Denial About Workflow Among Camera Companies
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It's painfully obvious that my DSLR should be able to immediately upload my shots to a cloud post-processing service integrated with downstream destinations like web albums, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. It was obvious a decade ago. It's easy to justify commercially, as a lucrative subscription revenue stream. The fact that DSLR makers have done next to nothing to bring us to that point - not even a single meaningful partnership between a DSLR maker and a software company - makes me think they deserve the disruption and market downsizing they will experience.
You can transfer photos to your phone. You can also use your phone as a remote shutter, which is kind of neat at first. You don't really end up using it though, as a dedicated 1 dollar remote shutter button is faster than fiddling with your phone wi-fi settings and launching a dedicated app.
30 seconds is long enough for me to not bother using it most of the time.
If the phone is already connected to a wifi network, you have to manually go into the wifi settings and change to the camera network. This is the part that I find most painful because usually when I'm outside, my tablet is tethered to the wifi network of my phone which I have to disable to be able to have the phone connect to the camera's wifi.
My camera won't allow you to do any operations on the camera when you're connected to it's wifi though, maybe a highend SLR would allow you to have it's wifi network always available?
The whole thing is pretty clunky, it is pretty cool to have a wireless (unfortunately low-res) remote viewfinder though, much better than using a timer and you can get the framing better.
Side anecdote: It took two of my friends, a CS guy and a PhD student in MechE -- both at MIT -- thirty minutes to figure out how to set up the connection on the PhD guy's Canon so that they could send photos to a phone. I feel like they could hire two people with UI experience and drastically improve the whole system for less than a half million dollars.
I work with some super-intelligent people (Professors, Doctors, etc), and it's amazing the things you find that they are unable to do, mostly because of crappy UI in software. There should be a lot more thought put into UI design. If the enduser can't work out how to use your software, your software is essentially useless (or possibly even dangerous).
With apps/webpages all having so many options for flexible UIs now, there's too many options for programmers to create their own cryptic UI that nobody understands but them.
I feel like in the old days things were much more predictable. Not that I'd like to go back to those days, but we've certainly taken two steps forward, one step back.
One thing that especially irritates me is the trend for everything to be an icon, especially on phones. I do understand why this happens, but it has the effect that if you can't remember or don't know what a particular icon signifies, there's (usually) no way to hover to get a tooltip to tell you before you press it. I say "usually" because my Samsung Galaxy Note 3 has what could have been a great feature that it senses when you finger comes near to the screen without pressing it, but unfortunately it only works in the stock browser and SMS app (both of which I don't use!). I guess Samsung has not released the API for it to work in other apps? It really could have changed how phone UIs work for the better.
Edit: the hovering feature is called Air view. It's slightly creepy how it can sense your finger even when you're not physically touching the screen. I've read some webpages that said it should work in Chrome, but for me it only ever worked in the stock browser, but I just tested that and now that doesn't even work, although it still works in the stock SMS app. I think it may have broken since the Android 5.0 update. I'm using a Samsung Galaxy Note 3, Android 5.0.
Phone cameras will continue to get better. Phones will continue to have more space (You can get an iPhone with 256GB now right?). They will have more compute power. They have access to the network to do serious post-processing (does someone remember that company which did this on-demand with racks of Mac Minis?). The threats are real to their companies and products.
And yet, I bet if they took the time to understand that problem they could blow away phones because phones just aren't specialized cameras like the ones they're able to make.
They not only have apps on phones that link with Creative Cloud but they've designed and released free apps which are superior to many of the social media content creation apps out there. They're able to create quality videos and images to post on any social media platform using any images in lightroom or photos (apple).
That's an excellent case of a company being ahead of the curve and actually using their knowledge to build the better products instead of being disrupted.
Phone cameras are not going to get around the physics problems of the weight needed to make a quality lens. And barring some amazing breakthrough, computing power is not going to make the $1, 3mm diameter lens on your phone work as well as a big pro lens on a DSLR.
