For many of us, it’s a taboo subject to shoot in auto mode. I mean, we want to surely have creative control over our images so that we can make exactly what we have in our minds. But truth be told, many of us shoot in aperture priority anyway. So why not just go to full auto? That’s the thought process that I had during my yearly staycation at the end of last month. In those two weeks, I felt creatively recharged while channeling some deep grief, sadness, and frustration. It came from my wanting to get back to basics. And one camera really helped me do that much better than any others: the Canon G1x Mk III.
I’ve talked about this camera at length before, and if you want to understand that conversation, I recommend that you check out this article that I wrote. But this isn’t the time or the place for me to do that. In fact, this isn’t a gear article. It’s an article about creative liberation that the current state of the photo industry doesn’t give us. They’re too busy catering to content creators, and not enough on photographers.
With this camera I was able to do a lot of very fun things. It gave me the scene mode, which many Canon cameras have even today. You can see more of these images on my Instagram or even on my VSCO. Specifically, I embraced the Toy Camera mode and let the camera do what it wanted to do while doing exactly what I wanted to do. In this mode, it gives a Lomo-like look along with a bit of a film simulation. The ISO doesn’t go above ISO 800 and the brightest the lens goes to is f2.8. So a lot of different things can happen. Sometimes this meant intentional camera movement. At other times, I used prisms, mirrors, and lens filters to make images that truly resonated with me. In this way, the tool became a creative collaborator of mine.
As I walked around NYC, I tapped into my own creativity to feel the moments that were happening in front of me. Not everything was a hit. But when I got a nice photograph, it was something very special. Not having to worry about all the technical features that get in the way really helped here with just making better images.
There are moments when you’re walking around a city at night where when you look at the light and the scene in front of you, you’re awestruck. It’s how people fall in love with Times Square or Christmas lights during the holidays. Sometimes the lights are installed for this reason while at other times, they’re happy accidents. But when you look at a scene, you realize that it’s all about the quality of the light. Combine this with a study of how toy camera photographs look. Then finally, top it off with your own emotional awareness of the moment. That’s how you get a photograph that can’t be made by an AI imaging algorithm at all. It can try, but it’s never going to be the same as mine.
A human being can understand the moment in time and emotions in a scene while an AI requires someone to truly be able to articulate those to get exactly what they want.
At times, I looked at the lights and due to my kerataconus-based eyesight, I was able to tell if something would look great or not when it was “smeared.” By that, I mean that when there is intentional movement with a slow shutter speed that the image would look like an impressionist painting.
The result is images that feel both familiar yet ethereal — as if they’re part of a dream that we can’t quite remember or put our fingers on.