The Ada Cougars’ recently enjoyed pep rallies in advance of their playoff football games.

Both pep rallies were hosted by Doc’s Food Truck Park, which is fun and says that Doc’s is really engaging with the community.

The stage and a sound system are lit by couple of street lights, various LED lights on food trucks, and a few dozen string lights, low-wattage light bulbs strung across the park. The light is enough to see by and have a pep rally, but it is somewhat challenging photographically.

First, there’s not a lot of light. In the film era, this essentially meant we would need to use a flash to get an image at all, or rely on mounting our camera on a tripod and shooting at long shutter speeds.

Secondly, the light is from all sorts of odd angles, and is all different colors, so there isn’t really a “correct” white balance setting.

As digital has evolved, cameras have gotten more and more capable at very high ISO settings. ISO is one of the three items in the triad of exposure control, with shutter speed and aperture.

For my coverage of these events, I dialed my Nikon D3 cameras up to ISO 12,800, which would have sounded like science fiction in 1980. In fact, I’m not entirely sure I would have believed you then if you told me that ISO 12,800 is even a real thing.

The D3 is an older camera, but actually creates a very usable image in what I like to call “the ISO stratosphere.” The images are somewhat noisy, but in the last 18 months, products that I use like Adobe Lightroom have introduced some very sophisticated and effective noise filters.

Shooting in the low-light regime doesn’t just test the high-ISO capabilities of your camera. It also takes lenses, image-stabilization systems, and your ability to see and manage a situation, to their limits.

Prior to the Olympics this summer, several news agencies decided to issue new cameras and lenses to their photographers, some of whom would take them to Paris to cover the Games. Some of those photographer posted this news, often that their newspapers or agencies were buying them new Sony equipment.

Almost immediately, Sony users chimed in, saying they were great cameras and lenses, but “Good luck navigating the menus!”

A “menu” in the camera world is a list of features and functions we can access by pushing a button on the back of a camera, usually labeled “Menu.”

Apparently, Sony engineers have yet to figure out how to organize camera settings, at least in a way that will please everyone.

But for me, most menu items are “one and done.”

I know there are photographers out there, maybe most of them, who would disagree, but the way I run a camera makes very little use of menus, so I don’t really understand why photographers who complain bitterly about how confusing they are.

One popular online camera critic said of the Sony A9 III, “It’s a pain to sort through the obtuse and complex menu system.” He also adds, “The menu system is huge and disorganized. This is not a fun camera to set up.”

And that’s the real reason I don’t care about menus: once I get a camera set up, I almost never revisit the menus, and I don’t really get why other photographers do.

An apt analog to this might be the way audiophiles used to buy stereo equipment with more and more controls, buttons, filters, switches, knobs, sliders, and on and on, though most of the time, they got the sound they wanted from their equipment, they seldom changed those settings. I know – I was one of those guys.

An odd addendum to this line of thought is the fact that despite complaining about the difficulty getting these cameras “set up,” many photographers don’t bother with some of the most basic settings like the date and time.

The bottom line is that once I really, actually get your camera set up, I almost never go into the menu again.

As I write this, the photography press has been up in arms again about, as you might be able to guess, Artificial Intelligence, or AI. And while there are legitimate concerns about the misuse of anything complex enough to damage the human condition, I feel that AI will soon move from the “next big thing” list onto the “whatever happened to” list.

No, it’s not going away, but as the flash-forward world of technology moves on to the next interesting topic like an 11-year-old at a Game Stop, so will the photography and media companies move on.

In this world of photographers, from seasoned professionals to dabblers and dilettantes, our world is full of photographers. What are we trying to accomplish, and what it the role of commerce in all this? Photographers seem so eager to spend money to prove themselves, tell the world that they are actual artists, whether they are artists or not.

I am certain there is too much ego in photography, and not enough humility and compassion.

That notion helps me circle back to my real topic today: the explosion of technology, and the idea that we think it works for us, but we actually work for it.

What do I mean? An article about photographic technology on fstoppers.com recently echoes one of my oft-recited ideas: do we really need the tech we claim to need?

A few specifications about photography serve as example; for instance, frame rate. I shoot tons of news and sports, and it’s nice to be able to shoot 8, 9, 10 frames per second. The fastest camera I use right now will shoot 11 frames per second, and sure, it means I am making lots of pictures of the events in front of me. But then I think of some of the fastest cameras in the world being able to fire off 240 frames per second, and, honestly, at that point, aren’t we really just making more of the same frame?

For what it’s worth, I actually put “fastest frame rate camera” into a web search, and it told me that the “swept-coded aperture real-time femtophotography” camera is capable of making 156.3 trillion frames per second. Finally, a camera fast enough for Ada’s fast-paced t-ball scene!

