Back button focus has been compared to the invention of sliced bread, and many who went BBF said they never went back. However, that was not the case for me. I acknowledge the advantages of separating the AF function away from the shutter release button, and this is a popularly used, much highly regarded photography technique by many. Nonetheless, back button focusing just does not work for me, and my reasons may not be universally applicable to all of you, but I would like to explore my reasons why I still stay with the shutter button as my to-do-it all options.
For those of you who prefer a video version, here is a short, 10 minutes version of me ranting about back button focus. For the first time in almost half a year, I was recording myself indoor, in the living room. Surely this was not my favourite way of doing a YouTube video, but I admit the convenience was too hard to pass.
I am not a wildlife or sports photographer. I totally understand how the back button focus can make a huge difference in such shooting scenarios, especially when you don't want to keep refocusing before each shot, that will increase a chance of miss focus. Hence using back button focus, locking it and waiting for the action to happen, and when it happens immediately pressing the shutter button can minimize the risk of error. This is applicable for wildlife, for example bird shooting, as well as sports where some of the players are holding their position and you wait for them to spring to action. However, I shoot events, weddings, portraits, and products, and back button focus just does not help in any way. I find myself rarely needing to wait for my shots, when I see something happen I normally have to react quickly, and have the shutter button released as quickly as possible.
I find that when I use back button focus, the handling of the camera is compromised. This is true for Olympus cameras, and I cannot speak for other cameras. Olympus cameras, especially the OM-D cameras were designed with prominent thumb resting area, allowing comfortable and secure gripping if your thumb is resting tightly on the hook. The smaller size of the camera makes it even more difficult when back button focus is being used, moving the thumb away from the thumb rest, which means effectively only 3 other fingers (other than your thumb on BBF and index finger on shutter button) are used to hold the camera in such an awkward manner. Then camera then slides into the palm, and digs into it, which is very uncomfortable for long hour shooting. I have full day shoots (corporate events, weddings) and I need to have balanced, comfortable and secure handling without worrying about the camera slipping off my hand. I don't like to move my thumb away from the thumb rest!
I shoot insect macro and portraits a lot. Critical focus is priority when shooting close up. For insect macro, even 1-2mm movement away from the focusing plane will throw the subject entirely out of focus. Similarly, when I shoot portraits of strangers on the street, I normally shoot wide open at F1.8 or F1.2, and any movement on the subject's part, even just a few centimeters can cause softness in my image. No amount of post-processing or photo manipulation can save an out of focus image. Having the AF assigned to back button means I need to lock AF first in one action, before capturing the image with another action by pressing the shutter button. The delay between AF lock and shutter release is increased when using back button focus. This is significantly improved when using the shutter button for both AF operation and shutter release, because after the AF is acquired, I can immediately fully press the shutter button instantaneously with almost no delay. This is of course less crucial for shooting landscapes, subjects that are perfectly still or anything that are too far away. For me, back button focus causes the slight delay which can amplify the chance of critical focus accuracy error.
Finally, during my brief experience using back button focus, my thumb suffers cramps and sore after a long day of shooting. It happened a few times that I decided it was definitely not the right technique for me. Besides, most of my photography subjects are constantly in motion, I am always moving around, nothing stays still, and I need to refocus my shots all the time before releasing the shutter button. The index finger is already always on the shutter button, having another finger locked on another button just makes things a bit more complicated and uncomfortable. I will have to press the shutter button to capture the image anyway, why do I need to use another button? Doing everything with one button works more efficiently for me as I need to refocus almost every shot.
I don't think there is any right and wrong technique, as long as you find the most suitable one for your own photography needs. Back button focus certainly is not for me, but if it works for you, then stay with it!
In my recent camera sales is declining video and article I received several comments claiming that the introduction and advancement of computational photography in smartphones is the main reason that negates the need for a camera, and implications were made about how cameras should adopt computational photography and "catch" up to smartphones. However, this is something that deeply troubles me - computational photography has been around since the beginning of digital photography and the level of computational photography applied in dedicated cameras today is not lagging behind smartphones. I want explore the significance of computational photography that has already been adopted integrally in Olympus OM-D cameras.