Most people would not be happy to cart around a kilo of camera body, plus kilos of lenses. Pro photographers have decided to make that tradeoff for quality photos.
There's no reason you can't add the phone sharing features to a quality camera though. But you still can't fit it all in your pocket, and I wouldn't carry it with me every day.
Honestly though, now that I've plopped down the relatively small amount of money?
The SD-to-Lightning adapter for iOS gets me about 90% of the way there. Sure, I have to physically move the SD card from my DSLR to my phone, but whatever. At that point they get imported and as far as anything in iOS is concerned they're indistinguishable from photos I took with the phone itself.
(I'm reasonably certain this is more or less equally easy to do with Android given an OTG cable or internal SD slot but I don't know)
I'm not even sure I want my camera maker trying to be any smarter than that. Ideally, of course, the phone should be able to put photos onto my camera via wifi or BT. But I can freaking well guarantee that functionality will just rot at some point. It will be broken by some future OS update, or some other reason, and it's not a thing I expect I'd be able to count on in 12 months or 5 years.
Creative professionals are not very interested in keeping up with the curve. In art, mastery over media is a lifetime endeavor and it somewhat assumes that the medium will not change very much. Disruptions affect one's ability to produce quality output for a good long time, because they have to relearn the medium. Pretty much the only people who are OK with that on a regular basis are tech nerds (and not artists)
I agree with his point that the pro camera gear should, at the very least, be better at sharing than a cheap smartphone.
No pro (or amateur?) is going to buy a camera that doesn't support SD cards for a while now anyway so your precious RAW workflow will be safe regardless, even if they finally add usable sharing options.
I am a tech nerd though, so I'm OK with it either way.
The 'kids with smartphones' thing is so much deeper than simply the ability to publish quickly. One of my siblings does photography for a locally-based national newspaper and the biggest reason for iPhone journalism is cost (aside from integration). To that end press photographers are being issues iPhones and told to capture most of their work that way. Photography is adapting to the future just fine, just not in the way some money-hungry entrepreneur would like
I don't think the author was intending to do anything that would break existing workflows though, he was just lamenting the fact that pro camera gear doesn't have the ability to share as easily as you would be able to from a phone (and why not?).
I presume he still would think that the cameras should have SD cards/usb tether if you need them.
Professional imagers have large files, and they must post-produce them. Those things like card readers, additional ports, etc. ignore that particular audiences needs. To draw an analogy to another closely relation field in motion pictures, this too is mired in a divergence of needs and contexts. The author of the post would probably cringe at the complexity...
Making a case for XXX workflow should always be grounded in the contexts present. While a professional league sports team only makes up less than a shred of a fraction of active players, the needs of that league are not suddenly insignificant due to share.
Here's the context: camera makers are getting the shit kicked out of them. The market is plummeting. It caters to the myopic needs of people who want to pretend that, to be a photographer, you have to work like it's a 1950s darkroom, only with computers.
Compact cameras a being destroyed by cellphones, which is where all the imaging innovation is actually happening. Without the cross-subsidy to high-end cameras, prices for lenses and bodies are going up with every generation, unlike every other tech out there.
But you know, keep pretending it's everyone else who's wrong.
If there were a niche that wasn't being served, then sure, pocket camera / cell phone could fill it where previous consumers only had a DSLR.
That said, that same niche that provides an entry point to photography will yield people that begin to understand why you can only achieve certain aesthetics via larger format sensors and optics. At that point, DSLRs are purchased again.
Canon isn't going anywhere with DSLRs. Nikon? No. Sony? Seems their foray into interchangeable lens cameras has grown, not receded.
In the end, no one is going to be able to sit and argue with someone that doesn't understand the differences and questions of qualia with you, but you know, keep pretending it's everyone else that is in the dark.
The facts - sales volumes and profitability - don't actually agree with you.
