The Gadget I Love/Hate: Kyle Cassidy & Micro Four Thirds Cameras

Kyle Cassidy is a photographer best known for his idiosyncratic portraits. His subjects have ranged from American gun owners to rocking chair owners and celebrities like Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer, all photographed with a distinct style that shows their world with a critical but still sympathetic eye. His photos have been described by the New York Times as having a “cheerful, American Gothic weirdness to them.” One Amazon reviewer commented that “His photos are never consciously arty, nor are they sentimental — they are the creations of an honest artist with great technique and a humane sensibility.” At the moment, he is documenting the lives of the occupants of the oil camps of North Dakota, where a recent discovery of oil in a remote location called the Bakken Formation has led to a boom in oil production, and where hundreds of oil workers live in harsh conditions.

Kyle is also a fan of technology & the internet: he was one of the first photographers to put a portfolio onto the Web, and is a contributing editor for Videomaker magazine. He has also written technical books on subjects like Windows 2000 network administration and enterprise security, so he clearly has no fear of getting deeply involved with technology.

So what gadget does Kyle love and hate? Currently, he’s experimenting with the Micro Four Thirds system, a new camera format that is smaller than the Digital SLR (DSLR) cameras he uses for most of his work.

Richard Baguley: What is the gadget?

Kyle Cassidy: Ever since the camera was, first really discovered and then later invented it’s been a process of great evolution but never really deviating from it’s most basic design — kind of like a drill — it still works the same way it did when it was invented, but a drill you get today is a lot more useful than one made in the 1920s. The principles of light that make a camera possible were discovered as least as far back as the ancient Greeks who found that if you poked a hole in the wall of a dark room, whatever’s outside would be projected on the opposite wall. It wasn't terribly useful because you could always open a window and see what was out there much more clearly (and not upside down), but it was the discovery that got people thinking “how can we make a record of what’s projected on this wall?” Eventually in the 1800s Niepce and Daguerre figured out how to record these images chemically but the cameras were slow and they were huge and during the American Civil War if you were a photographer you needed to travel around in a wagon full of junk just to make photos. Cameras kept getting smaller and by the 1940s they were pretty portable, and by the 1950s they were very portable and this is probably where the modern “photo gadget age” began. Essentially, what you’re carrying around today is what they were carrying around then — one big exception being that there’s no film. Another of the really big differences is that the extra stuff has really, really gotten better. There are all sorts of lenses and lights and attachments that didn't exist in the 1950s that are available today. So you basically have a camera, and then you start needing all this stuff because each little bit of stuff gives you more options when you're out in the field. And eventually, you're traveling with maybe 30 pounds of gear when you go on the road. And that’s what I typically do, I'm a nomadic photographer, I get on an airplane, I go somewhere where I may or may not have someone helping me, but more often than not, whatever I pack in is what I'm carrying with me all the time.

So here’s the kit that I typically take with me — this is right before I was headed out to photograph rollergirls in Minnesota. There are two camera bodies, five lenses, three flashes, three radio controls to set off the flashes, a background stand, three lighting umbrellas (one of which is 63 inches across), two light stands, two backdrops, a foldup reflector, plus some clamps, batteries, cables and the various computer shiznit that you need to actually look at the photos. This is probably a pretty typical setup. It fits in a backpack and a light stand bag, and then another bag for the backdrops, ostensibly one person can carry all this and travel (if they don’t expect to change clothes very often).

So when you are on the road with gear, the gear kind of becomes your trip. It’s concern #1 — how do I get it from point A to point B? Will it be safe? Will it break? Who’s going to watch it when I’m not sitting on it? And so anything you can do to make the gear smaller is always at the very front of your mind.

There was what I think of as a golden age of photojournalism in the 1960s and 70s when people would head off with two really small Leica camera bodies, three lenses and some film and that would be it. But because all these gadgets exist today, like small, portable flashes didn't really exist. Now you have that option, you never have to say “it’s too dark” instead you can say “I brought my own light” — so I always end up doing that, but I yearn for the days when someone could carry around everything they needed in a little messenger bag. So, because of this, I've been experimenting with smaller cameras and less gadgets and I've also been redesigning a lot of stuff in my head wondering why nobody else has.

So I started playing with a new format of digital camera called Micro Four Thirds — they're significantly smaller than a DSLR, the standard “pro” camera, but they also lack some of the important features. I started bringing one with me instead of a second DSLR body and trying to use the Micro Four Thirds camera as much as possible but having the DSLR there as a fallback.