The core of digital photography comprises of 3 components - Lens, Image Sensor and Digital Processing. The lens allows light to enter the camera and focuses light onto the image sensor to form an image. The image sensor then translates this light from analogue into digital signal. Then the digital processing converts this into the final output, resulting in JPEG files which can be viewed on digital devices and shared on online social media platforms. Computational photography comes into play during the capturing process of the images as well as during the digital processing stage. A lot of camera operations rely on software algorithms and the final optimization process to produce that beautiful JPEG file relies heavily on computational photography.
How is smartphone's computational photography better than camera's? I just do not see it. A lot of reference was made to the fake bokeh rendering, smart HDR processing and auto-compositing of images done by smartphones with ease and minimal effort, to produce amazing results. I argue that these advancement in software has been seen in cameras for a while now and there is nothing new in the smartphones that can even come close to what the dedicated cameras can do. Except maybe the fake bokeh artifical rendering but in cameras why do we need fake bokeh when we can acquire real and better more natural looking real ones?
Now let's take a look at the processing chip found in Olympus OM-D current line-up of cameras - Truepic VIII. In a single Truepic VIII chip, Olympus claims that there are two Quad Core processors. There are 8 independent processing cores in an Olympus camera with a Truepic VIII processor, and you know what? Olympus E-M1X has two Truepic VIII processors, meaning E-M1X has a total of 16 cores! Each core is assigned for a singular, computational heavy task - one core to compute image stabilization real time, one care for AF operation, one for smart image processing, one for writing/reading to SD card, one for EVF/Live View display, etc. Olympus also claims that the processor that they used in their cameras are more powerful than any consumer mass available Intel processor (true in January 2019, source here).
So why does Olympus need so much processing power (more powerful than any smartphones) in their camera? Is the answer not obvious enough? Of course - computational photography.
Here is a list of instances when computational photography plays a crucial role in modern digital cameras, especially in Olympus OM-D cameras
1) AF operations
In a single-AF operation, at the half-press of the shutter button the camera quickly captures 240 frames per second, and these images are not stored in the SD card, but in the temporary buffer. The camera's processing will analyze all these images quickly and using smart contrast detection the "computer" will quickly acquire and lock focus.
In Continuous AF, or 3D tracking, computational photography plays an even more important role to analyze the pattern of subject movement and apply an adaptive smart algorithm to predict where the subject will move to next, allowing the tracking to work efficiently. None of this is possible without raw computational power, and believe me when I tell you the C-AF or 3D tracking in any top level Canon, Nikon, Sony or Olympus cameras are superior than the best smartphone camera you can find today.
2) Composite Modes
There are many composite modes in camera - High Res 50MP shot, Live Composite, in camera HDR, Focus Stacking and Hand-held multishot noise reduction, all taking multiple images at once, and merging them together with smart real time analysis and effective processing to accomplish selected, desired results. Each composite settings require the camera to perform some computational photography magic to selectively take some parts of an image and merge them all into a final composite image. Most of these composite modes can be executed with just one click of the shutter button. Computational photography has been used by cameras to push and break boundaries - to acquire more high resolution image, to achieve better image quality (less noise in high ISO, wider dynamic range than single shot), to capture more depth of field and to prevent overexposure in long exposure modes. If this is not pure computational photography, I don't know what is.
3) 5-Axis IS
How does image stabilization work? The gyroscope will detect movement of camera shake, and the camera will use the efficient computational power to counter these movements, all happening so fast that the image or video is fully stabilized. We know how capable the 5-Axis IS in Olympus camera is, and then there is the 5-Axis Sync IS, when the body IS works with lens IS in sync to further improve stability of the shot.
4) Smart JPEG Processing
Modern digital cameras have superior advanced JPEG processing that a lot of people take for granted. The images are not uniformly sharpened, and the noise reduction application is not done on a global level. The camera will analyze each image separately and apply variable sharpening and noise reduction on images with different shooting parameters (different apeture used, ISO number and lens attached). If the lens is sharp, shooting at optimum aperture and lower ISO, the in camera sharpening is lowered and less noise reduction is applied to achieve a more natural look. Also, the camera will study different areas of the image and apply noise reduction and sharpening selectively. There are a lot of processing happening to optimize a JPEG file in camera - barrel distortion correction, vignetting compensation and chromatic aberration suppression just to name a few. Also, since Truepic 6, Olympus uses no low pass filter on their image sensors, hence they have advanced the smart Moire correction algorithm in their processing engine ever since. Furthermore, there is compensation for diffraction when narrow aperture is being used. All this, happening at a click of a shutter button, almost instantaneously, with virtually zero shutter lag when shooting with a camera.