But it's unclear what exactly makes sense in higher-end camera today, especially given that much of the audience for such cameras generally hate interfaces getting all cluttered up with the consumer features of the moment. (e.g. I think my Canon DSLR has some sort of direct to printer that I've never used--and can't imagine many do these days).
And yes, I do think we'll still have SD cards in a few years.
Heck, with my 6D I can share directly to my phone and post to social media just like you can with a smart phone camera.
The thing is for the stuff I want to do, I spend at least as much time in post and doing that on a smartphone would be a huge pain.
http://www.nikonusa.com/en/nikon-products/product/wireless/w...
The thing with camera system is you need to have an idea of what you want to shoot and build your system towards that. The smartphone is a great all-purpose camera, if you're using a SLR/Mirrorless it's because you want to go beyond that.
I have a full frame camera and the raw images are ~30 MB. I wouldn't want to transfer 32GB of data over wifi anyway.
If cameras can produce JPEGs presumably they should be able to produce low-res JPEGs.
Or maybe just phone integration so he can send the photos to his phone where he can stuff them in an email and send them to the editor.
His primary complaint seems to be getting scooped by teenagers with their smartphones, but I don't see how anything that gets classified as a "workflow" can beat hitting the "post to Facebook" button 2 seconds after you take the picture.
* Wirelessly transfer images to my phone using wifi-direct.
* Do so with a tap, as it has an embedded NFC tag.
* Be remotely controlled by my phone, including a laggy but usable viewfinder display on my phone screen. This mode also automatically transfers pictures taken to the phone.
Partially reposted from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12756662
"Workflow" can mean just an auto-correct/auto-awesome filter on the camera. It will certainly beat the equivalent processing happening on a phone.
I had a fun little workflow when I traveled where I'd have a micro SD in a SD adapter plugged into my camera. When I got to a hostel, I'd plug the micro SD into my phone connected through wifi and upload to flickr and whatnot. I felt like a cyberpunky travel journalist, it was fun.
> Just shoot Raw, and double the number of frames you can record in burst mode, then process the images you need to share immediately in camera. You can sample down as far as 720x480. That means with an Eye-Fi SD Card you could upload a properly resized image directly from the 60D to Flickr, even if it began as a Raw file.
> Seems like a handy feature to me.
Soon after that manufacturers started including built-in WiFi in their cameras (for example Canon 6d from 2012/2013 [2]), which acknowledged the need for getting images easier and quicker to the world. And the capabilities in this area have been steadily improving, see for example Sony Alpha 7R[3] from 2014. You could argue that its still not yet good enough (which is probably true), but that is completely different argument than what the author is positing: "What I’m complaining about is that it isn’t beginning to happen today, and it should have happened yesterday.". Arguably this sort of workflow improvement already began happening five years ago, and is very much on track to continue improving.
[1] http://thedigitalstory.com/2010/11/in-camera-raw-proces.html
Later as I was going through my pictures, I unfortunately realized that the EXIF DateTime field is a string, meaning I had to batch-convert the timestamps into the country's local time. It was a completely unnecessary annoyance, why couldn't EXIF just use Unix time?
The author's view excludes fine art photography as well as a number of other types which value quality of speed and quantity. If you need or want to deliver images fast then yes camera companies are in 'denial', but I would argue the majority of photographers aren't.
Making it faster to get photos off the device helps fine art photographers as well, just not as much, because they're less latency-sensitive. I don't see any way in which it hurts them.
Also chances are if you shot several gigs of data you are using your own external card reader, especially so if you aren't using SD cards. I can transfer 32GB from a CF card in about 3 minutes with my USB3 reader too.
On a personal note I still shoot film and am perhaps a bit more comfortable with longer latency than most others.
i'll admit i have not explored every feature of my 70D and lightroom, but i'm pretty sure the combination can't pull that off.
https://flashair-developers.com/en/documents/api/lua/sample/