This weekend I sent my last rolls of Kodachrome film to Texas. To honor this event I had loaded my Canon new F1 with the Kodak cassettes and made the pictures in the full understanding that this was the end of an era. In fact not only the end of the Kodachrome film, but also the end of the full system precision miniature slr camera. The New F1 is the premium example of a now forgotten philosophy of camera design and photographic expertise.



Basically the New F1 is a manually operated automatic exposure camera which can be changed into a fully automatic aperture priority model by changing the prism finder and into a fully automatic shutter speed priority model by changing the motor drive. The beauty of this concept is the flexibility of changing every important component to suit the task at hand but at the same time the camera retains the operating simplicity of the specific function. The match needle exposure setting is visually vastly superior to the now current dancing bars or the numerical information. And you know always what you are doing: if the match needle information is at the right vertical side of the finder, you are in manual mode. Is the exposure information in the horizontal lower part of the finder you are in aperture priority mode. The concept of flexibility and simplicity is now almost obsolete and replaced by a concept of complexity and user-selectable functional profiles. With the Canon New F1 you needed experience and insight to use the camera. With current concepts you only need opportunities and the camera has enough image taking processing to get a good picture whatever the expertise or intention of the user. Experience was also required to get good images with Kodachrome and the combination of Kodachrome and a manually operating precision miniature camera asks for real knowledge of the photographic processes.
A recent article in the NYT notes that the whole idea of a professional photographer is becoming obsolete itself: now that almost every digital camera can create high quality imagery and the difference between a professional and an amateur (quite important in Kodachrome days) is dwindling. Even picture agencies are now using amateur pictures who sell their images for a fraction of the cost of a professionally made image.
With the extinction of the likes of Kodachrome and New F1, the world of photography is entering a new phase and this might be totally different from what we know now and can envision.
The F1 has been safely placed in my display case. It is no use to keep referring to the past and new products are emerging that can pick up where the New F1 stopped. This weekend I also entered a new stage in picture making: The new Leica S2 is in my hands and for the next weeks I will report on this experience, evaluating the results and philosophizing about its significance.