After a week of rain and unseasonable cold, the weather forecast gave everyone the promise of a dry and sunny day before returning to the regularly scheduled program of cold and wet. So I stopped at the JR Takefu train station to find the rental bicycle services that often can be found in Japan. The electric and non-electric bikes there were fitted with devices requiring a downloaded smartphone app as well as credit card to make electronic payment. Rather than lose precious daylight on the eve of the winter solstice, on the advice of the tourist information person, instead I walked five minutes north of the station to the terminus of an electric tram company. They have fewer bikes and all of them require pedaling. But for 100 JPY (less than $1 at the 2024 exchange rate) it is how I covered many kilometers between 9:30 and 2 p.m.
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| examples from the toy camera's lens, far from high-definition or true colors |
One camera was in a chest pocket of my padded vest. The bigger one was in the outside jacket pocket. The cellphone rested in my rear pants pocket. The division of labor between each camera tended to follow a pattern. The project theme is old buildings and places of human activity. So the enthusiast camera (Canon g9x-ii) mostly recorded those subjects (see thumbnails, below). But the toy camera's strength is its lack of details (see thumbnails, above): only the main geometry and masses of light and dark, color patterns and dominant shapes can be recorded pleasingly; but not in contrasty light or low light. When there is plenty of illumination, and especially when it is indirect or comes through cloud cover, then the best results turn out. Treating the toy camera (Pieni II) as something like a watercolor brush helps to match scenes and subjects to its lens.
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| subjects for the Enthusiast Camera (1" sensor size) |
So if the toy camera is for poetic representations and the enthusiast camera is for main subject, highly detailed images suitable for enlarging or printing, then what is the third camera for, you may wonder. The cellphone cameras have come a long way since the 1990s novelty of putting a lens on the phone first arrived on the scene. A generation later many people reach for their cellphone not to talk but to send text or to take a photo or a video clip of a moment in their day, either to share with friends or strangers (social media), or for personal reference. So you could say the device is a camera with added telecommunication uses, rather than being mainly for talking and the camera is an added tool.
Now that cellphone pictures are just about as clear and accurate and easy to make and use as the ones from a dedicated camera (for film or digital images), many serious and casual photographers record increasingly larger parts of their daily or weekly pictures not with a dedicated camera, but preferring the compact form and relatively usable images they create to the ones requiring bigger equipment. So for today's rental bike ride along the old feudal-era routes up and down the valley, the cellphone camera is the one I reached for most often.
Looking at the file count at the end of the excursion there were 123 pictures, including a handful of video clips among them. Of these, 38 were by toy camera, 29 were by enthusiast camera, and the remaining 56 were by cellphone camera app. What prompted me to reach for cellphone instead of toy or enthusiast was a set of subjects different to the poetic or the historical features: social changes, eye-catching light or texture or another compositional cue, panorama situations (the other two camera require the PC to stitch the overlapping frames into a wide canvas; the cellphone merges the scene in-camera), macro subjects for close-up (handy function on the cellphone's camera), and super-wide views (beyond the focal length of toy or enthusiast cameras). The following thumbnails from the cellphone camera give an idea of the mishmash of subjects recorded there.
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| close-ups, panoramas, notes on lunch menu, emergence of Christmas displays went onto the phone |
Maybe all the purposes delineated here could fit onto the cellphone's camera app, but like all tools, it works best in some situations but not in others. For example, since so many people snap photos all day long in public, semi-public, and private settings, it rarely attracts worry or attention from the people nearby. The novelty of a tiny toy camera also is non-threatening. But somebody with a big piece of equipment, or setting up lights and a tripod almost certainly makes people wonder if this would be published, with or without permission. So in addition to the technical excellence of many cellphones today, the ubiquity of them can be an advantage, too. However, unlike a "real" camera with menus and dials and buttons for quick control and added functionality in challenging light or weather conditions, a cellphone battery soon runs out, the controls one might need in a special setting could be hard to find or unfamiliar to use, and there are other things happening on a cellphone besides photography, thus leading to distraction, for example. The coatings on the lens in a dedicated camera give superior results to the small bit of glass in a cellphone, as well.
As for carrying a toy camera with its minuscule battery, lack of LCD screen, mostly unusable viewfinder, and plastic lens, it is true that some filters or specialist apps can mimic various quirky cameras by digital manipulation. But having a separate device to do those niche pictures keeps them physically and mentally in one location, rather than to be intermingled with other work. And the blind nature of shooting with almost no viewfinder and no LCD screen means that results only come some hours later when transferring the files to a PC. So it is akin to the days of roll film and processing delays before getting the results.
In conclusion, when image recording devices are getting smaller and lighter, but also more capable of delivering good results, it is not a burden to carry more than one. Each can be given a separate job to do so that reaching for A or for B produces a mental compartmentalization when the field location has many sub-projects or subjects to photograph; not all being used for a unitary publication but for several concurrent but differing projects out of the same event or place. Today's example is one way to traverse the cultural landscape with multiple lenses that record different parts of the day's experience. A different social observer may be dominant in video and only incidentally take still photos. And someone with an eye for hand-drawn compositions might mix camera(s) and sketchpad while exploring a place or a topic. By selecting the best tool for the purpose catches one's eye, the best results are most likely. It takes some practice to remember to reach to the rear pocket, or the chest pocket or the jacket pocket to fish out the right camera for the moment, but eventually things go very smoothly. The reward comes when reviewing on the larger screen of the PC and from there sharing commentary and images with the wider world.
