"If the best photography is about presenting the world as you see it, what's the use of a picture that depicts the world as you've never seen it?" These shrewd words of my good friend Puplet - who for such a young dog, says the wisest things - struck a chord, particularly in light of my last post.

Maybe the dog has a point about this new Olympus E330. An SLR with a live view function? Preposterous, because that is just not the point of an SLR is it? And the fact that you can tilt the screen up to allow shooting from difficult angles without guesswork or contortionism adds to the if you want a digicam then just get one argument. I would however like to remind Puplet that he is about two inches tall and getting shots like Emma's guinea pig must be a lot more accessible without the kind of bruising that us bigger people might suffer from.

In fact I am sure that we are actually writing of the same thing in terms of "presenting the world as you see it" or the "mind's eye sketches (...) seen through the plastic view finder" of the point and shoot box of my youth. I am glad that we wrote about the same thing in our last posts, because Puplet just confirms how important and yet how easy to forget this key aspect of photography actually is.

Of course cameras like the E1, my D100 and even that preposterous E330 make that sooo much easier than we deserve. But the challenge remains... recreating what someone else would never see if we didn't manage to pull it out of the plastic box and onto the monitor.


I took this shot with my D100. I didn't lie in the mud by the Humber estuary. I pointed the camera in the vague direction, took a guess and checked the result after the shot. And it turned out OK, even though I don't have a 90 degree variable angle screen with live view function. Enough is enough.