Do not get me wrong, I am not bashing smartphone photography, in fact, far from it. I am a firm believer that smartphone photography is the future. However the claim that the computational photography in cameras are falling behind and that camera manufacturer's should play catch up - that is fraudulent.
The problem with smartphone cameras is not the software. I admit the software is improving, and there will be progress and we will see more exciting things happening in computational photography soon. The real limitations to progress of digital camera in a smartphone is the actual lens and image sensor used in smartphones. The multiple camera setup is a good idea, but it is not the ultimate solution for smartphone photography. I would be terrified to think of iPhone 15 wiith 15 camera modules at the back of the phone. There is no point having so many cameras, all with similar physical limitations.
How to improve smartphone cameras? Use larger sensor, maybe include a 1 inch image sensor (like what Panasonic did once), and use larger and higher quality optics to complement the more capable image sensor. Combine that with truly powerful software, then we can talk. At this moment, no matter how advanced the computational photography is in an iPhone or Samsung camera, the fact that those tiny image sensor and crappy lens still render sub-par quality images. I have tested the Samsung Note 10+ recently and trust me, I am NOT impressed. For a smartphone camera, yes it is possibly the best now in the market, but compare that with even an entry level mirrorless camera, say an Olympus PEN E-PL9, there is still a serious gap.
Let me know if you still hold firm to the believe that, today, the smartphones have higher level computational photography power than cameras? Share your thoughts!
Smartphone photography is the future, there is no denying that, and the declining traditional camera sales is the proof of that. Almost everyone owns a smartphone, and the camera is everyone's hands. When it come to assessing the smartphone camera's quality, all the rage goes to computational/AI advancement, the pixel count, night mode (low light shooting), HDR implementation, the fake bokeh and overall smart software handling overall shooting process. I admit the smartphone camera is improving drastically, but a lot of people are missing one very critical factor that determines the look or outcome of a photograph - the choice of lens focal length and the corresponding perspective. With the majority of lens being the default wide angle lens, with the new inclusion of ultra wide angle, not many smartphone users know how to manage wide angle shooting effectively, or deal with the big problem that comes with it that can completely destroy a photograph - perspective distortion.
Wide angle lens when not used carefully, can cause excessive distortion to an image. This has nothing to do with the quality of the camera or lens, perspective distortion happens to all wide angle use, it is just the nature of the lens fitting as much as possible within a frame. Perspective distortion can be seen as subjects in an image appear being artificially stretched and looking disproportionate. For example, close up wide angle portraits usually will either elongate or shorten limbs, stretches the shape of the head, making it bigger than normal in comparison to the body size. Also, when shooting buildings, looking up, the verticals are not perfectly straight and it appear as if the buildings are falling down.
Example of a wide angle shot with corrected perspective
wide angle with perspective distortion, uncorrected, straight out of camera
The biggest problem comes when shooting human subjects with wide angle lens. Since it is the default on most smartphones, you have no choice but to deal with it. When going too close, for example taking a selfie shot, most people will try to hide the double chin hence angling the camera upward, looking down from the eye , and that can cause the forehead to be wider than usual, nose appear larger, and if done wrongly, the face shape might appear nothing that dissimilar to an alien head.
Alien head selfie
Wide angle lens problem shooting humans - Limbs being stretched and look ugly/unnatural
Disproportionate looking human subjects - head appearing very big in comparison to body size, and shortened legs.
Left: 28mm equivalent, looking unnatural
Right: 50mm equivalent, looking more realistic and appealing
Typically for fashion and portrait photographers, the popular choice to shoot flattering portraits are lenses that are much longer, such as 85mm equivalent or longer. 70-200mm telephoto lens is a popular choice to render realistic and natural looking portraits, with minimal perspective distortion, hence no stretched limbs, no weird looking head or ugly disproportionate looks. This perspective distortion is not a problem that can be solved via software or computational/AI photography, it is just the nature of how the images look, there is no avoiding it if you are utilizing wide angle lens all the time. There are some ways to manage the amount of distortion (we will explore this) but it is crucial to recognize the cause of the problem and how ugly the results can be, if care is not taken during the shooting process.
