Chris Till

Tag: Consumption

  • Micro Four Thirds, and YouTube “experts”

    Photo: Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

    I’m conflicted between my distaste for excessive consumption and still rooting for OM System and the Micro Four Thirds image sensor system to do well; and sell as many cameras and lenses as possible. This is because I believe in it so much for all levels and genres of photography. And because all of the bullshit YouTube “experts” have polluted the entire photography community with nonsense about Full Frame sensors being the only ones worthy of use in 2024.

    These are people who don’t know what they’re talking about, and wouldn’t be published in a photography magazine or serious online journalistic outlet in the past or present. Obviously, YouTube and other social media services are incredibly useful and invaluable for people who had almost no platform in traditional media. Left wing political outlets in particular have benefitted no end, which is great. Because in that instance, they are the experts. But there is of course a downside to allowing anyone to end up with huge platform. You can end up with non-experts reaching and influencing a far wider audience than the real experts in the field. And that is the case in photography. No matter what good people like Chris Niccols, Jordan Drake, Robin Wong, and many others say, there is seemingly an army of idiots out there to spread misinformation that seriously threatens a format like Micro Four Thirds. All the people I see who support MFT are thoughtful, intelligent, reasonable people. That’s a problem, because we live in a very dumb, unreasonable, reactionary society. It doesn’t really fit. It’s like left wing politics right now. People who have taken the time to really educate themselves politically can see through the nonsense liberals and conservatives spew incessantly; and can understand and appreciate the counterintuitive benefits of left wing policy ideas. The same goes for MFT cameras. The problem is that very few people actually do take the time to properly educate themselves on anything these days.

    I’ve heard people in big companies say things like “the people are demanding this, so we’re just going to give it to them”. Even when they themselves know that it’s the wrong thing to do; they do it anyway because they know it’s harder to educate those people that what they really need is something counterintuitive. Take megapixels. We even saw with the Panasonic G9II (another MFT camera), where PetaPixel compared it to the OM System OM-1, and the G9 had worse image quality in their test despite having a 25mp sensor as opposed to 20mp. OM System worked hard to improve the sensor technology in other ways. To improve the overall image quality, rather than just resolution. But more people would just focus on the higher number and assume it’s better. And that’s within the Micro Four Thirds ecosystem.

    This is why OM System is particularly at risk from this current online climate of idiocy (along with any other businesses that try to do things the right way in other fields). Panasonic are obviously a huge corporation, and they’ve also hedged their bets and have pushed full frame offerings a lot in recent years. OM is small, and only makes MFT cameras (apart from their tough series compact). And on top of that, they don’t subscribe to this idea of giving people what they want even if it means sacrifices to the end product. We’ve just seen this whole thing again recently with the updated OM-1. It came out a bit too soon for my liking (that’s another blog); but it did have a lot of significant improvements. Many of which couldn’t be done purely with a firmware update. Some of them could, and they are now working on an update to the original OM-1, the camera I have (and plan to keep using for the foreseeable future).

    Obviously, there’s some controversy about whether or not they had abandoned that camera until pressure mounted on them. That’s another potential future blog topic. But the point is that the updated model does feature significant improvements that many professional photographers especially will really notice and appreciate. And that will make arguably as big of an impact or bigger on their photography than if the company had announced the OM-1 Mark II had doubled the sensor megapixels to 40, or some insane change that would be visible on the spec sheet. Imagine if they had done something like that. It would have been the talk of the town (at least until the full frame supremacists had made another unwelcome intervention). As it was, the conversation became almost exclusively negative, accusing OM of cashing in on their loyal customers and failing to innovate. Only true experts like Thomas Eisel (professional fashion photographer and YouTuber) actually went deep into all of the small but very significant improvements that were almost universally ignored elsewhere.

    Thank god a big outlet like PetaPixel does give MFT fair coverage, and does their best to promote its advantages (lens size and weight, image stabilisation, computational modes, comparatively low cost, long telephoto range ideal for wildlife and particularly birds, and so on). Not to mention the fact that most people in the world can’t tell the fucking difference between full frame and MFT photos anyway. I just hope we don’t end up in a situation where MFT goes away.

