinking about camera controls, and I thought it would be cool to share our thoughts about the inputs on our current camera. We've tried doing this in the past, but it wasn't healthy, since we'd focus a lot on things that either were not healthy, or not things we were actually interested in talking about. Talking about camera stuff has been a little traumatising for our experience with photography, and so it's made talking about it in a healthy way really hard. We've actually been hesitant to make two photography blog posts back to back, since we really didn't want to make it worse for ourselves.

Alright!

colour modes

Something we think is really cool about our new camera, is the colour modes. There are four main modes we've experimented with so far: provia, velvia, astia, and classic chrome. we used to get excited hearing about these names, although reading things online made them and so many other photography things so much less special for us. It's good we're recovering, at least.

provia!

Provia is the "standard" mode (the camera says so!). I guess it is supposed to be used for general purpose photographs.

Compared to our DSLR, we've noticed that provia is very sensitive towards greens. DSLR's standard mode liked warmer tones, especially red and orange, and so would prefer those. On provia, foliage is instead rendered green and sometimes even bluish. It also kinda feels like provia reduces colour constrast in foliage, making small gradients of colour tint less noticable. This makes it significantly easier to get things to actually look green when we want things to look green, but in general, we like the warmer tones more from our DSLR. They make us excited, and give us good memories.

We do actually have a lot of positive memories with our DSLR, and I think that is primarily because it was before we had enveloped ourselves in the world of techy photography things. We had always been so careful in the past to avoid things like photography "guide" books and websites, or really anything about photography that gave off the wrong vibes, like things that felt prescriptive or pros/cons based, or consumerist. Which is most photography things; unfortunately photography writing and authorship is dominated by very unhealthy and and uncomfortable norms and ideas. It kinda feels disconnected from reality sometimes, which is disassociative, and sometimes also oppressive and marginalising (because the disconnect from reality is a result of massive privileges). i dont like it, and it has been traumatising. we were effectively forced to put ourselves deep into this environment, because we needed to find information for the camera that would make us happiest.

at first, provia was kinda upsetting. like, the techy photography people always talked so much about how good our camera's colour modes were, espeically for artists, but after using it, they feel so much more like a marketing gimmick. provia is flat and unappealing and really not good for much of anything. Looking back, we should've known that the people writing the things we were reading were not actually artists, and probably had a very objectively defined meaning of what art was, and we absolutely shouldn't have listened to it at face value. but we did cuz we wanted a cool camera, and it is hard to find things that aren't written like that. This was frustrating, and sometimes made us feel conflicted about the decision to change cameras. Like, we were taken advantage of by badly authored photography media, and that made us give up things we did like about our DSLR.

It made us feel conflicted feelings. we were supposed to like our new camera, but we couldn't! at least not in this way. and, and that means we made the wrong decision! and that hurt to think about.

this thought doesn't affect us anymore, because we've realised that we are still allowed to like certain things about our new camera, while also accepting that maybe it isn't as ideal as it was supposed to be, and there were actually things we prefered in our DSLR, and that we miss. we can know that we prefered some things we left behind, and acknowledge that we feel that way, and that's okay.

we don't have to try and prove that our camera is actually perfect for us, and there's nothing wrong with liking certain things about our other camera more 💝 we dont have to feel bad about it 😊

Some of our other thoughts about provia that i don't really know where to put is that it is also pretty de-saturated and also makes the images look flat for whatever reason. Like like. Weird tonality and constrast, not just for greens and stuff. It just feels super artifical and yucky to us. If the colours behind the mode were more solid and made more sense i do think the bad constrast things would be okay cuz then it could like, be a style.

Feels too unfocused/yucky to be a style on its own at the moment though.

we're still trying to use provia to try and find situations where we like it, and we have taken a lot of pictures we really like with it! it just doesn't seem to be as flexible as we thought, since a lot of our photos lately have involved situations that we want to be more saturated or that have a lot of green in it.

velia~!

Velvia is the vibrant or vivid colour mode, and i think we've read somewhere that it is like a landscape mode.

On our dslr, the landscape mode seemed to just increase the saturation and excitedness of blue and green (sky and foliage), and that was it. it wasn't particularly elegant about it, and we rarely could find any other use for the mode outside of what it said on the tin. The landscape mode also didn't fix the green colour rendering issue of the DSLR, in fact nothing did, which was, kinda frustrating, since this was the mode specifically dedicated to... pointing the camera at tree... Sometimes we do want our trees to be all green, and not yellow tinted!

