Bad Back

We’ve all done it…or we are going to do it one day. Lean over and pick something up that is too heavy and too far away…and pull a muscle in the lower back.

Hello Voltarin. Hello all week. Or just plain hell…

Which is the introduction to a confession. No not that I am propped up in bed with the iPad and the Voltarin…the confession is that I have come to admire the flipping LCD screen on a digital camera. I only have one – on the Fujifilm X-T10 – but it has seriously influenced my desires for future cameras. And I used to think them nonsense.

Perhaps they were nonsense when they flapped out to the side of the camera body…the Nikon, Canon , et al designs. I could always see them catching on some obstruction and ripping off the body. I’m sorry to say that this did happen to a Canon video camera my wife was using and it was a costly thing to put right.

But the advent of the flipping screen that folds down and out rather than sideways has changed all that. Sure, you can catch it on something and get equal destruction, but you have to be more clumsy to do it. And for the most part the screen is more useful than dangerous. It is the modern-day waist-level finder.

That’s exactly how I used the X-T10’s screen at the recent hot rod show for nearly 80% of the shots. I raised it to eye level for very few images – and these were mostly action shots. For the most part I was looking down and triggering the camera with my right thumb. It could almost have been an old Mamiya 645 camera in operation…except for the fact that it worked every time. That and the fact that I did not have to contend with a flapping mirror and banging sound.

For a dedicated studio shooter – one who most often works in landscape orientation – it really is the answer. I am drawn to this conclusion with today’s lower lumbar lollapalooza as well. The last thing I want to do is raise anything heavy! I think it may be time to analyse the next Fujifilm body before this old body does it again…