The first thing I did like that, professionally, was a portrait of “Rogue Taxidermist” Beth Beverly for the cover of the Philadelphia Weekly. Beth had just gotten a reality TV show and I went to her studio to photograph her. What I learned was that the smaller cameras were maddeningly Not Exactly Good Enough — you had to fight to get something spectacular in a way that you didn't have to fight to get something spectacular with a DSLR. I’d taken both systems with me to North Dakota to photograph oil workers and every time, there was a comparison, the DSLR outperformed the smaller camera in terms of image quality and technical capability. It’s easier, for example – to photograph in the daylight with a flash using a DSLR because the shutter syncs with the flash at a higher speed, the DSLR is faster and the auto-focus is faster and the images are sharper….

But the thought of reducing all that weight is like a siren call, so I was willing to do some extra pushing.

Richard: What do you love & hate about Micro Four Thirds?

Kyle: There are a number of technical limitations that micro four thirds cameras have, one is that due to physics, size does, in fact, matter — the size of the light-sensitive “digital film plate” for want of a more descriptive term, anyway, so the larger the digital sensor, relatively, the better your photos are. Another limitation is that for the most part nobody’s making micro four thirds cameras for pros to use as their only camera body. That’s really the thing. They're made to appeal to people as backup camera, or as the main camera for what they call an “enthusiast” — someone who wants better vacation photos than all his friends so the motivation’s not entirely there to make them perform like I want them to, and — a huge danger is that some company IS going to make a smaller camera for pros and it’s not going to be based on the micro four thirds format so if you’ve invested in it, everything you’ve bought will just go in the trash as you switch to a whole new system.

So after a lot of trial, error and weeping, I was confident enough that I could get useable images from just a Micro Four Thirds system and I’ve used that exclusively on a couple of assignments. It’s really great to be able to fit most everything in a tiny bag but, at least for me, there’s this constant nagging in the back of my head that it could have been X amount better if only I'd brought bigger stuff. Conrad Erb, the famous wedding photographer once told me “perfect is the enemy of good” and that’s one of the things that you have to fight all the time. You need to be able to balance quality and function and you can spend hours getting a photo from 92% of what you want to 99% of what you want or you can move on and make another image that’s 92% of what you want. So there’s a time to say “I'll pack the small cameras and I'll be able to get there faster and move around easier and I might not come back with exactly what I want, but I'll live to fight another day.”

Richard: What feature/ability do you wish that Micro Four Thirds cameras had?

Kyle: I love gadgets more than most people, but I still find myself craving things which are simple and efficient. There are some spectacular lenses being made for the format, which suggests some commitment on the part of manufacturers, but so far the bodies haven’t caught up. So it’s at the point where I still need two complete systems and it may always be like that.

Richard: If you were looking for a gadget like this now, would you buy it again?

Kyle: I’m sure that my concerns will be addressed eventually and someone will fix it, but in the meantime, out there on the bleeding edge you kind of have to be willing to work a little bit harder with the tools you have until industry realizes this is a direction that’s profitable and the tools catch up with the work you’re doing. But I do hope that, sooner, rather than later, someone will realize that professional photographers are looking for a serious working camera system for times when you need to travel light. My back really hopes it more than the rest of me.

In May of 2013 the Philadelphia Weekly asked me to do a portrait of novelist Neil Gaiman for the cover. It was going to be a long day with a lot of shuffling around and I didn't want to be hauling twenty pounds of gear and the Beth Beverly cover had gone okay, so I packed a pretty tight kit of the Panasonic GX1 with two lenses, a flash, an umbrella, a stand, and two wireless triggers almost all of which fit in a pretty small messenger bag. Carrying a small messenger bag with a light stand in one hand is a lot better than a giant backpack full of stuff.

I would, given my druthers, have put another light behind Neil and to camera left to give a little “pop” to his hair and shoulder, as it is his hair gets a little lost in the background. But then I don't know if you've read Plato’s Republic, but in the first two chapters Socrates lays out an idyllic society for his friends, they all agree that it sounds fantastic; it’s simple, it’s easy to maintain, nobody is overly burdened with anything, but then this guy Glaucon, says something like “That’s marvelous Socrates! Just one little thing, I don't want to sit on a chair all the time, so we should have couches too in the perfect world” and Socrates says “oh … oh, you want couches ….” and then for the next two hundred pages of the book he lays out how the needs of the republic must get bigger and bigger now because once you have a couch, you'll probably want a table, and if a table, why not perfume … and cake, and if you have cake, you might as well have poets and dancers too and everything spins off into the unwieldy mess that life really is where trash is collected on Wednesdays on odd numbered streets and Thursdays on even numbered streets, in some countries you drive on the left and others you drive on the right, and your iPhone won't play Flash videos and everything is bloated and complicated. And I look at that photo and think “ … here I am in a beautiful, simple world. Today I can live without the couch.”