The three Fs

Frame, focus, f-stop. Nowadays I wonder how many photographers think in terms of the three Fs. I bought a small 10.1 megapixel camera that comes with a nice pedigree (and only cost a tenth of what I paid for my “real” camera). It has a 12x zoom, from 25mm to 300mm (35mm equivalent focal lengths), a 300-picture minimum storage capacity, relative lightness and small size. Recently the emphasis on the number of pixels is being downplayed because more isn’t necessarily better. Oh, and it makes movies too.

Its Leica lens seems to take near-perfect pictures every time. There’s one problem though; you can’t easily frame a shot when you’re outdoors because there is no viewfinder. You compose by looking at the large LCD display on the back. Outdoors its brightness increases, but in bright daylight it’s almost useless. So I am learning to shoot “by the seat of the pants.” This is a new discipline for me, but I’m catching on, surprisingly.

Today the peace is almost continuously disturbed by the noise of firefighting airplanes battling the Big Meadow fire in Yosemite Park north of here. The picture above shows one of them. My camera decided to focus on the branches of the tree instead of the plane. There is no way I can change that, apparently. Later on I was feeding horses in our corral when a plane approached and I tried movie mode. The plane was high and I couldn’t see it on the screen so I just aimed kind of like shooting from the hip. When I played it back, the plane was very close to the center of the picture.

Back to the subject of frame, focus and f-stop, who needs to frame a shot when there’s Photoshop? You can crop a photo, change its perspective, and manipulate just about anything to do with composition. Focus? Automatic for the most part nowadays. And how many people even know what an f-stop is? Real photographers remember in the back of their minds that if you make it a small number, you can put a foreground or background out of focus to emphasize your subject. Small point-and-shoot cameras don’t give you much choice there since their tiny lenses are so close to the focal plane (what the heck is that?) that most everything is in focus.

With the new small automatic cameras, we could add a fourth F—Fun. No more lugging around a selection of lenses and bodies, awkward flash attachments, and all that old-timey stuff. The expense of making many exposures on film is gone. Gratification (or disappointment) is instant. Add a fifth and sixth F—Fat Folios. Of photos Fotos. (Seven)