Digital photography is not rocket science. It just seems that way.

Here’s a TV advert for a camera touting the benefits of film cameras over digital cameras. I’m almost inclined to wonder if this advert is a parody, but even so, it has a point.

Let’s watch…

Photography for technophobes.

I’m reminded of when I was lending my digital camera to a friend some time ago. She knew how to use a film camera, but the technological revolution had, alas, left her behind.

She had no problem with the LCD display on the back. This was why she wanted to borrow my camera in the first place after she saw me using it. Taking a picture while holding the camera at arms length is a lot easier than holding it up to the eye.

Showing her how to browse old pictures took a bit of teaching but she soon picked it up. It helped a lot that this camera had a big switch with only two settings; taking-pictures or looking-at-pictures.

The big stumbling point was when I showed her how to use memory cards. I tried to explain how it stores pictures, but I got a lot of blank looks. I finally said “This card is like the film.” There was a sudden look of understanding on her face.

The analogy to traditional film cameras worked perfectly. I told her that the photo shops will develop (print) her pictures, produce negatives (make a CD copy) and clean the film off to be reused again. If she needed more film, she could buy some by asking for a “128 MB SD” at the shops (which might tell you when this story took place).

Embrace the metaphor!

Film cameras are devices that direct photon particles in order to induce chemical reactions in silver halide particles mounted on sheets of cellulose acetate.

Somehow, the camera industry managed to sell us cameras without having to give us chemistry lessons first. And yet, we all need computer science lessons to use digital cameras. People never really cared about the chemical processes of film photography and we shouldn’t have to care about bits, megabytes and other pieces of jargon that can be abstracted away.

So, here are my suggestions for the digital camera industry.

1. Standardise!
Why are there so many memory card formats? As far as I can tell, they’re all flash memory chips contained in differently shaped blobs of plastic. The industry needs to pick one shape of blob and stick with it. No inventing new blobs unless there’s a really good reason to.

2. Call memory cards, ‘digital film’.
Embrace all the metaphors. If the world already has a name for something, don’t come up with a different name for it.

3. Tell me how many pictures it can store, not how many gigabytes.
This one will be tricky, as the size of a picture depends on the number of pixels. So while I don’t think we could realistically get rid of the “GB”, cameras need to help the user by telling us how many pictures are in a “GB” at that particular time.

4. Cameras should come with a reasonably sized card as standard.
How would you feel if you bought a camera, but later found the lens was extra? Digital film (getting used to the phrase yet?) is reusable and will probably last as long as the camera itself. So why not bundle it with the camera and save your customers the hassle.

5. Photo printing shops to provide archival DVDs as a standard part of the service.
People using film cameras expected their negatives as part of the service. Copying a few gigabytes full of pictures to a DVD should be cheap enough that it could be offered free to anyone who wants to print a vacation’s worth of snaps.

Hang on, did that advert just say two cameras for ten dollars? Forget everything I just wrote, that’s a bargain!

Picture credits:
‘Film and SD card’ by ‘sparkieblues’ of flickr
‘Leica’ by ‘AMERICANVIRUS’ of flickr

2 Replies to “Digital photography is not rocket science. It just seems that way.”

  1. Very good ideas, Mr. von Hackensplat! I would offer another suggestion. Now that media cards, whoops, digital film… has become so cheap (at least cheaper to the cost of celluloid film, frame for frame) that perhaps people should just keep buying cards as they need them and store the old ones away safely as they did with negatives before. Maybe in a little pouch on a sheet of contact prints for each photo on it.

    one last thing: "How would you feel if you bought a camera, but later found the lens was extra?"

    That's exactly how I bought my camera šŸ™‚

  2. No. By all means encourage manufacturers to make an idiot-proof quick-start guide to include with 'proper' instructions, but don't annoy the people who have bothered to teach themselves something new by littering a product with analogies designed for someone else.

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