Viewing Screens on Digital Cameras

The viewing screen on the digital camera and the ground-glass screen on the reflex camera have much in common with the first draft of a story. Each allows the viewer an entry way to the reality awaiting just beyond the lens. Each allows for a nearly immediate retake, a compensation, if you will before the most severe editorial process, Photo Shop.

Photographers, even beginners, take for granted something those in the motion picture industry call The Burn Ratio, the number of images taken overall to produce the desired result.

Many writers want the first draft to be it, and if their characters take on such Actor's Studio traits as wanting to re-do a given scene in a variety of ways, simply to get the feel of it, the answer is a curt, business-like, No. Probably even No! To be sure, there writers at the other end of the spectrum, happily engaged in their obsessive compulsions or, perhaps, their compulsive obsessions. 

 These sorts will quickly inform all who will listen that there are so many frauds and miscreants pretending to be members of The Craft, men and women who have no idea for the details inherent in books of the past, men and women who scarcely have more than six synonyms for the verb "said." These sorts will support the dietician's goal to have the literary equivalent of a protein/carbohydrate breakdown on each story, including illegal uses of like for as, and numbers of point-of-view violations.

Some of these observations are the literary equivalent of ghosts, those flash halos whose mere presence often ruin an otherwise promising shot, involving the recently completed writers' conference and the eruption of a civil war involving dialect. 

 The Suni workshop leaders argued for missing terminal g's, other misspellings, and enough diacritical marks to resemble the windshield of a Volkswagen on a summer evening. The Shia workshop leaders argue that dialect is passe; writers such as Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers evoked the sound of characters by their choice of words and the cadence with which they are spoken. Bang! Bang! Surge. Stay the course!

My approach to this issue is that the choice is with the writer. Dialogue or straight text can be made to sound as artificial as a campaign promise, calling attention to themselves by their seeming plausibility or, conversely, sounding as halting and awkward as most statements by the current president of the United States.

If photographers can--and do--do it, so can writers. But we are sometimes a lazy lot.

I am no great fan of John Updike, but I know from chums who once worked at The New Yorker that the manuscript does not leave the author's hands until there is no question about what he intends the text to mean. Ditto for Alice Munro, although there I am a fan.

There is some argument that comparing photography and writing is to compare apples with oranges or, to put it in straightforward declarative sentences, there is no comparison, one involves a grasp of the physics of light, possibly color, and surely some consideration of optics.

We will leave the analogies and comparisons for another night and cut with some hint of directness to the nub, which is that both arts are deeply concerned with passing time, point of view, and sufficient light to allow the subject to be illuminated.

My little gem of a Lumix FX-30 has a viewing screen as big as the screen on a Canon 5D; it affords me a good look at what I'm trying to capture, and if I don't like the image I capture, why, I can go after it again. My first draft affords me a good look at what I'm trying to capture, perhaps even including some detail I'll not notice for two or ore subsequent drafts before calling itself to my attention, Hey! What about me?

We rarely see all the possibilities for discovery already in frame until we have spent some considerable time editing out the cluttering details and coming face to face with the essentials. If my bedroom begins to resemble Van Gogh's bedroom at Arles, I need to pay attention to my ear.