On our DSLR, there are like, settings to customise each colour mode thing. Adjust constrast, saturation, sharpness, and "colour". According to the tool tips, the changes made by the colour slider are the tint. One end tints it to a red with a little pink in it, and the other end tints it to either yellow or green. It always felt strange that that was the only colour customisation other than white balance bracketing which made literally no sense cuz bracketing seemed to be the only way to customise the white balance in any form.

an aside on the tooltips that taught us about what the slider does:
by the way they only appear when you have easy mode turned on!!! like literally what the fuck omg. like they force you to use the really badly designed "beginner mode" option (which is not actually particuarlly helpful from our experiences) stuff just to see goddamn tooltips of what something does. also the tooltips only appear when accessing the menu from the quick menu, and not the, and not the fucking button that says "menu" on it. they just dont appear when using the main menu. the main menu also gets rid of the beautiful pink and brown colour scheme that we had turned on and the bubbly design langauge that made the quick menu so amazing for our brain. Honestly the quick menu aesthetic design was one of our single favourite things in that camera and we would absolutely love to have access to it on our new camera!! it is literally so aesthetically perfect. which is so fucking weird cuz its just the quick menu everything else is horrid.

So like, I guess we could've probably used the colour slider to change how it renders greens, but i think we did and still couldnt get it just right. and like, we also really didn't want to use it, since the menu is so clunky and slow to use. we did use the saturation and contrast sliders a lot, and we hated how slow it made photographing things. we'd need to change constrast every couple of seconds!

our new camera also has all these options, except for tint, but they are universal (although they do also let you store presets of a bunch of settings! so you get both presets and the ability to customise them universally!), constrast is split into highlight and shadow constrast, and all the effects seem to be more noticable and also less frequeuntly something we feel the need to change. In the future we may wish the constrast settings had finer control and graduation, and it would be cool to make our own colour recipes, but at the moment we don't miss these.

we don't really need the manual colour tint adjustment at the moment! In the case of velvia, it has colours take a very specific and cohesive way, and we really enjoy that.

Soft shadows are rendered purply or bluey, and we absolutely love this. we've always thought about editing pictures to do this on our own, and now that we've used velvia, we're surpised we havent seen this in other cameras!

velvia also gives more definition and prominence to warm colour blobs, compared to the other modes. In the other colour modes, pink clouds or orange/purple skies aren't as exciting as we'd expect them to be based on real life, because the colour isn't as prominent as we expect! it mostly just looks like a featureless blob of colour; it is definitely there, but it doesn't seem noticeable. in velvia, the colour are a lot more exciting and balance a lot better with the rest of the scene, and that's really cool. really, the way velvia handles warm tones especially pink and reds reminds us a lot of our dslr, and that's a good thing. it has the same kinda excitment and care in the reds. although it does extend more of that to other warm tones and i think that looks really awesome when capturing exciting light.

velvia also reduces constrast in blues a little bit, which also is really nice for photographing skies. minor variations in shades of blue transition smoother together, and we like that. this combined with how velvia handles warm colours makes clouds look extremely good to us, in like, maybe almost a dreamy way.

these and the other aspects of velvia give the colour mode a specific look that we really like. it's different and we use it in different way, and it gives us different inspiration for what to and how to photograph. and that is exactly what we want from different colour modes.

this is actually a very recent realisation!! for a while we thought velvia looked over the top and a little too much for what we liked.

Exploring it is really fun. We've mostly used it for photographing cool lighting and skies in a happy way, and to access some old feelings certain aesthetics have made us feel in the past. So far we have really enjoyed using it in softly lit situations (the shadows look really cool!), and in fields with cool yellow and green foliage and also when there is really cool lights and colour around us, like during sunsets and sunrises.

Recognising all the small things it does has made us realise how cohesive it is for landscapes. a lot of thought seems to have gone into making scenes look good, and how to achieve that. a lot of the situtations where we appreciate the differences between other colour modes are when we are outside and looking at natural things. this will likely change in the future as we discover more things about it! quartz has said that it uses velvia for people pictures and we wanna try that too.

oh did we forgot to mention velvia also has really high saturation across the board. thats pribably an important part of its aesthetic

also a fact about the shadow thing. since it appears to only change soft shadows, changing exposure and constrast settings can signficantly change how the picture looks in velvia, even with only minor adjustments, if the shadows enter or exit the range for the blue colour, and what parts of the picture do. this can also sometimes make it pretty difficult to replicate a certain image in velvia, especially if lighting conditions change. It's fun, we like it :)

astia

astia is a lot like provia, except, weirdly a little more saturated, and also introduces more warm colour details into foliage. comparing images side by side it seems pretty minor when trying to find differences, but i think that the small difference is noticable when doing the vibes check. Terry buster wolf.

it's still pretty distinct from our dslr's reds, although it is much more subtle. Our dslr also very noticeably put a lot of yellow into trees, which was, weird. astia also does this, although it is also also signifcantly more subtle, and it works really well for balancing out the green and giving more colour constrast. Sometimes trees and even other foliage do have a little yellow in them, and astia enables us to capture that much better than provia!!