Some newer smartphone cameras include a "telephoto" lens which is roughly equivalent to 50mm, that could solve a lot of perspective distortion issues.
It was not easy to use wide angle lens to begin with. Besides excessive perspective distortion (which is destructive) wide angle lens fits EVERYTHING. Most photographers photographers prefer clean, simple, straight to the point framing so that attention is not diverted away from the main subject in the image. When wide angle is being use, you may accidentally include some subjects that can be distracting in the background, causing a messy composition.
90mm equivalent lens used to create flattering, proportional look
28mm causes excessive perspective distortion
If you have your portrait taken, would you really want to look like the Antman on the left? Wide angle makes ugly human portraits.
So how can we fix this problem? Here are a few pointers.
1) Don't Use Wide Angle If Possible
Not all situations require the use of wide angle, and sometimes we can get away with longer focal lengths. Consciously trying to use longer focal lengths can minimize the problem of perspective distortion. If your smartphone has an option for longer lens camera, use that, many flagship or higher tier smartphones have a "medium telephoto" lens for this purpose. I am not saying avoid wide angle or ultra wide angle at all costs, just use them when absolutely necessary, for example to fit as many people in a group photograph as possible shooting in a tight space.
2) Center Your Subject
Usually perceptive distortion gets worse being away from the center of the frame.Avoid placing anything important at the sides, edges and corners of the frame. Keep the subject, especially human right at the center. And do not tilt the camera unnecessarily, or shoot from high or low angles. Try to keep the straight lines straight - verticals and horizontals.
3) Dno't Shoot Too Close
I know I know, the famous saying by Robert Capa, if your photo is not good enough you are not close enough. That is not valid for wide angle photo, if you just step back a little bit, allowing a bit of negative space around your subject, and then crop in, you will get a much better, more proportionate looking image. The nearer your wiee angle lens is to the subject, the more exaggerated the perspective becomes.
Keep the subject in the center, and do not shoot too close. This minimizes perspective distortion when shooting with wide angle lens.
Same image as above, but cropped in a little.
I hope you find this article useful and that you will start to consider minimizing perspective distortion when you shoot with your smartphone camera! Do you have any more tips? Share with me in the comments below.
Slow motion video is the rage and everyone is doing it though I personally feel it is gimmicky. Nonetheless, it is one of the highly requested feature and Olympus included that in their newest E-M5 Mark III, having 120FPS Full HD High Speed video. I thought why not follow the trend and do a short video capturing everything in slow motion? That was super, super fun to make. Also, in later part of the video I demonstrated how to enable the 120FPS Full HD setting in camera.
Video footage was straight out of camera with no post-editing/grading performed. Lenses used for this video - Olympus M.Zuiko 17mm F1.8 and 45mm F1.8.
How to activate the 120FPS Full HD High Speed video in Olympus E-M5 Mark III
1) Turn the mode dial to movie recording mode
2) From the live view press OK button to activate the quick menu
3) Scroll till you find the video recording options
4) Choose the 120FPS High Speed FHD option
5) Press INFO button and you can change the slow motion speed which corresponds to the frame rate being captured. Eg 60FPS is half speed, and 24FPS is 20% speed.
Some limitations of 120FPS capture on Olympus E-M5 Mark III
1) Audio recording is disabled
2) No C-AF available, only S-AF or MF
3) Movie IS 2 only - sensor stabilization only, no electronic stabilization available
I thought the 120FPS slow motion straight out of the camera came out quite well, the footage was crisp and clean, smooth and free of unwanted artifacts or weird effects. The camera still fully engages the built in camera's 5-Axis Image Stabilization resulting in steady and shake free hand-held video recording. It was a challenge to find scenes or subjects that fully showcased the advantage of slow motion capture, and I had a great time spending a few hours out in hot Malaysian sun testing the 120FPS video mode!
It is a hot topic now, with the rumors circulating the closure of Olympus business, and the ambiguous Bloomberg reporting Olympus CEO "backtracking" his comments on the possibility of Olympus imaging unit being on sale (which has been DEBUNKED by the way, go here), I thought it would be a good opportunity to dive into the reasons why the overall camera market is declining. We can easily point the blame solely to the existence of smartphones, but that is not the only reason. I admit smartphone camera improving drastically over the years with the convenience of only carrying one device to do it all, there seems to be less reason to pick up a dedicated camera. I acknowledge that smartphones played a huge contributing factor to the shrinkage of the camera market overall, but in this article I want to explore several other valid reasons why less and less people are buying cameras.
