A digital camera with no LCD? Brilliant?

Ok, maybe this is a little crazy sounding but bear with me for a few minutes. Leica recently released a limited production digital camera with no LCD. That’s right. There no way to view the photos you just took until you upload them to your computer. Here’s a link.

I know, it sounds like madness, but there could be a good idea buried in that little trip to looney-ville. First of all, the only controls the camera has is focus, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. So, basically it’s all up to you to craft the photo. So, I guess question is, “is that a bad thing”? There are no menus to navigate, no settings to tweak (or curse, or blame), so what you get out of it is what you put into it.

Just maybe, knowing it’s all up to you will unlock a little creativity and originality that’s sitting there dormant.

Here’s a good analogy from musician Brian Eno on the topic of using digital music technologies:

“Why is it that people can still make interesting stuff, not only interesting but innovative stuff, using those tools which in digital terms are hopelessly limited?

…The reason is, because it’s hopelessly limited. …You very quickly can understand what you can do with an electric guitar or a violin or a set of drums and you stop looking for more options, and you start grappling with it. You say, ‘okay this is what it does, so what do I do?

The problem with software-based work is that you can never exhaust what it does, so you can always cover the fact that you haven’t got an idea by trying another option in the tools.

So if you have a lot of options, you don’t usually have a lot of rapport with the instrument. If you have fewer options, your rapport keeps increasing”.

Is this also true about a camera? If you stop worrying about the hundreds of setting on the back of your digital camera and stop worrying about how you are going to work with the image in post processing, will you build a closer relationship with the camera and lens? Will it make you a better photographer? Will you start concentrating on the important stuff?

Just something to think about.

Thanks for reading.

-Ken.