Although, we have noticed that it being much more subtle about the yellow in trees does make it kinda difficult when there is actually a lot of yellow in the tree, there doesn't seem to be any way to make the yellow or the colour constrast more prominent without changing the white balance of the whole image. (we dont think this will be noticable for autumn colours, because i expect that the yellows will be signficantly larger so the camera will be able to better tell that that is what the scene actually looks like)

astia is called the "portrait" mode, in some places, and the "soft" mode in others. Soft doesn't mean anything to us, it is more of a standard mode that is tuned more to warmer tones. Portrait mode on our dslr was also like this; except it was a lot more prominent about it. In both cases, using astia and portrait mode has come to replace most situations where we used to use provia and standard. We really like warm colours and pink!

Although, using portrait on our dslr did always concern us that we would over do it, since the red and pink was so much stronger than everything else by a lot. This isn't a concern with astia, since its way more subtle, but that isn't inherently positive or negative. Sometimes we like having really over the top colours, sometimes we don't! it's art :) it would be cool to have the option to change the strength of it, to match our interests and feelings!

it's interesting to us that this does seem to be the portrait mode. we haven't taken many portraits with it, mostly just a small number of self portraits from a larger set, but, because of how subtle it is, i dont think there is much reaon to prefer it over provia, if the goal is to make warm tones look more prominent. this may be the kinds of photos we've taken, and we definitely haven't used it very much, but it is interesting to us.

classic chrome

classic chrome is the "chrome" mode.

it's handled differently from the rest of the colour modes, and pretty noticeably.

it's aesthetic is much stronger and more defined, and is also a aesthetic that was specifically made for the camera, whereas the other three colour modes were based on film formulations that the manufacturer also makes, to emulate the film appearance digitally.

based on what we've read online, classic chrome seems to be designed with a specific artistic style in mind, based on the vibe that newspaper prints of the sepia era gave off, rather than trying to emulate somewhat general purpose film rolls.

classic chrome is de-saturated and gives a lot of prominence to blues, or at least the photos we've taken with it do. It also handles bright and colourful and warm looking scenes in a very very interesting way.

what this mode does is not entiely clear to us, but we have enjoyed using it when the sun is at a oblique angle, and at night. in fact, we really love basically all the pictures we've taken with it. it was the first film mode other than provia that we explored, probably cuz its aesthetic was so much more clear to us than the others, and it is an aesthetic we really love and resonate with.

we really want to explore more types of photographs with it. we dont use it much cuz we are generally hesitant to de saturate general purpose photographs and also to introduce a blue tint but i feel like we could find a lot of wonderful use cases for it.

at the moment, we're thinking of a photograph we took on the cliff of a plateau in a forest during the winter. the strong warm sunlight reflecting off of the icy river at the bottom of the valley and the snow, and the shadows cast by the trees probably would've looked amazing in classic chrome.

it's exciting!!

other colour modes

our experience with the other modes is either very limited or non existent.

there are pro neg std and pro neg hi, monochrome, and sepia.

it is interesting to us how they had all these cool names for modes and then just went with monocrhome and sepia.

pro neg have only used for portraits when cant get colours how we want, and we like them, dont know the difference, and havent used monocrhome or sepia, but based on pcitures we've seen online, we dont know if wed like that. want to eventualyl explore both monocrhome and sepia

we really like how we'vebeen able to use colour modes and its exciting!

dials dials dials

on our dslr, the command dial had a very good tension to it and also click when it shifted position. it was very responsive and nice to use, and we wish there were more things the camera used it for!

on our new camera, there are two command dials, and they are very slidey. they turn so smoothly and easily. they also kinda float a little bit and dont have a static position. it is much easier to change things quickly, or at least in theory,

both of these cameras have an issue with the command dial design. our dslr is aligned weirdly and doesnt have enough give to change settings at even slightly oblique angles. our new camera's dials are unresponsive, and inputs are freqeuntly eaten. we don't think this actually has anything to do with their physical design, but how the camera polls the inputs. if we turn the wheels at a specific frequency and when in neutral, it seems to read all the inputs. faster frequncies will read the first two, stop reading for a second or two, and then read a small number again.

i think it is how the camera treats the neutral position, how it delineates between one click and multiple cliks of the dial, and the input buffer. i assume that there isnt a buffer so pressing inputs too quickly just makes the camera's polling skip that input and then also making it so the neutral position for the next input is in a weird spot, and that may be why it feels so slow and unresponsive. Also, navigating menus with dials is slightly laggy, especially when changing settings while still showing the preview screen, which makes it hard to change settings quickly. This sucks but we're actually pretty confident we could somehow fix this, we just dont know how.

auto iso is pretty fun :3 yay!