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Otherwise known as The Menu Blues.
Every digital camera has a menu. It is generally accessed with a button on the back of the camera, although on the Flapoflex Digital Royale Special you wake the camera up by swearing at it. You can choose which language you do this in: Teenager, Longshoreman, or Streetwalker. Flapoflex have always staggered to the beat of a different drummer...
But back to the menu. Depending upon which digital camera you have, there will be a number of decisions that you need to make before you press the shutter button. Actually. enough that they must be organised into divisions in the menu. If you use one brand of camera you may be spending some time deciphering the menu of another, though within any manufacturer's design department they generally keep to the same format; ie. a Canon DSLR shooter will recognise the Canon mirror-less menu items pretty well.
I have two different brands in hand - both APS-C sensor cameras, and have opened their menus and counted how many questions I must answer before I can take pictures:
a. Nikon D7500 camera with a prime lens:
148 decisions or settings.
b. Fujifilm X-Pro1 camera with a prime lens:
50 decisions or settings.
c. And for a comparison , a Leica M2 film camera with a prime standard lens:
4 decisions or settings.
The film combo needed an extra decision in the shop at the film fridge, and will need one again when the film is finished - ie. which lab to take it to and when to go back to pick up the prints, but that is nowhere near the number of options that the user of even the most basic digital image-editing program will face when they open a set of digital files in the computer.
Argue, if you like, that the artistic process is all about choice at every juncture, and that the digital worker makes the image their own by the greater number of judgements applied...but doesn't it seem as though we have condemned ourselves to a mountain of work in the last 20 years?
I also accept that most of those decisions need only be taken once every few years as you set the electronic pathways of your camera. And some need never be set - the manufacturer's opinion of what you want and need being stronger than your own. I freely admit to never moving the video settings off factory default...and then never taking video. I call it the extremely minimalist school of cinema...
Shall you go and dig out the film camera and be carefree for a while? Even if you miss out on a chance to take 15 examples of the same picture and then discard 14 of the shots...wouldn't it be nice not to have to sit at a screen for 5 more hours during the week you get back from your holidays? Just a simple set of 6 x 4 prints to put in the shoebox...
