Six Ways to Make Any Camera More Fun to Shoot With

Choosing a camera is rarely just about specs. A camera can cost over $6,000, autofocus everything in front of it, shoot at 30 frames per second with pre-capture, and still leave you feeling completely disconnected from your own images.

Coming to you from James Popsys, this thoughtful video starts with a question a commenter left on an earlier video: why is shooting with a Fujifilm X100V more fun than shooting with a Sony? Popsys admits he didn't have a good answer at the time, so he spent a couple of months actually thinking about it. The result is a surprisingly honest look at what engagement means when you're shooting for yourself rather than a client. His jumping-off point is a trip to Antarctica, where he used the Sony a1 II for weeks straight. The autofocus never missed. Pre-capture grabbed frames before he even pressed the shutter. He was shooting 50 MP raw files at 20 frames per second. And when he got home, he had almost no interest in looking at the photos, because they didn't feel like his.

The e-bike analogy he opens with lands harder than you'd expect. When technology solves a problem you actually wanted to solve yourself, the reward disappears with the friction. Popsys connects this directly to cameras: the most capable tools on the market can quietly remove the photographer from the process. The X100V feels more engaging, he argues, because its physical dials, hybrid viewfinder, and manual focus experience all signal that your input is required. That feeling of being needed, even if it's partly an illusion, is where the satisfaction comes from.

He then runs through six practical changes you can make to any camera to get more of that feeling back. Turn off screen aids like grids and the leveling tool. Shoot single frames instead of bursts. Disable auto review so you stop chimping between shots. Dim your screen so the image isn't handed to you on a plate. Use aperture rings if your lenses have them, because involving your left hand makes the act feel more physical. And shoot a prime, or lock your zoom to one focal length, because compositional constraints force you to think. These aren't gimmicks. Each one returns a decision to you that the camera would otherwise make automatically. Popsys also adds a brief postscript about the Sony a1 II specifically: switching to the mechanical shutter, which disables pre-capture and limits burst rate by default, made the camera feel noticeably more engaging. Putting the screen away entirely helped too.

Check out the video above for the full rundown from Popsys, including his reasoning on why image quality has become almost irrelevant to choosing a camera, and what he thinks actually is worth spending money on.