    Photography is like politics. You have the uneducated people who believe everything a grifter on YouTube tells them. And you have those who take the initiative and make the small effort required to get informed of the facts, and what they mean. For the left to win, and for us to eventually reduce consumption and stop releasing so many damn new camera models, (and other even more throwaway tech products); people have to be informed. And they have to buy Micro Four Thirds cameras. Strange way to end a blog maybe, but I think it works. I haven’t written for ages so you’ll just have to put up with it.

  • The Endless Climate Fight of Consumption vs Production

    Boycotts + campaigning to take down capitalism

    We’re stuck in this endless loop of arguing about how we get started dealing with climate change in a serious way. Until we reach a consensus about what will actually work, we won’t get anywhere. We will just keep going round in circles while we put giant amounts of emissions into the atmosphere every single day. I think you can fit the argument into these three main categories.

    Right wing politicians and most of the media focus on individual carbon footprints, and shame environmentalists who aren’t perfect in every way.

    Many climate activists say individual action doesn’t work and that we need to change the system first.

    People like me say it’s boycotts that will bring down the system from the bottom up.

    If you follow different environmental and mainstream media channels, as I do (as little MSM as I can get away with these days); then you’ve no doubt noticed that no one can ever agree and we just go round and round forever. Climate discourse hasn’t moved forward in years. You could play back something now from Good Morning Britain or BBC News that aired before Greta started school striking, and it would be practically indistinguishable from what you see today.

    It’s time to end this nonsense once and for all.

    How I see it, bringing down capitalism from the bottom up is the only option. The neoliberal political systems in pretty much every country are designed to prevent an uprising occurring at the ballot box. And even if it was possible; even if there were candidates allowed to stand who believed what many of us do, it’s definitely not possible in the next couple of years, which is all the time we have, if even that.

    Those who say that many of the choices we make to pollute are made for us are correct. Many of us are effectively forced to do things like drive a car, fly, drink bottled water and consume things that are made of plastic much more than we’d like. This is because of political choices made by the right wing that mean infrastructure is not fit for purpose. I’m not arguing those things. But what I am saying is that there are plenty of areas where we do have real, affordable choices that put pressure on polluters financially. That’s how you bring down capitalism.

    If you only consider things that are the same price, or less than what we’re doing now, you rule out plastic free organic food and things like that for a lot of people. But so many people could choose to not own a car if they live in an urban area, or stop buying useless plastic junk. I know there are lots of things I used to buy that cluttered up the house that I now avoid. There are ways most of us can cut down on our consumption of things we don’t need, cut our spending and put pressure on the capitalist system. If we live in smaller homes, with lower heating and cooling requirements for example. Even people who are forced to drive because they live in the suburbs and have poor, expensive public transport and no bike infrastructure can find ways to put pressure on the capitalist economy. Spend money only on the necessities, and the things that mean the absolute most to you.

    And I’m not saying that boycotts and consumption reductions should come at the expense of campaigns. They go hand in hand. You may be able to boycott or reduce your consumption of certain products, but maybe you still have to buy the same plastic packaged fruit. That doesn’t mean you can’t join a campaign calling on the supermarket to get rid of the plastic.

    We have to do what we can to pressure the polluting status quo with all the tools we have available, and we have to stop going round in circles being dictated to by the right wing media and its obsession with climate hypocrisy. It’s ok to be annoyed about wealthy climate activists and celebrities flying around in their private jets and living in mansions. But we have to stop short of falling into the trap of believing that their overall message should be voided by their individual actions.

    We need to all reduce our consumption in whatever way we can. We all have something we can do less of, and those of us in more privileged positions have certainly accumulated more crap. We also have the moral duty to offset what those less fortunate can’t do. And then we need to come together to campaign and pressure.

    You can’t use imperfection as an excuse to do nothing, and you won’t have success campaigning profit driven industries when you keep buying as much of their product as you always have.

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