A good friend of mine just bought one of the Leica-clone point and shoots, the Panasonic one, 10mp, 16×9 format, it’s really nice. We were out on New Years and he said he really liked it but hated the red eye preflash. So we tried to figure out how to turn it off, two professional photographers, no luck, and then we tried to figure out how to fool it to turn it off. Can’t be done! So you miss the moment. I had my M6 and flash on it, f11, hyperfocal distance, 28mm lens. I didn’t even need to look through it or focus it, and it goes off instantly, exactly when you want it to. It really is a little bit like “shooting”.
I was watching some girls pose for a picture taken by a friend in the subway today, and there is that frozen expression, the waiting. This is new, used to be we all got fooled by the preflash, the red flash, etc, now we all know to wait for several seconds while it all goes on. Immediately after the pic (this is the pic that got away for me…) one of the girls instantly turned to bored, the effort of holding that smile. It was so artificial.