Cameras and Photography Explained

Canon today announced EOS Webcam Utility Pro and will discontinue the basic EOS Webcam Utility approach on August 25th. EOS Webcam Utility now uses a freemium model that requires an account with Canon. For free you get dirt basic connection. For US$50/year, you get a host of features that, in my mind, don't add up to the price for 99% of those doing Cam-ing on the Web.

Normally you'd expect that when you purchase a camera, that it enables you to do everything that the camera can do. But just as automakers poked at SaS (service as subscription) as a way of adding function-for-pay, the camera makers have dabbled at it from time to time (e.g. Sony's custom gridlines for a fee). 

The thing that concerns me is that no camera maker has proven to be good at software, and when you start trying to sell subscriptions for function, you're in the software business. 

This latest poke at SaS that comes from Canon has a list of the paid features that reads a lot like "duplicates functions I'm getting from other existing products." 

Why would Canon be doing this? Mostly because they don't want to be muscled out of an area that they thought they should own. You need a camera to Zoom conference, for instance, but much of what the video stream is doing once received by the computer is now controlled by Zoom and others. The camera is just a widget you need that you connect with a cable. Once you've bought the widget, the camera maker is out of the picture (pardon the pun).

The most revealing feature of the new EOS Webcam Utility Pro subscription option that suggests this displeasure at being muscled out is this: "change camera settings via app." 

I've written it for decades now: if you're actually a "systems camera" maker, you need to enable the ecosystem that surrounds your product. Not partially, but fully. Canon is trying to not just control but own the entire EOS ecosystem. Witness the non-licensing and apparently suit-threatening surrounding the RF mount, for instance. I'd tend to say that Canon's approach here is contradictory to one of their long-stated goals: own the majority of the camera market in volume. 

I have no problem paying for good software that's maintained, upgraded, and added to regularly and which also has excellent support. Do I get any hint that I'd be getting that from Canon's new offering? No. 

The danger is that any of these pay-for-function things attempted by a camera company gets real traction. Given that four companies own over 90% of the market, once the dam breaks, we'll be flooded with SaS, with no indication that they actually care much about what the customers need or think. Customer service and support at all the camera companies pretty much sucks right now, and I don't see it getting better any time soon.

Yes, I've been quiet with my sites recently. As I noted in the Spring, I'm working on revisiting site design and information. It continues to be a work in progress, as the tool I'm using isn't really ready for prime time production yet (Real Soon Now).

However, along the way in rethinking my Web presence and diddling with prototype designs, new concepts, and more, I discovered something: The Internet as you knew it is dead.

You may have heard the term SEO before. That stands for Search Engine Optimization, something pretty much every site owner and maintainer has been dealing with for decades now.

SEO is really a euphemism for "get Google's attention." With 90% of the search market these days (and a majority pretty much since inception), whatever Google wants Web sites to do has had to be paid attention to. At the onset, Google used "experts" to tag sites that should be prioritized in search results, but humans are expensive and Google has lots of computers, so the method of prioritizing sites quickly gave way to algorithms. 

Worse still, as Google's revenue became more reliant upon selling ads, the old search mechanisms started breaking in favor of what made Google more money. Try this as an illustration: type "Kodak Porta" into a Google search bar. Did that bring up the company that actually makes that film or better yet point you to the data sheet for Porta? Nope. Instead, today I get this stack of things (in this order):

• five sponsored ads
• Amazon!
• An AI QA
• Wikipedia page
• An fstoppers.com review (good on you and your SEO, fstoppers)
• eight "popular products" (more ads)
• more of the above

Nowhere on this first page of search results is the producer of the product, who might actually have the best answer to your question(s). Of course, if all you wanted to do is buy some Porta, well, your results were sold to the highest bidders. 

This is no longer useful search, and it's getting worse. Even DuckDuckGo has a similar problem with the search term I just suggested, though they at least claim that they protect your private information. In April, the US District Court held that Google violated antitrust law, specifically because the Google search methodology has been abused. What will happen from that decision is still unknown, but I don't think it makes a lot of difference.

