Every once in a while I ponder what my dream features I would love to see manufacturers build into their cameras or lenses, and I have a few that are right at the top of my list, and have been for the better part of a decade:
First, I would love to see live exposure view. We saw this in the iPhone 12, and now the 13 (I’m sure the feature exists in the Android platform, but I’m an Apple guy). During night photography or long-exposure photography, it would be nice to see a live view of the exposure build as it gathers light during the time the shutter is open. Sort of the way one sees the image magically appear on a sheet of photo paper in the wet darkroom. That way, you could start the exposure, and end it once you’re satisfied with the image. I know it could cause some pretty massive battery drain, but many cameras can accommodate a battery grip, or even an external power supply, so that hurdle could be cleared pretty easily.
Second, and this one is a technological biggie: the ability for the camera to shut off individual pixels after it reaches a defined exposure point. To explain: using Photoshop as an example, the brightness of a pixel has a value on a scale of 0-255, 0 being the blackest black, and 255 being the whitest white, and no visual information is contained at either extreme. With this feature, you could tell the camera to limit each individual pixel to gain no more than a set amount of brightness on that scale, say, 245-250, where you’ll still get bright highlights, but won’t completely lose information or detail. If any of you are familiar with the Zone System, this would be akin to placing our highlights on Zone 8.5-9. Like I said, this one would be a biggie, because it may make the camera comically large with all the added transistors and diodes and any other electrical components that would be needed for allowing the control of millions of pixels, but it’s one I dream of.
And thirdly, and perhaps the one I want the most, would be to invert the image on the LCD in live view. I spent many years looking at the ground glass of a large format camera. When using a large format camera, the image of the scene being photographed is projected through the lens onto a piece of glass that has been frosted, so it has some opacity. This projected images is upside down and backwards, that is, what is up is down, what is down is up, and things on the right end up on the left side of the glass, and things on the left end up on the right side of the glass. It’s the way every single lens ever made works. Even your own eye sees the world this way, your brain just flips everything to the way we see. So it is with the SLR, DSLR and mirrorless cameras (and some medium format cameras, but we’ll not bring those into the present discussion). In the case of the SLR and DSLR, there is a prism that bounces the image around until we see the image “correctly” in the viewfinder. I found that viewing the world upside down and backwards was an incredibly helpful tool in composition. It drew your eye to shapes and spatial relationships, and revealed value (shades of dark and light) in ways that you don’t get by viewing the world the way we already see it. In today’s digital cameras, meaning mirrorless cameras, the optical “correction” is written into the software/firmware of the camera. It would only be a matter of adding a menu option to let you invert the image. Something that could even be added to previous generations of cameras via a new software update.
Do any of you have dream features you wish camera/lens manufacturers would add to their products?