If you prefer to look at an Asian guy with small eyes (yes I received several of this comment, racist much people? I thought we are in 2019 and this is behind us. But nope....) with larger than average sized body talk on and on about this topic, I made this video for you.
REASON 1 - CAMERA HAS HIT SUFFICIENCY
Let's face it, there is not much to do with camera development left. I am not saying we have the perfect camera now, there are still kinks to work out there and here, there is always room for improvement. However, take a deep look at any camera released in the past 5 years, they are certainly more than good enough to tackle any challenging photography task thrown at it and deliver satisfactory results. The consumers will keep on driving demand for bigger, better, larger products. More megapixels, more dynamic range, cleaner high ISO images, the demand is never-ending and the chase will not stop, and honestly has become meaningless. Those who do REAL photography has no issue using a 50 year old camera and still produce work of art. The cameras we have today are sufficient for our use, our greed is killing the camera market.
I give you two examples. A successful local Malaysian wedding photographer, who has been in the wedding photography industry shooting for more than 10 years. Guess what camera is he using in 2019 to shoot wedding professionally? A Nikon D700. Yeap, that dinosaur D700, first generation full frame DSLR from Nikon. He is not using the latest D850, or the Z7, he is still making fantastic work of art with his old D700, being bruised and battered over the years, been in and out of Nikon service repairs. His clients were always happy with his delivery, and this same photographer was one of the first few who inspired me to pick up wedding photography. Be real guys, are you seriously going to deliver 61MP image files to your wedding client? Do you need ISO1,000,000 to shoot a wedding? Anything as high as ISO3200 or 6400 with the use of quality F1.4 or F1.8 optics, and creative flash boost can cover almost any scenario, delivering beautiful images that can be printed large still.
Another example, a maternity, newborn and family portrait photographer, also a close friend who is based in Kuala Lumpur. If you have seen her images you will be blown away. She uses a Canon 5D Mark II now, actively for her shoots, and she is fully booked until next year. If these two highly successful professional photographers who regularly shoot in challenging situations with cameras that are 10 years old and still able to thrive in their business, why can't we be happy with any cameras that have come out newer than those two?
More megapixels do not make you a better photographer. Better dynamic range and cleaner high ISO images won't elevate your photography. At first when everyone started buying cameras, there were some inadequacies, as the digital camera development was progressing, but it has come to a level where the cameras are better than 99% of the photographers out there. Those who bought cameras a few years ago have less and less reasons to upgrade their cameras, hence the sales are declining drastically.
REASON 2 - INTEREST IN PHOTOGRAPHY IS DYING
Collectively in the world, it is quite obvious that the interest in photography is slowing down drastically over the years.
There was a time when cameras have become so accessible, entry level DSLR going for mere few hundred dollars, everyone jumped on the bandwagon quickly. A lot of people bought cameras not because they were interested in photography or wanted to get wet in the world of photography, they simply joined the cool club of owning a camera. Peer pressure is an effective tool to drive sales. There was a time almost EVERYONE has a camera.
What happens when the bandwagon is full? There is only so much new camera users the brands can target.
There are generally (simplified) two categories of camera users - group 1: photographers and group 2: camera users.
In group 1, the photographers use the camera for photography purposes. They work their craft, they want to shoot, they want to pursue art and creativity. They aim to do story-telling with their photography, they shoot with passion and clear purpose. They have no issue with self-driving themselves to go out and shoot, and they will continue to shoot even when the world is ending.
On the other hand, in group 2, the camera users are of a different breed of species altogether. These camera users bought cameras because photography seems like fun. The excitement in the beginning was real, everything was new, discovering a whole new world of photography was indeed thrilling. However, there was never any genuine interest in photography, they shoot because everyone else is shooting. Fear of losing out is real. They have a camera dangling around their neck because that was what everyone else was doing. Guess what happens when the excitement wears out, after half a year, after a year or two, when there was nothing left new to find out? if there is no inner desire to shoot, if photography is not a true passion, the interest in using the camera fades away very quickly. This is the hard truth - not everyone who has a camera is a photographer.