Yes, I know. But seriously, where is it all leading? When will photographers decide their cameras are enough of this and enough of that? What did you get for your $5000? Doesn’t it seem, at least some of the time, that we spend more effort (in the form of money) to acquire equipment so we can say we are photographers than time we spend actually being photographers?

Part of me has always had the desire to take the path less traveled, and the feverish race to load up credit cards and empty bank accounts in pursuit of ever-less-significant camera improvements has left me wanting to to pull out a sketch pad and some pencils and draw a flower instead of photographing it.

Several friends of mine recently took the dive into Nikon “mirrorless” digital camera photography. Two of these photographers, Robert and Scott, hail from Tulsa. The three of us met at the University of Oklahoma forty years ago.

In 1984, we photographers had only the vaguest idea about digital photography, and I recall quite clearly imagining that newspapers would merge with or form partnerships with television stations. I had in mind that all photographers would shoot video for tv and newspapers would use screen captures for their print editions.

Robert bought a Nikon Z5 a couple of years ago, while Scott bought a Nikon Z30 and last year, then just a few months later, a Nikon Z8. With the Z8 easily overshadowing the Z30 for Scott’s wildlife and wilderness photography, he mostly stopped using his Z30, and recently offered to send it to me to test it out and see how it fit into my workflow.

The short answer was: it didn’t really fit.

The Nikon Z30 is a very capable camera. It is lightweight and fast, makes clean images, and is made and marketed as the kind of camera you might use if you were a videographer or vlogger. And that’s the rub for me: it’s a great camera for someone else.

The Z30’s biggest deficit for me is the lack of a viewfinder. It is set up to be used the same way you might use a smartphone, by holding it at arms-length, and looking at the monitor on the back of the camera, or, in the case of many cameras in this class, with the monitor flipped up, down, or to the side.

I’ve been throwing this camera into my news and sports workflow, and over and over I have put the camera up to my eye, only to remind myself to hold it away so I can see the monitor.

The Nikon Z series is an impressive lineup or cameras. Scott has been posting images made with his Z8, and they are amazing, but I am inclined to say it’s because of his constant journeys into the mountains above his home near Provo, Utah. A great camera can certainly help make images there, but the real end game is what’s in front of his camera, not inside it.

Robert brings his Nikon Z5 mirrorless down when he visits, and I’ve shot some with it. It does have an electronic viewfinder, so I am more at home with it in my hands and at my eye.

A fellow photographer friend in California, Nic Coury, mostly shoots as a freelancer for news organizations and magazines, and a couple of years ago bought a Nikon Z9, the current top-of-the-line Nikon mirrorless. He makes great images with that camera, but again, the camera is only one link in his photography chain. For Nic, especially, I’d say that his biggest asset is his understanding of light.

Scott didn’t place any kind of deadline on returning this camera to him, so I’ll keep shooting it for a bit. I’m grateful both for his trust and his generosity.

The bottom line seems to me to be this: the current mirrorless cameras are great machines, and when it comes time to replace aged-out cameras, that’s the way for many to go. But they aren’t the game-changers everyone seems to think they are. In fact, if you have a new mirrorless camera, my challenge for you is to show me – not just tell me – how great these cameras are and what they allowed you to do that you couldn’t do before.

If you know me at all, you know how fed up and I with the mythology surrounding photography, and at the center of my frustration is the idea that you can – an should – buy mastery.

Anyone in any art knows that you have to earn mastery. A new piano won’t make you play that etude better, a new red dot sight won’t make you shoot straighter, a new airplane won’t make your approaches safer.

In the photography community, there is a lot of social pressure to “upgrade.” Photography websites often rely on advertising, so they are eager to promote and praise the latest and greatest, and, of course, the most expensive, cameras and lenses. That message goes hand-in-hand with the idea that what you have now, what you bought last year or five years ago, is “outdated,” and by proxy, incapable of making good photographs.

I know it sounds ridiculous to pay $6000 for a camera, then be told by the web, and the photography community, that your camera isn’t good enough because the next $6000 camera is better.

But that is the unambiguous message of the photography community.

I know so many photographers who bought into this thinking, and bought newer, more expensive cameras, yet whose work remained exactly the same.

If you think I am talking about you, I probably am.

I can think of an important exception: my photographer friend Scott AndersEn bought a Nikon 200-500mm and a 35mm f/1.4 a couple of years ago, then – and this is the real reason for buying it – he went to Europe for two weeks. His stuff from Europe was incredible, and I know he enjoyed shooting it with his new cameras. But of course, the real star wasn’t more pixels or sharper lenses, but the things he photographed with them. (See his images here and here.)

But photographers themselves are often the heavy hand of social pressure to spend more money on equipment. I was at a baseball playoff game a few years ago in a media scrum next to the third base dugout when a photographer from another newspaper grinned and rolled her eyes and, with a sarcastic lilt in her voice, said, “So you’re still using the D2H.” Her message was clear: I was an idiot for having an old camera.

