Amber Belle and the camera that started the whole thing off for me.

Amber and the camera and the ergonomics

A little while ago, I lent my entry-level Olympus mirrorless camera to Amber Belle because she was looking to buy a camera and it seemed sensible to try a few different types. The Olympus is a tiny and beautiful camera, and I’m even rather fond of the standard zoom lens which folds itself away and allows me to fit the camera in a jacket pocket. I thought it might be the ideal camera for a stylish lady, and I couldn’t have been more wrong.

How fingernails relate to the buttons on a compact MFT camera

The problem is that Amber wears her nails long, and that means that she can’t operate the very small push buttons with which the camera is well equipped. A Nikon D7000 proved much more to her taste; so much so, that within two days, she'd bought one of her own! For many years, I’ve been telling people they should 'try before they buy', but this was far and away the clearest demonstration of the truth of this advice.

Amber took to the much larger body of a Nikon at once and bought one of her own within two days.

I know I’ve got it wrong in this area more than once: vie bought a camera (or an accessory) on the basis of a review or a paper specification and it’s proved in practice to be difficult to use and very poor value for money. This has led me into interesting territory thinking about ergonomics and our cameras and lenses, and the various forces driving things.

First off, let’s look at the least ergonomic camera you own: your smartphone. No handgrips here, and a certain lack of dedicated buttons for altering settings that we tend to expect with higher-bracket cameras. Everything is done on and through the screen. Any add-ons that may help (like the once-ubiquitous selfie stick, or a gimbal) make it much less mobile.

There’s no handgrip on a flat plate of a device…

You can help yourself, even if the designers haven’t done that much to make it easy: notably, very many camera phones allow you to use the volume controls as the shutter release, so that you can squeeze instead of tapping, and can keep a better grip on the device as you take the picture. Given the regularity with which I put my finger around exactly the wrong edge of my own mobile, a camera in the corner isn’t a great idea. Who knew?

This leads me to the least ergonomic part of many modern DSLR and mirrorless cameras - the touch screen. I believe there’s something rather perverse going on here, and it grates on my psyche as much as the people with a big petal lens hood on back to front as they shoot. As novice camera users, converting from smartphones for the first time, are used to a touch screen for doing everything, the manufacturers give them one, and it’s a natural upgrade path, so to speak.

Much less natural for anyone who is used to shooting with a real camera: the old idea that you should be able to adjust everything important with your eye at the viewfinder goes right out of the window if you have to look at the back of the camera and dab at it to change things! Especially odd, I find, when camera manufacturers usually work hard at keeping the same control layout from one model to the next.

My car has a touch screen, and it’s really useful for putting the destination in before I set off. But it’s a poor second to the controls on the steering wheel for adjusting the radio. With a car, there are real risks to life, limb and license if you look away to use a touchscreen, and the fact that it’s only convenience you’re throwing away with a camera touchscreen merely means the latter is less important. But convenience seems to be important to most of us: does anyone reading this get up to go and change the channel on the TV?

Touch screens are wonderful for complex data input, or for swiping - but why bother when you don’t need to take your hands off the wheel, or the camera from your eye?

I use Sony Alpha 7 bodies, and I find them just about ideally suited to my hands, which aren’t particularly large. I tend not to take pictures in extreme circumstances, but I know that I find it less convenient to operate the controls wearing gloves! It’s a common complaint from wildlife and sports photographers that Sony bodies are too small to hold and operate, and they prefer the Panzer tank-like Canon and Nikon professional bodies. These have premium price tags and offer high ISO performance, particularly rapid autofocus, and a degree of weatherproofing and robustness that nothing else matches. Maybe Panasonic’s first full-frame mirrorless cameras were aimed at the same market.

I find the Alpha 7 bodies easy to carry one-handed, without using the strap

A feature of ‘professional’ bodies is that they carry two batteries and have an inbuilt vertical grip. Some people I’ve met seem to like this, but I find the unwieldiness of that much bulk and mass (usually with a 70-200 f/2.8 lens on the front) absolutely intimidating. If you want to travel rapidly, would you buy a Range Rover or an Audi TT? Photographically, I want to move fast…

I own two vertical grips: one was free with my old Olympus in around 2014, and I used it sometimes. No particular increase in convenience, though the extra battery capacity could be welcome: the other was a motor drive for my Minolta 9000, bought because I found a secondhand one going cheap. Its raison d'être was to give rapid firing to the only manual wind autofocus camera ever made… And so it carried six AA batteries and a quite powerful motor. The vertical grip was more or less incidental!

A vertical grip can be an asset but is not always so. I’d think hard about using one for pictures where I have to carry the equipment far. Most are bigger and heavier than the one on an OM-D EM-1.

