A few days ago I was in Cádiz. At sunset the beach of La Caleta fills up with people, not necessarily tourists, to see one of the best sunsets in Europe. As expected, I saw many people take out their mobile phones to immortalize the moment. I couldn’t help but think that those photos could be part of Penélope Umbrico’s brilliant work made up of thousands of photos of sunsets… taken from the Internet.
Although I am fascinated by the spectacle of that Sun sinking into the Atlantic, I spend a few seconds looking to my side to see if there is someone with a camera. Well no. Nobody carries a compact camera, an SLR or even a state-of-the-art mirrorless camera. This causes me some surprise.
I also carry an iPhone 14 Pro in my pocket, with which I take photos without stopping, but I am the only one carrying a heavy camera that afternoon. And that makes me feel a little more alone on this lonely trip to Cádiz.
I suddenly feel like all those people pointing at the Sun need to be convinced that they need a camera. They need a visor that isolates them from their surroundings and to look through it to concentrate, to better see the spectacle offered by the castle of Santa Catalina and the marshes flooded with orange light.
We need a camera more than ever. One that allows us to take photos without receiving notifications while we frame. We all need more concentration and good photos that feed our memory. But we also need a camera capable of taking high-quality photos if we need it.
It is what I have felt when I have been able to photograph the photos of the ruins of the Phoenician city of Gadir in the twilight. My phone could take those photos too, but it was important that the memory of that moment be as good as possible. And almost all of us feel that some moments need to be recorded in the best possible quality.
I watch a group of young people taking pictures with their phones at the beach viewpoint. They take great care of the frame. They move, look for different points of view, make sure that nothing they don’t want gets into the photo.
But at no time do they consider turning their phone and placing it horizontally. I wonder if that has to do only with the fact that, after all, a phone is held vertically. There is a microphone and a speaker that invite us to hold it like this for more than a century.
I approach this group of young people wanting to also have a portrait that is not a selfie. When I ask them to take my picture, they smile as I hand them my Sony A7 II with the wonderfully heavy Sony 24-105mm f/4 lens.
The magic works. It does not occur to them to hold the camera vertically or even remotely. They frame horizontally. The camera has a design that invites you to pick it up like this and bring it to your eye to look through the viewfinder, even though it has a screen almost as big as a phone. And that’s wonderful. After all, we have our eyes placed on our faces to see the world horizontally, not vertically.
Yes, it is true that we are living in a time when there are even production companies specialized in vertical video, as is the case with Cosmic. Only in Spain has this company made videos for Air Europa, Armani, Disney, Meetic, Disney, Eroski, BBVA, Mapfre, PepsiCo, Uber, Levi’s, Masqmai, or Xiaomi. TikTok and Instagram Stories are to blame for phenomena like this.
But the fascination felt by the girl who takes my photos is also real, she takes that camera that weighs almost a kilo and a half. She loves to see the result of her photos on the screen. Perhaps that is why televisions that can be rotated to view them vertically have been an absolute failure.
I’m not alone in this pro-camera ode. One of my students surprised me by shooting a short film for class with an old compact camera. It did not allow recording even in HD and the quality was much lower than that of a phone. And we are talking about someone who has not reached the age of 18. But she made the short of her and the images of her turned out to have a great personality.
His case is like that of those young people who return to using cameras that the New York Times spoke of recently. TikTok has become a great showcase for the old cameras from years ago to come back to life. The young people who use them today seem to be looking for two very different things: low-quality photographs illuminated by the light of a xenon flash, much more powerful than the LEDs on telephones; and a device that is not connected to the internet.
But they also want their photos to have personality, they want to escape the homogeneity that the images captured with the cameras of the phones present. Well, after all, these produce images that are as spectacular and incredible as they are predictable. Let’s remember that even the most modest compact cameras have a much better zoom than many phones.
The fascination for cameras seems to be today in those that offer photos that are far from being similar to those we use with a phone. That is why Polaroid has miniaturized its mythical instant cameras. The Polaroid Go look identical to the old Polaroids, which are still being made. But they’re smaller, they can be controlled via bluetooth from your phone, and most importantly, they produce smaller, cheaper analog instant photos.
They also have automatic focus and are worth just over 100 euros, so you don’t have to think long to buy them. The Go film is also half the price of traditional Polaroid films. And the price is important for the new generations.
Today it is very difficult, if not impossible, to buy a new compact camera that costs less than 300 euros. This market has practically vanished. Now we only find in that category cameras from dubious brands that don’t seem to excite anyone.
Canon, Sony, Nikon, Pentax… the big companies in the sector today do not produce affordable compact cameras. And perhaps that is one of the reasons why many young people do not have a camera other than the one on their phone. What happened to the economic chambers of hypermarkets and bazaars? Those that for 100 or 200 euros let you take photos that a phone would never achieve.
The big photography companies have launched to produce cameras that replace the compact ones that come equipped with something that makes them striking: artificial intelligence, like the Canon PX that takes photos by itself; they are unbreakable, like the GoPro; They are designed for social networks, like the Sony ZV-1; or… they fly. Let’s remember that lightweight, and cheaper, DJI drones sell very well and equip quality cameras. The problem is that all these products are not available to everyone.
Has the use of mobile phones really meant that there are not even a reliable cheap compact camera left for sale? I call Fotocasión, one of the largest specialized photography stores in Spain, and they give me surprising information to understand what is happening. According to sources in this store, if they had compact cameras in their stores they would sell them all, but those who are looking for them cannot buy them because there is no stock.
It seems since the pandemic broke out and the chip supply crisis occurred, manufacturers prefer to invest the available components in producing cameras with higher performance. And even sometimes there are specific supply problems for these, they point out from the store.
So it is not an exaggeration to say that the pandemic has wiped out the cameras with which many of us learned to take photos. A victim of the Covid that no one had computed until now. It wasn’t all the fault of cell phones.