The best camera is the one you have with you.
The Canon G7X is having a moment right now. Every 5th reel on my feed is about how this pocket camera is everything an influencer could dream of. The G7X is a point and shoot camera that comes with a 1" sensor, a 24-100mm equivalent focal length zoom, and a pop up flash. While I don't have the G7X, I've come to be fond of my own digital point and shoot, the Sony ZV-1. I recently started to use it again after a long time. In this post, I want to share how I found my photography groove with this little point and shoot.
Why are point-and-shoots so popular all of a sudden?
I mentioned earlier how the Canon G7X has been having its moment recently. But the popularity of the G7X is quite an interesting sign of many things. We saw it earlier with the resurgence of film photography, then with 2000s digicams, and now it seems that the G7X has completed the circle and we're back to the digital golden age. Funnily enough, this isn't just limited to photography, the same trend of of "old is the new cool" is noticeable in clothing as well: old fashion styles have seen their comeback too, with Y2K, baggy jeans, and oversized tee shirts. Music too has seen something similar, the feeling of nostalgia is definitely not missed in songs like Stephen Sanchez's "Until I found you" or Sabrina Carpenter's wildly popular "Please Please Please".
Now, coming back to photography, what makes point-and-shoot cameras so popular once again? I have two working theories:
The first theory one has to do with how traditional cameras handle exposure and colors. Phone cameras are great but they are powered by computational photography which bumps up the dynamic range, giving flat results where shadows don't fall off naturally. Phone photos, in the end, just don't look the way our eyes see the world.
The second theory is TikTok is making these cameras popular. Pretty easy to guess which theory makes more sense.
So, how do you take good photos with a pocket camera?
Practice your ABCs
If I had to give one tip in this matter, it would be to practice your ABCs, by which I mean "Always Bring your Camera". You'll take more photos with your camera if you have it on you. Having a point and shoot is great because it's small enough to fit in with you wherever you go. I've been taking my camera with me every day on my commute to work and back simply because I want to practice photography, and I've seen some decent results.
Explore different picture styles and white balances
Flat photos are boring photos, and nothing makes me as excited as seeing a good photo with the right colors straight from the camera. Custom white balance allows you to bring in so much character and feel into the photos you take. My favorite painting from Edward Hopper, New York Movie features a rich palette of contrasting red and green, which is a look I try to imitate.
This look is suprisingly easy to recreate with a bit of color correction with white balance and picture styles. Gone are the days when white balance needed to be "correct", it just needs to match your artistic vision. I've been a huge fan of using Cloudy and Shade settings at any time of the day (I've seen this work well for me on both the point-and-shoot and the DSLR).
If you have a camera, you probably have picture styles that allow you to preset a look, for example, "Landscape" probably has high saturation and contrast, "Portrait" has lower sharpness. Editing these looks can easily give you something nicer right out of the camera. I took the following photo last night at a bar in Lake View, Chicago. I tried to imitate the colors I like, and the photo is minimally edited.
The following example shows how creatively picture styles and white balances can be tweaked to get the results you're looking for (Fujifilm shooters already know this well). The first photo is the "correct" white balance while the second photo has its tweaked.
Have fun with different shutter speeds
The iPhone's default camera app is notorious for dumbing things down for the user, so much that the only way to get creative longer exposures is through live photos, and it gives acceptable results to be honest. But it doesn't let you have as much fun as a camera with more manual controls would.
In many of the photos in this post I've shot at shutter speeds slower than 1/60th of a second. Some have been taken with my hands still, the others with them tracking a subject.
Refine your aperture controls
Point and shoot cameras like the Canon G7X or the Sony ZV-1 have 1" sensors, which means that their sensors are bigger than most phones. This means that if you're coming from a phone, this is a bokeh party. Both the Canon and the Sony offerings have a maximum aperture of f/1.8. The combination of the larger aperture and bigger sensor size gives you a lot more flexibility when it comes to being creative with aperture controls.
I took the following photo at f/2.8 to highlight the flowers as the subject.
Enjoy the peace and disconnect from social media
As someone who is chronically online (I average 10 hours on the phone daily), I've been making concerted efforts to stop the overconsumption of content and to get back to creativity. To that end, I've started carrying my point and shoot with me to take photos with. The iPhone 13 pro has a perfectly capable camera with 3 lens options, but it's not good enough when it comes to quality, and I often get distracted by the other apps on my phone and the constant notifications. To me, the point and shoot provides a very nice in-between to practice photography with. I don't have to carry a bulkier camera to practice with daily, and I'm happy with the results I get from it. It's still a more conscious photography effort than snapping a photo on my phone.
Closing thoughts
What made me try out the Sony ZV-1 was not curiosity, but the situation itself. I traveled to California for a weekend late last month. I was traveling on a tight budget and could only carry a personal item with me on the flight. So I decided to bring only the Nikon F3 and the Sony ZV-1 as my cameras. I finally got around to becoming comfortable with the Sony UI and customized the camera to my preferences. That's when it really clicked for me.
It is important for me to highlight that this a very personal decision for me. This post doesn't mean that you should go buy yourself a point and shoot. A lot of what I mentioned as pros for point-and-shoots can be emulated with a cellphone, you can get apps like Lightroom camera if you want to change your Shutter Speed, ISO, White Balance, or turn off HDR and get similar results otherwise. You can further tweak your photos on Lightroom or Snapseed. I've also written a post about how you can take better composed photos with a phone camera. Again, it's important to remember that the best camera is the one you have on you. For me, the point-and-shoot sits nicely in the workflow I'm enjoying.
Post-post-post: I've been having SO much fun with photography recently, you guys, it's like my brain is finally starting to think in the right way to take photos I like. The carrying the ZV-1 around has definitely been super helpful for that. The photo from earlier, the one with 4 bikes in front of the Chicago theater was taken by chance. I was walking back from work and saw that there was an event taking place there. I'm glad I had the camera on me that day. Outside of this, I've been doing new things here in Chicago, meeting new people and making friends. I hope you all are doing great too!
love this Saptarishi!
Such a fun read! Keep it up!