I don’t pretend to understand the science and art of ergonomics, but I do know that sometimes it all goes slightly wrong. For instance, Subaru had the brilliant idea of putting the on/off/volume control on car radios where the driver can reach it with minimal movement, on the right side of the radio: I loved it, and my wife occasionally ‘turned up the volume’ to hear better, and retuned the radio… A more telling example of perversity in action is the way that British cars, with the steering wheels on the right, have indicators on the left, the same side as the gear lever. Trafficators on the left make sense for a left-hand drive car… Interestingly, Subarus imported from Japan tend to have controls that are perfectly adjusted to right-hand drive, as they don’t need to conform to a European standard.

Over the years, most things improve, and the handgrips and finger holds of cameras are a case in point – those on the Olympus OM-D cameras don’t protrude very far, but allow a good grip for both using and carrying the camera: the once-innovative grip of an early EOS film camera are far less finger-friendly.

Minimal grips in size, but perfectly positioned for many hands-on the OM-D EM-10

There’s been a similar development in focus control, where early autofocus cameras had narrow rings that were hard to grip, and which suffered from sloppiness and backlash. I suspect that there’s a simple reason for the poor feel – in engineering terms, the designers were minimising the power needed to focus, and the time it took, requiring a very free-moving mechanism, rather than the beautifully-damped arrangements in manual focus lenses. Newer lenses, where the focus ring is merely an electronic input control sending signals to the AF motor, usually offer a wide grip and delightful weighting.

There’s currently a lot of debate about the benefits of having aperture controls on the lens, and some manufacturers, notably Fuji, are providing a very retro feel and experience. I’m not sure that it’s necessarily a better way to arrange things than the little wheel next to the shutter release, but it does allow a different division of functions between two hands, and if you have never used a camera with input wheels it will definitely be more instinctive. But I honestly feel that part of the brilliance of Canon’s early AF cameras was in the completely ‘other’ nature of the controls, and the way that the design pushed people towards operating everything at eye level, with readouts in the viewfinder, rather than rings and cursor marks on the lens. Minolta’s push/pull controls were decidedly second best. Those wheels made everything slicker and quicker: generally, touchscreens have the opposite effect!

Minolta push-pull adjustment controls compared with Canon wheel. The Minolta control is the grey button in front of the letter A, and moving more than one step required repeated pulls or pushes. The only advantage of the 9000 over the equally-ancient EOS 620 is that it has a second control, positioned on the left side of the mirror box. Thoughtful - but not ergonomically right in practice!

I threw a wild card into the mix when I put a Leica in the box of cameras that I took to Aimee’s house so we could shoot the majority of illustrations for this article. It’s not a camera that encourages a vastly high frame rate, although once you are used to shooting with one, you can whip through 36 exposures in a minute – and that’s enough for anyone who is working under normal conditions. The Leica made an important point when I handed it to Aimee: you can choose to work with the camera’s ergonomics or defy them. With the viewfinder at one end of the body and the film advance lever at the opposite one, it’s absolutely definitively a right-eyed camera. That way, you can wind the film at eye level – put it to your left eye, and it simply doesn’t work.

Left-eyed use of a Leica M-6

It’s like the classic camera grip that Aimee demonstrates with the Nikon: it’s used a lot because it works well, and provides stability as well as easy access to all the controls. Right index finger on the shutter release, easily sliding to the front control wheel, left hand gripping the zoom ring (or, with a manual focus camera, the focus ring). It works.

But there’s one last question that it’s worth asking yourself after you’ve made sure a camera fits your hands and suits your needs, unless you see it purely as a tool for earning money, and that is something that’s all about emotions – does it feel lovely? And that takes me right back to the subject of my previous article here, the most decidedly unergonomic Exakta cameras. We practice photography, I think, because it’s fun, and I’ll freely admit that part of the fun for me is in playing with the machinery. Including Exaktas: although you can’t advance the film with the camera at eye level. Despite the bodies that (far from having a finger grip) taper away, and the arcane controls, the Exakta is a camera that I enjoy using every single frame of the way.

It’s not ergonomic, but it’s beautiful - Exakta VX

And that is something that you may want to consider when you’re eyeing up that new model that you really fancy after reading the reviews, and it’s the bottom line on ergonomics: a balance between operability and giving the feel of a high-quality product. That’s where the brilliance of Fuji’s designers shows through, from the start of their EVF cameras - everyone has the heft and operational delight of a good mechanical film camera. That’s no small achievement. It may be the right one for you...

Camera handling is something that will never be a ‘one size fits all’ proposition. There are photographers whose right eye isn’t up to the demands of focussing, or who have other disabilities that require that they do it differently. And bodies (as well as fingernails) are inconveniently different. So it’s worth remembering that what suits you may not be so good for others, and they will have good reasons to choose differently.

And I am incredibly grateful to both Amber Belle and Aimee (aka Aimee is Weirdd) for their help in producing this article, and illustrating it. Should you want to put either (or both) of them in front of your camera, you can find their portfolios by searching Purpleport.com, and joining as a free member if you want to book them.

 Happy camera use: Amber with a Nikon, and fingernails.

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