Convenience vs. Encumbrance

I was going through my backfiles looking for candidates for an "iPhoneography" themed calendar for 2024, and came across these two shots, both taken in May this year on two different walks, both using my iPhone 12 mini. I don't think either will make the final cut, but I remember being surprised to come across these small, ephemeral bodies of water that had appeared since I last passed that way, presumably because of a raised water table following the torrential downpours earlier in the year. In the one above water has filled an old channel in the water-meadows next to the River Itchen; in the one below it has found an old digging in Spearywell Wood, near Mottisfont, and created a temporary pond.

Increasingly, I find myself using the phone in place of a "real" camera. If I'm honest, this is mainly the result of convenience winning out over encumbrance: I'm simply less willing to sling a camera round my neck or to carry a shoulder bag than I was in the past – if nothing else, either will wreck the lines of my Paul Smith suit (I'm joking). The results from my phone are "good enough", and occasionally better than that, although it's true they rarely match the results from even the smallest, most portable cameras I own, for example the truly diminutive Panasonic GM1. But I'm simply becoming too lazy and too habituated to the phone as a multi-purpose device of negligible size to bother to pick up a more bulky single-purpose device before heading out.

When film was the only option, back in the 1970s and 80s, I went through a similar cycle. I had got along just fine for years, like most camera owners, just taking maybe three or four rolls of 35mm film a year. I used a Ukrainian-made Fed 3 rangefinder [1] I had been given for my 11th birthday in 1965, the "Type b" version, an excellent Leica copy with a decent lens but which, bizarrely, lacked any strap lugs, meaning you had to use its bulky leather ever-ready case to carry it around. Then, from around 1972, I started to use the new 110 cartridge format cameras; another triumph of convenience over encumbrance. As a result, although I still used the Fed from time to time, I mainly "documented" my university years and various travels – including my only trip to the USA – with a Kodak Pocket Instamatic: pocketable, yes, but a cheap piece of plastic rubbish, and the photos were terrible. For a while I tried using one of the Pentax Auto 110 interchangeable lens cameras, which was fun, but the pictures were still only slightly less terrible. Realising my mistake, in 1983 I invested in an Olympus OM-1n SLR, and thus began a serious engagement with photography.

However, the shortcomings of 35mm film itself were highlighted for me when I saw the outstanding work produced by a friend who was a medium-format film enthusiast; his prints were fine-grained, richly-toned, and easily cropped and enlarged beyond any size of print I would want to work with. He sold me his old Mamiya c330f and I became a convert, developing the film myself, and printing with an ancient Meopta Opemus enlarger that looked like a prop from a 1950s sci-fi movie. It was all a lot of work, but the results were great. However, wielding a heavy twin-lens reflex camera is less than spontaneous – the very definition of encumbrance – so I moved back slightly in the direction of convenience, at first with a Koni Omega Rapid – an insanely robust "press" rangefinder with a pump-action wind-on mechanism – and then a Fuji GS645S rangefinder, probably my favourite film camera ever. But by then we had two children, and I began documenting their every move with a pocket-sized 35mm Olympus Mju, reserving the Fuji for "serious" stuff, opportunities for which were always shrinking before the demands of work and family. Convenience had yet again won out over encumbrance.

A similar cycle – or is it some sort of curve? – happened once digital arrived on the scene. I started around 2001 with a flat, slab-like Fujifilm Finepix 1300 with a tiny 1.3 megapixel sensor, which produced images 1280 x 960 pixels in size. Nonetheless, I was impressed with the quality of the images, provided you wanted nothing bigger than a 6" x 4" print – they were everything that 110 film prints should have been – and above all loved the instant, more or less cost-free turnaround, especially after years working with the inconveniently slow and uncongenially expensive medium-format colour negative film-processing cycle. You know: buy film; expose film; drop exposed film off at camera shop for "dev & contact"; wait a week; pay for and collect negatives and contact sheet; examine contact sheet; drop off negatives at commercial darkroom for selected proof prints; wait a week; pay for proof prints; order a fine print or two; etc.

So, despite the limitations of the early generations of cameras, the convenience and cheapness of digital was its own argument. Once again, I started to climb up the quality and encumbrance scale, through several Olympus compacts, a couple of Canon DSLRs, Panasonic and Olympus micro 4/3rds cameras, until reaching my personal peak with the Fuji X series cameras, having long ago passed through "more than good enough" on the way up. But... On holidays and casual outings I still preferred the unobtrusive convenience of a small digital compact like the Fuji X20, and then in 2021 I bought an iPhone 12 mini, and started to prefer convenience over encumbrance most of the time.

It is therefore a matter of some regret to me, having now become used to the iPhone ecosystem, that Apple have since abandoned their "mini" option (roughly 6.5 cm x 13 cm, the size of most smartphones until recently) in their latest offerings. That size is perfect from my p-o-v, and I really don't want to have to use one of those over-large phones – practically the size of a small "tablet" – you see people struggling with in the street, just to take advantage of any advances in the camera-tech contained within. Yes, convenience will have become an encumbrance, just like those usefully small camera systems such as micro 4/3rds that are now increasingly lumbered with massive, heavy lenses, in pursuit of "improved" image quality.

There's one of those laws in there somewhere. Something like, "The pursuit of image quality will ensure that any advance in convenience will be countered by a subsequent increase in encumbrance". Essentially, when it comes to lens-based imaging, you can't overrule physics: if you want bigger, better pictures, you need bigger, heavier devices. In the end, "convenience" is all about acknowledging "good enough", and sticking with it. Some hope...

1. Interesting, isn't it, how many things previously subsumed under "Russian" have now been acknowledged as Ukrainian? Here is a great example: Ilya Repin's wonderful painting "The Reply of the Zaporizhian Cossacks" has been recreated using Ukrainian soldiers by French photographer Emeric Lhuisset. I mean, who outside of Ukraine even knew where Zaporizhzhia was until recently, or that Repin was Ukrainian?