A photographer stands the test of time - after all your friends have quit photography and left you, if you still hold on boldly, clinging into your passion, then you belong to group 1. Else, camera users in group 2 becomes the main reason why the camera sales are declining, because they simply give up photography, they simply give up the camera. Is that not happening to the majority to camera users around you over the years?
REASON 3 - SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGED THE LANDSCAPE OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Social media has changed the content of photography over the years, and shifted how the crowd perceive photography, resulting in cameras being irrelevant in this modern digital age.
Let's take a few steps back, in the older days, how does a photographer get noticed or recognized for his art and talent? You get published, you get exhibited. Find an art gallery, do a real physical photography exhibition with prints, and you are seen as a successful photographer. Now in this digital age, all photographers can exhibit, you don't need an art gallery, you don't need to work with a curator, or editors, you bypass all that, from your social media platform you can reach thousands, or possibly millions if you play your card right (I obviously played mine wrong, I failed to grow my Instagram, and even my YouTube and Facebook have sad number of followings). My point is, the way people see, value and interact with photography have changed drastically, and this was because of the dominance of social media in our lives.
Here comes a big problem, social media promotes the culture of me, me, me and me. Photography has never been about the photographer (so literally), photography is about the photographer shooting the world around them. Hence the lens was pointed outward from the shooter not inward. Take a look at your Facebook friends, the Instagram accounts that you follow, any celebrities or "influencers", the content published online was ALL about themselves and the lives that they live. Is it not the food that they eat, the places they travel to, the parties they are at, the dress that they wear, the cat or dog cute poses or that amazing car that they just bought? Photography, which was a genuinely powerful tool of art and documentation has been vilified and reduced to mere selfie tools. Photography has become selfish, self-centric adventure and is losing the core meaning of why the camera was invented in the first place.
You don't need 61MP for your selfie photographs, you don't need ISO100,000 to shoot that slice of cake, and certainly you don't need a super-telephoto 600mm lens to shoot your Siamese cat licking her paws. The relevance of having a camera is eroding away so quickly, now that the purpose of photography has shifted so much. There is no longer a need for a camera to do the "modern photography" for social media.
REASON 4 - PHOTOGRAPHY IS STAGNANT
Photography as an art has remained stagnant for a long time, and is not evolving.
Take other art forms - any art forms - fashion, music, TV/Film, writing, each and every one has evolved and changed so much over time. We don't wear the same cloths as our previous generation did in their 80s, we don't listen to the same music on radio as it was played in the 50s, movie and TV have changed so much, we can clearly see how much art has evolved over the years. However this cannot be said for photography.
Look at the legends Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Martin Parr and Ansel Adams, they redefined what photography was during their age. They reshaped the history of photography. They challenged the norm, they dared to push boundaries, they went the distance and provoked what was deemed right. They were visionaries and they successfully made photography truly meaningful. In stark contrast, today all we do are merely imitating what has been done before over and over again, a million times. What's new today? Look at the Instagram feed - sunrise, sunsets, long exposure photography, portraits of beautiful lady, more model shots, these are good photography yes, but they have been done to death and there is nothing new anymore. I don't see anything truly thought provoking and revolutionary from the work of today's photographers.
Photography is an art form, but people do not see it that way, not today in 2019 in the digital age. Therefore, it was not a surprise that the camera sales are declining, because the appreciation for true photography is significantly dying. To be fair, this critique is also valid for myself, and I am writing this article as reminder to myself not to stay complacent with my craft and dare to challenge myself, take a risk or two, to elevate my photography. I hope you are taking this in a positive manner.
So what can we all do collectively to fight the dying camera market?
Honestly, there really is nothing much we can do at this point. It is very difficult to predict the future of photography.
For me, I will ask myself why I picked up the camera in the first place? Why did I fall in love with photography? Where did the passion come from? Remember the excitement of shooting something for the first time, and that excitement can be reignited. Go back to basics, find the core of photography, and continue to push further and shoot more. After all, there is no photography without the active use of cameras.
We can do our part, to improve ourselves, be better photographers, be true to ourselves, then we can be the inspiration for others to follow. I am sure together, we can bring the joy and true meaning of photography back to this world.