Follow the money. Always follow the money. The reason why Google wants you to use an Android device, the Chrome browser, and their Search engine is simple: that gives them full control over you, and they can track and promote to their heart's content. But you might have noticed that third thing in the stack of things I got from a Google search: an AI response. And this leads me to my original bold-faced assertion, above: in the coming year or two, search as we know it will disappear and be replaced by AI interaction. 

This introduces all kinds of interesting topics, including where did AI get its information from? My site currently blocks some of the AI engines from scraping it, but that quickly became a futile game as the only one that seems to respect .HTACCESS file restrictions is ChatGTP. I blocked another AI engine—you might guess which one—only to find that it simply resorted to accessing the site using a different server.

I'm writing the above because what's happening is going to broadly impact your use of the Internet soon, if it hasn't already, and what you're reading right now is an Internet site. Search no longer points to "reliable data sources." AI engines are pattern matching, not knowledge bases, so hallucinate answers that are incorrect, misleading, or use poor language. I recently responded to someone's "is this AI summary correct" query with a pretty scathing breakdown of all the things that were wrong with what AI had written. Sloppy wording, loose language, incorrect assertions, inconsistent information, and more. Remember, most so-called AI engines are really just pattern matchers. They use a huge collection of previously posted information to form their response, and create that response in similar patterns. If someone with a much scraped Web site once wrote "diffraction is ignorable," then guess what answer you might get in the future?

I've tried—to the best of my ability, as I'm the only one populating my sites, books, articles, and presentations—to provide useful, detailed, accurate, and helpful information, and I've been doing that on the Internet for over 30 years (yes, 30+). My project this summer was to try to figure out how to do that better, and redesign my sites for the future Internet I can foresee. 

But Google, Meta, Microsoft and others want a future whereby they scape all information from others, then are the sole ones presenting it. That is dangerous in more ways than you might first imagine. You might have noticed more and more of the best information providers moving behind paywalls. I'm bemused to find that there's an Ayn Rand irony happening here. One of her assertions was that the uncompromising free-market capitalists were fighting against so called "second handers" who attempt to live through others. This all became the primary theme in her novel Atlas Shrugged, where the creators, inventors, and scientists all retreated from the second-handers. Hmm, Google has become quite the second-hander, hasn't it? 

Why did I write "irony" in the previous paragraph? Because the current administration and large corporations may say they're following or approve of Rand's ideas and are free market believers, but they don't seem to realize that they've become the ones Rand was railing against. While I don't really agree with Rand's ideas—she oversimplifies and ignores a great deal—it appears I'm now talking much like her heroes do, thus another irony ;~). 

As I've noted before, I'm at a point in my life where I don't need to do this anymore. However, I enjoy what essentially is a new form of teaching. 

All the above has got me rethinking and recalibrating, though. I'm not interested in helping Google serve you while they extract a constant toll (disclosure: I own some Google stock, both directly and in ETFs). Which may mean that I need to put my best and most timely information behind a paywall. What I'm now exploring in my summer Web redesign are ways of doing that while still leaving exposed a large amount of useful, detailed, accurate, and helpful information. There are plenty of others who've shown that this can be done. For instance, MacMost, a site you Mac users should be aware of.

So if you got this far, don't expect major site refreshes as I emerge from my summer pontifications. I'll continue to do what I've been doing for a while before eventually deploying byThom 4.0. And I won't deploy at all unless I can guarantee that what I'm going to do is better than what has come before.

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Is there a photographic implication in the above? Sure is. At the simplest level: you should reinvent and experiment rather than blatantly copy. I've written before that photography tends to be faddish, with some in-the-moment trend becoming how everyone composes and processes until that eventually becomes blasé and the drum majors up front start down a different path. But if you want to really stand out, you need to explore your own path and ignore what everyone else is doing.

Here’s something I don’t understand the moral logic of: a rumor site that posts watermarked images clearly originating from another rumor site, who themselves watermark the posted images they obtained from elsewhere. It appears they expect no one to scrape and republish their scraped images while they don’t mind scraping and republishing from others. The best I can come up with is “see, I had it first.” 

One of the things I learned in business school was not at all directly about business. It’s that everyone has moral positions that are often either (a) not thought through; or (b) based upon an unchallengeable first premise. You can’t talk about ethical business practices until you wade through those two things, and they turned out to be immense walls that almost everyone in the class had built for themselves and was hiding behind. 