What these photographers never do: hand you their credit card.

In the years since then, her newspaper has collapsed under the weight of foolish spending and failure to plan for the future, with wave after wave of layoffs, while my news staff and I do our jobs with what we can afford, and keep going strong. I wonder if she would trade any of her pricey gear to have a few more photographers or reporters at her paper.

So that circles us back to the central idea in photography, the idea that you can’t make great pictures without this lens and that camera. It turns out that last weekend, I actually won an award for Photo of the Year, which I shot with the very camera she scoffed at years ago, the Nikon D2H. There is nothing about this photo that would be improved in any way with a more expensive or newer camera.

I was tapping away at this and that on my laptop recently. I listen to my Apple Music on shuffle most of the time. As I worked, I came across the song Silo Lullaby by Toad the Wet Sprocket, originally offered as a “hidden bonus track” on the CD Coil in 1997.

When I first got Coil, I used my made-from-scraps Windows 3.1 386-processor desktop computer to unhide the track, and played it many times. Later, in 1999, I went on a photo trip to New Mexico, called Villanueva, the tiny hamlet where I borrow a friend’s cabin, and still listened to Toad all the time. So, as can happen with music and the way it leads places in our imaginations, Silo Lullaby became something of an anthem, at least between my own ears, for that week in the desert.

That week in New Mexico was inspired by the beginnings of the move from printing film to scanning film at my newspaper, which meant I was suddenly in possession of rather a lot of orphaned black-and-white film and paper. What to do with it? Head west!

The Villanueva trip was a great opportunity to use my Fujifilm 6×7 GW670III, a rangefinder camera with a fixed 90mm f/3.5 lens, which was very sharp. The 6×7 negatives that came out of that camera were full of an amazing amount of detail.

The flaws of the Fuji in my workflow in New Mexico, however, remained as obvious as they had all those times I tried to use it in the newsroom: too slow to focus, plasticky controls, and because it was a rangefinder and used a mechanical parallax compensation system in the viewfinder, it was never really possible to take full advantage of the much larger area of the 6×7 cm frame size because something always ended up getting cropped in or out.

I was, and still am, pretty good with a rangefinder, since my first camera, a Yashica Electro 35 GSN I got for Christmas when I was 13, used a rangefinder. I had more time and less film in those days, so I spent a lot of time practicing with the rangefinder.

I don’t want to say my Fuji 6×7 was a failed purchase, but it certainly didn’t revolutionize my fine art photography.

In the end, I have built a career on discovering what does and doesn’t work for my photography styles; news, sports, illustration, fine art, travel, and on and on; and though I wish it had, the Fuji 6×7 just never worked for me.

The biggest news in photography in recent weeks has been Sony’s announcement of their release of the Sony A9 III, a $6000 mirrorless camera that is equipped with the first-ever global shutter.

Do a web search for “why is global shutter a big deal?” and you will find no shortage of articles and videos explaining why. At the top of all these lists are “rolling shutter” and “flash sync speed.”

As I read and watched these items this week, I kept coming back to this: I know what these problems are, but when do I experience them? The answer kept coming back again and again: never.

So what are the possibilities? Am I somehow divorced from the technology because of my age and experience? Am I cynical about endless technological developments as needless, pointless corporate money grabs? Am I somehow missing the point?

It’s not easy to write off my answers, since I make pictures for a living, sometimes thousands in a week, and I really don’t run into these problems.

Last week another photographer, a Sony shooter, echoed my sentiment: what does global shutter do for us? Are these actual problems that need to be solved, or is this just another technology to buy to “keep up with the Joneses?”

Let me also say that I don’t want to be that old guy shouting, “Back in my day, all our film was ASA 25. You kids and your damn contraptions! Get off my lawn!”

Okay, the final elephant in the room: video. This might be the obvious answer to the question of why global shutter is so significant. I don’t shoot a lot of video, and aside from a few people in my area who work in media relations, I don’t see a lot of “produced” video, just start-and-stop video from smartphones posted to social media.

Video in the last few years has become so self-referential, it’s hard to remain interested. There are so many videos on how good camera are at making video, but very little actual content produced from those cameras. “See what the new (brand) can do! Isn’t it amazing?”

So, is global shutter a solution in making videos? If it is, I’m not really seeing it. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place. Do you have a video that you have produced that benefits from global shutter?

Another angle: digital camera sales have been way down as they compete with the cameras built into smartphones, even to the point that a lot of my photography students are pulling camera out of their bags that they neglected, telling me that want to learn to use it, “but I’ve mostly been shooting with my phone.”

How can they compete? The only way is to produce cameras with more features, with faster this and that, sharper this and that, cooler this and that. Global shutter is one of those things. And you can’t make cameras slower and heavier, even if you are trying to make it more affordable, because no one says, “You saved money? Cool!”

What do you think? Is this a solution to a problem, or a solution looking for a problem?