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Comment by john61 | Hacker News Reader

I make better photos with my old manual Hasselblad from the 1970ies. Because the interface has massive cognitive overhead. No automatic at all, all manual, clunky, complicated. It forces me to think slowly. Therefore it gives my head and heart the time and deep concentration about the picture I want to make. This leads to much better photos.

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I'll play devil's advocate to that. Nowadays you can use high resolution cameras with automatic everything and take lots of pictures. High resolution means cropping still yields a useful picture and taking lots means you are far more likely to have a useful picture. You are certainly far less likely to miss something. (Manual focussing is also not available to short sighted people like me since glasses/contacts don't result in perfect correction.)

If we extrapolated your approach to development then we shouldn't allow highlighting editors, debuggers (Linus has argued this), and similar modern tools. Heck you should have to wait hours/days for program output like they did in the punch card days.

I suspect that skilled people can make good use of the tools available, be they completely manual or with lots of automation. It is quite possible the automation doesn't help them that much. But the vast majority of people are closer to average.

A interface that makes things easy is comfortable and probably profitable, since most people are lazy. But convenience does not correlate with quality.

It certainly depends on the results you're after. If you're photographing landscapes you're not worried about "missing something", and taking lots of pictures without manual adjustments won't do any good.

I thought the diopter adjustment could compensate for glasses?

> I thought the diopter adjustment could compensate for glasses?

The problem I had when I tried it was that I could get everything looking perfect through the viewfinder, but the resulting picture was blurred. My current prescriptions round to the nearest 0.25 (glasses) / 0.5 (contacts) dioptres.

Even if I could make a perfect adjustment, my vision alters during the day. For example when tired things can get a little blurry.

I have 3.2 dioptres and have no problem at all with the hasselblad manual focus.

I'm at -5 and -6 and the last time I tried things was with a Nikon many years ago.

Could it not be the other way around? Modern camera's surely are far more complicated than that Hasselblad, and offer a magnitude more options to fine-tune before taking a picture. To my knowledge though, they don't have fewer abilities for manual control. It is fair to say that the cognitive overhead of understanding what a modern camera will do when you take the picture is much greater than that of the old camera.

Perhaps you can take great pictures with that Hasselblad because you understand exactly what it does and how it does it?

If you know what you want, you have to guess at how to get the automatic device to give you that result, and you have to look at the result to see if the device correctly inferred what you want. That feedback loop where you reverse-engineer someone else's guess at your workflow produces more cognitive load than a dozen knobs with deterministic and predictable effects. Being able to eliminate the feedback loop is a huge win, and is why keyboard-based interfaces can still be more productive than GUIs where you have to look to make sure the button is where you expect it and the cursor is where you want it.

I found the same when I started using prime lenses. Not only was the quality there, but it forced me to think about composition, where I was standing and the geometry of the shot.

The interface of a prime is much simpler though as a whole dimension of control is removed.

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