The invasion of the Feature Creep

by David Benjamin

“To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.” —Henri Cartier-Bresson

MADISON, Wis.—There’s a story, probably apocryphal, about Henry Aaron, the greatest hitter of all time and my childhood baseball hero. It is said that one day, when he came up to bat, the catcher for the other team, perhaps fellow legend Joe Garagiola, took note of how Aaron was holding his bat and offered a word of advice.

The bat was an ashwood Louisville Slugger, lathed, sculpted and boned. Its label, a wood-burned oval logo about halfway up the shaft, was complicated. Besides providing the bat’s brand, it identified the name, Hillerich & Bradsby Co., and location of the manufacturer, Louisville, Ky. (MADE IN U.S.A.). Before the advent of aluminum bats, kids in Little League were instructed by coaches that the artfully scorched H&B logo marked a weak spot. Make sure, coach would warn, that you can see the label. That way, the ball won’t meet the bat at the point most likely to splinter.

The catcher had all this unproven Louisville Slugger lore in mind when he noticed that the label was facing away from Aaron. According to the tale, the catcher said, “Hey, Hank. Turn the bat, so you can see the label.”

Henry Aaron might have been smiling when he peered down and replied, “Joe, I’m not up here to read.”

I recall this story lately whenever I turn on my camera, a Pentax K-70 and regard the display. Often, but not predictably, instead of providing the technical information I want, the display instead asks me for a choice of language.

Language? Who in God’s name decided that a camera needs a language? When did a photog ever need to carry on a meaningful dialog with a Hasselblad? Indeed, the only time I ever converse with my Pentax is when it pulls an unwonted stunt like this and I ask, “Goddammit, what the hell’s goin’ on?”

Despite the fact the camera has languages, it never answers me in any of them.

I became a photojournalist in 1974, more by mandate than motivation, when I signed on as a reporter for a small weekly newspaper. As part of my journalist gear, I received a Mamiya C-3 manufactured in Tokyo shortly after World War II. To make it operate effectively, I took a crash course in photography, learning—on the run and without a light meter—how to estimate my shutter speed and f-stop.

But I didn’t have to study Japanese.

Since then, I’ve gone through many cameras, most of them 35mm Pentaxes, all of which—true to my initiation—I’ve operated “manually,” by guess, by instinct and eventually by experience. When the transition to digital photography arrived, I resisted. But I had to succumb eventually because Pentax, Nikon, Canon and all those guys stopped making wet-film cameras. Also, hardly anybody sold (or processed) film any longer.

There were, of course, gimmicks available in digital photography that I appreciated, foremost among them the ability to check the images as soon as I’d shot them. However, as the modern camera’s “automatic” extras proliferated, I eschewed most of them. Starting with my Mamiya, I’d always shot photos the way every photojournalist ’til the 21st century—from Matthew Brady to Eugene Atget and Robert Capa, to Margaret Bourke-White and Art Shay—did their shooting. I stuck with the same ASA (now called ISO) and read the light (ideally with a light meter, which is no longer built in to my Pentax K-70). I set my shutter speed and f-stop according to the available light. Then I focused (the most important part) and fired away—as fast as possible, before the moment passed.

When operating in manual mode with a single-lens reflex camera—manually—these steps represent the photographer’s entire body of practical know-how: light, shutter speed, f-stop and focus. If you fire enough shots, some of them “turn out.” More can be rescued in the darkroom or—nowadays—in a computer’s photo-processing function. Ansel Adams once emphasized the importance of what happens after the photographer presses the shutter:

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”

My K-70 violates that timeless ethos. It wants to know what language to speak, but does not contain a light meter. Now, like my bygone Mamiya period, I have to fudge my shutter speed and guess my f-stop. Whoever installed in my new camera a hundred different apps, functions, diversions and obstructions did so under the illusion that the camera—not the photographer—makes the picture.

In his classic 1955 photo compilation, The Family of Man, Edward Steichen, conveyed the message that the photographic image is a universal bond. It is communication without a language to separate the photographer and his human subjects and everyone who sees the pictures. The photo is a thousand words condensed into a silent, brilliant, evocative one-hundredth of a second. It embodies what Dorothea Lange meant when she said, “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”

With my new digital Pentax (when it grudgingly agrees to just take pictures), I ignore eleven of the twelve options on my little camera-top dial (no idea what “SCN” and “U3” do). I shoot everything on “M” and focus where I want to focus (not where the camera insists is my focal point). But here’s the rub. Although I bypass the hundreds of possibilities embedded behind my “Menu,” “Info” and other buttons, the camera occasionally attempts to override my Luddism and shosw off its myriad wonders. It bridles at all the idleness within its bowels. It blinks inexplicably. It wants to focus for me. It offers ISO advice. Once in a while, apparently to strut its digital stuff, it decides that I want to delay my shot for ten seconds, so I can set down the camera, run out in front of the viewfinder and pose for a portrait. When this happens, it takes me five minutes—not ten seconds—to hunt down the rogue app that spontaneously disabled “manual” and turned the camera into a selfie factory. Eventually, I find the switch and shut it off. But I know—and fear—that it will strike again.

The Feature Creep is a jealous gremlin.

When I’m in Paris, I’m a regular, shutterbug, roaming the city and snapping its every nook and detail. At home in our Paris apartment, I also use our DVD player a lot, because we don’t subscribe to any French television service. So, our TV, a vintage Sony Trinitron cathode-ray monster, serves us exclusively as a playback device. Among our dozens of DVDs are a multi-disk collection of the classic Sixties sci-fi series, “The Outer Limits.”

Each week, the show was introduced by an Orwellian “control voice” that threatened viewers with dire but nameless consequences. As I plot ways to foil the Feature Creep inside my camera, I wonder if the creators of “The Outer Limits” somehow foresaw, fifty-odd years ago, the emergence of digital devices offering choices so numerous that the user is helpless to choose—each Pentax, Nikon, smartphone, seeing-eye doorbell, telepathic thermostat and intuitive cybertruck embedded with a spokesperson who condescendingly explains, in a menu of 32 languages, the futility of “manual” interference:

“There is nothing wrong with your television set [camera, phone, car, spouse, government]. Don’t attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. If you comply, we will leave you alone. If not, we will hunt you down, heave you bodily into a black van and rend you to a concentration camp in a shithole country for the brief remainder of your life. For the next decade—at least—sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear…”