Now, you might not think this has anything really to do with photography, but it does. One of the challenges of the day is to accurately describe what exactly is a photograph and what is completely an artist’s creation. This problem raised its head early with the first version of Photoshop and other similar tools. Indeed, there became a clear separation between the capture process (film), which was tough to fake, and the output process (digital scan and processing), which was. 

Probably the most “real” photos ever we re contact sheets. You took a photo, you developed the film, you directly duplicated that to paper (you might have to reverse values along the way, but that was a simple direct reversal). A contact sheet, particularly one annotated by the photographer themselves is about as close as it comes to “I saw this, pressed the button, and this is what was captured.” 

You probably saw right through that last sentence, though. The photographer could have manipulated the scene, altered the exposure and tonal values (think filters), or did something in the processing that wasn’t the norm (think cross processing). Still, a contact sheet with a clear forensic trail is about as close I’ll ever get to “this happened, this is what it looked like, and here’s the proof.” 

Today we’re in an age where anything is possible, and often happens. 

Photoshop sort of pioneered the whole image manipulation idea, and with the Generative AI additions Adobe has recently made, trying to tie a pixel to something in the real world is now impossible. Moreover, startling things are happening. 

Recently I was processing an older image a bit differently, including an area I had cropped out before because there wasn’t a way to “fix” it reliably (part of a vehicle was out of focus and blocking part of the frame). This time I used the whole frame and asked Photoshop to render something in the area I had cropped out before. What surprised me is that what Photoshop put in that area that was nearly exactly what my vehicle was blocking. Mopane trees often have distinct bark distortions, usually caused by elephants. That particularly tree had what I thought was a unique elephant mark. After all, I could see that mark clearly in some of my other images taken that day. 

However Photoshop’s Generative AI managed to put a near duplicate of the tree into position for me, complete with what seemed to be the same mark! I actually spent several minutes comparing the fake tree trunk with the real one, and couldn’t find any clear difference. What should we make of that?

Long ago my mentor Galen Rowell and I talked at length about photographer ethics and morality. Every photographer has that (whether they know it or not). Most never think about it or even realize what their practices actually are. Some, like those in my business class, live behind walls they’ve constructed that on close examination are much like the Emperor’s New Clothing.

NANPA (North American Nature Photography Association), of what I was once a charter member, developed a Principles of Ethical Field Practices back in 1996. They’ve since expanded what was once a small card you could carry into a full book. Meanwhile, I was running Backpacker, and we practiced things like Leave No Trace. Today we also have a host of other similar well meaning organizations and statements of practices that just try to dot every t and cross every I. Yeah, that’s not what we need, either, though I support those efforts for the most part.

What you need is a small set of clear, reasoned, and practiced first premises. You then examine all your decisions based upon that. 

I’ve written about this before. I once was flabbergasted to see a well-known professional photographer pull up a blooming, living plant at a World Heritage site, move it to where he wanted it, take his photo, and leave the dying plant where he had placed it. Apparently his morality was “whatever makes my image better.” 

While I’ve been known to move rocks for an image, I also move them back. In fact, upon lifting a rock, I make sure that it doesn’t have a clear, active ecosystem under it before moving it, otherwise I put it right back down. Yes, I want my photo to look better, and that rock didn’t help (or would help more over there), but I also didn’t want to disturb the natural sense of things any more than I would by walking through that environment. 

You can probably guess where I’m going with this. I get asked a lot these days about whether or not they should use any of the AI tools we now have available to us. My answer is yes, as long as you have an ethical stance and can treat AI like I do rocks. 

For example, a common situation that happens in wildlife photography is that if you expose for the underside of a flying bird (which is usually in shadow), you’ll probably blow out the sky. Well, that’s not what we see in that situation (bird detail, no sky detail). Our eye/brain constructs the scene so we remember the beautiful bird flying against the (often interesting) sky. Well, that’s the photo I want to capture, too.

How do you do that within my “move/replace the rock” ethic? Simple. 1. Exposure for the bird and take as many BIF photos as you’d like. 2. Go back and expose for the sky (with no bird in it) on the same track. 3. In Photoshop, Sky Replacement using the well exposed sky with the well exposed bird layer. That’s what I would have seen and remembered, so why does pressing a camera button mean I have to give up one aspect of what I saw? 

Of course we now have smartphones that sort of do that on the fly. Adobe’s Project Indigo camera app essentially is taking multiple exposures with my iPhone and processing them into a finished image much the same way (actually better, as it will stack out matching detail to reduce noise in it). 

What’s not cool is not understanding what your morals are and what ethical practices that will enable (or destroy). Blindly using AI without thinking about what’s being done, how, and for what reason is lazy ass ethics, in my book. Whatever you do needs to be defensible, and defensible across repeated actions without having to add “but if X, then Y” constructs. 

I want you to see the world I experience in my photos. That’s my job as a photographer. But my other job as a photographer is to make sure I don’t start sneaking away from that and start inventing things that I didn’t experience. At the point where I cross that line I’m no longer making photos, I’m creating art. In my Backpacker days, we labeled that “photo illustration.” 

The thing you can never do with a camera is “capture reality.” You make a lot of decisions without realizing it. For instance, which lens is on the camera, which direction the camera is pointed, where you’ve focused, and when you press the shutter release (or when the camera does that for you). If you’re creating JPEGs, you’ve picked color, contrast, saturation, and sharpening aspects of the final pixels. Thing is, the photographer standing right next to you is making different decisions. So is his photo unreal and yours real? What’s just out of frame can be as important to the meaning of the photo as what’s in the frame, after all. Using a longer lens is a form of editing out things if you think about it. 

My goal in taking a photo is “this is what I want you to see.” Generally, that’s what I saw and felt when I was there, all done without changing anything from the way it is or could be (those temporarily moved rocks ;~). Moreover, when I process an image, I’m going to process it in a way where I control how your eye takes it in so that you’re taking in the same thing I took in, and not wandering off paying more attention to the unimportant things in my photo. 

Painters start with a blank canvas and add. Photographers start with a full canvas and subtract. We both seek the same thing: visual and emotional impact from what’s on the canvas. 

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Bonus: The interesting thing is that I’m more manipulative of the things in my frame when I photograph Events and Weddings. In fact, I’m darned manipulative, because most human subjects go into what I call the “frozen stick” pose the minute they see a camera pointed at them. A few go into a “crazy pose” they’ve developed or learned. Neither looks natural, so I have to intervene. The great thing about my current cameras is that they don’t make a sound when I take a photo and can hold focus when I’m not looking through the viewfinder, so my subjects often are just interacting with me and not noticing that I’m taking photos. Great. That’s what I want: natural interaction. Or simplified: natural. 

With sports, I can’t manipulate others, only me. I have to think like coaches and players and know the plays. Anything less and I get random images that may or may not capture the right moment. But if I have a strong feeling the next play is coming to a specific spot, guess where I am? I want my sports photos to feel like you’re right there at the point of action, so that’s where I need to get. I manipulate me. 

But note the word I used: manipulate. When you take a photo, you’re making seen and unseen manipulations. The real trick to becoming a great photographer is taking control of those manipulations. Just make sure you have an ethical stance of what you can/should/will manipulate and why. 

As I noted earlier this year, I'm taking a couple of long breaks from posting this year so that I can work on new products you'll want, including site rethinks and redesigns. You just saw one of my planned breaks as I worked on updating the Mastering Nikon JPEGs book and created the new Mastering Nikon Customization book. From the response so far it seems I was correct in anticipating demand for more information in these areas. With Nikon updating firmware and a Z5II book to still complete, there's plenty just in the book side of the business to do.

Since I haven't perfected cloning yet, when I deep end on these projects, I don't typically have the bandwidth to keep all the sites updated with new material. Given that I'm in the middle of site re-designs, I also don't want to add much new material when I'll just have to redesign it. Moreover, the less interrupted I am, the faster these things get done.

I'm about to enter another planned quiet period. Look for new site material in late July, after which I'll take another short break. 

My goal is to come out of 2025 with sites, books, and more that are better than ever, and far exceed what you've seen in the past. It'll just take a little alone time for me to get ahead of you again.