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Your camera is better than Ansel Adams'...


pierces
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Over on DPReview, there's a very interesting video from a photographer by the name of Ted Forbes. He makes some excellent points about photography being less about the gear and more about the skill/art. I've always touted this theory (admittedly because I usually couldn't afford the gear in question) and he states the premise very well.

 

https://www.dpreview.com/videos/6092751364/video-remember-that-your-gear-is-more-advance-than-ansel-adams

 

Since I finally broke down and bought a new camera that is technically a better camera than I am a photographer, the video sort of speaks to why I feel the need and some genuine inspiration to go out and try to shoot some images worthy of it.

 

With a pang of painful realization, I just figured out that every camera I've owned over the decades was a better camera than I was a photographer.

 

Damn video.

 

Anyway, watch it and feel free to comment with your thoughts on the subject.

 

 

 

Dave

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Interesting article - thank you for sharing it.

 

When I read Dave and Justin and Adam's comments on the Sony full-frame, I have to keep telling myself: "there’s never a time when you need new gear."

 

But maybe it is only envy and lust on my part!:confused:

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The video actually popped up on my youtube feed. I then saw it on dpreview.....and as usual I only made it through about 10 comments before I wanted to jump off a bridge. I am becoming more and more convinced that most of the folks who post over there DON'T either take pictures or actually like photography. :rolleyes:

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I read an article a while back titled "do you need the latest and greatest new DSLR", I wish I could find it again to read through it. The writer made a point that made me think "is a new camera going to make you a better photographer, or is overcoming the limitations of your current gear going to make you a better photographer?". I took that question to heart and am trying to get the most out of the equipment I own. Once I think I've gone as far as I can with this or it craps out which ever comes first (my money is on the camera) then it is time to upgrade gear.

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Yes, the gear that we have today is far superior to the "gear" that Ansel used...in a way. He used an 8X10 Press camera. The negatives were superb. But, he set the shoot up and probably waited for hours (or days) to get the desired shot. If I could find film (at a decent price) and a lab to process it (again, at a reasonable price) I would still be shooting with my Nikon F2AS or my Mamiya 645. Unfortunately, it's not feasible any longer.

 

I buy a 32G card and shoot for weeks. Home printers can now do a respectable job of printing pics. Sure, DSLR cameras are really a nice, handy way to shoot - but at the end of the day - it is the shooter as much as it is the camera. Composition will ALWAYS rule the day :)

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The video actually popped up on my youtube feed. I then saw it on dpreview.....and as usual I only made it through about 10 comments before I wanted to jump off a bridge. I am becoming more and more convinced that most of the folks who post over there DON'T either take pictures or actually like photography. :rolleyes:

 

 

I seldom read much over there. Reviews that have "Almost unlimited options to customize the camera" as a Plus and "So many settings can make the menus difficult to navigate" as a negative without explaining that the customization makes the menu mostly irrelevant most of the time tend to make me shop for corroboration before I set aside the grains of salt. It does seem that they almost feel compelled to find fault to justify the "fairness" of the reviews.

 

That said, they occasionally hit a high note and I think the video's premise that the photographer is the key to a good photograph and except for fairly specialized equipment for equally specialized photography, great photos can be made with nearly any camera. Nearly every truly memorable photo from the last century was shot on a camera that is now "quaint" by today's standards.

 

We live in a great time to be photographers but with all the shiny equipment and shinier ad-speak, we need to remember that being a photographer is more than plunking down a mountain of cash for the right logo and pressing a button.

 

Dave

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I used to help run a community magazine, and took most of the photos used. One of my colleagues on the committee fancied himself as a photographer and had very high spec gear but no flair and no eye for composition, resulting in boring flat photos for which we had to make excuses not to use his ones.

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I still like and appreciate the reviews, especially the thorough ones, even if the final tally, list of positives and negatives, and overall score might not come out as good. Because I generally ignore those final scores/ranks/awards...and I look through the list of positives and negatives ignoring the ones that don't relate to my photography or will not affect me. For example, comments about ergonomics in any review are as close to pointless as it can get - because ergonomics are a very very personal thing...what one person may find uncomfortable, another may find very familiar and comfortable. Negatives relating to video performance are completely irrelevant to me, since I will never use the video functionality. Complaints about extensive menus being confusing are ignored, because I strongly favor extremely inclusive and exhaustive menus that allow control or access to everything - as Dave mentioned, I don't need to go into the menus once I've set my custom controls and my Fn menu.

 

With any review, and even with user-comments, you need to consider whether it would affect YOU and your shooting. Ergonomics need to be figured out personally by holding and shooting a camera and seeing how much you like it and how comfortable you are with it. And any features a camera has or does not have that you would never use anyway should not sway your decision one way or the other.

 

Without question, a good photographer can get good results from almost any gear, and may get better results with some better gear. A bad photographer can get bad results from any gear, and will likely still get bad results from even the best gear.

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Interesting set of posts in response to your original post and to the DP video. One of the best photos that I ever took was done w a Minolta A camera - http://camerapedia.wikia.com/wiki/Minolta_A - which is as basic as I have ever used. No exposure meter. Shot as a Kodachrome slide that had no exposure latitude. Shot in an alley with a wide light range. Pure good luck. I wish that I still had the slide. I would scan it and print it again.

 

I think that the comments of the guy who did the presentation could be reduced to - a good photographer can get a good photograph w any camera even if it is inexpensive; a bad photographer can't get a good photograph with any camera regardless of the price of his equipment.

 

We have all seen people who use the spray and pray technique of photography and I can be guilty of this as some times. I remember that I was on a Kenai Fjord boat trip once and there was a guy who was shooting probably 20 or 30 pictures per minute for the entire 6 or 7 hour trip. I always wondered how you process that many pictures and I am totally sure that he never actually saw much of the beauty of the trip.

 

Just my thoughts.

 

DON

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He makes some excellent points about photography being less about the gear and more about the skill/art.

I had a conversation with a member of a local photography club, and I asked him how much he thought someone should spend to get decent camera gear.

 

His response (as best I remember it):

"Photography is a hobby. Like most hobbies, it will take all of the disposable income you have to spend on it. The more you have, the more it will take."

 

Photography isn't my primary hobby. It usually comes in about third or fourth on the list. Accordingly, it doesn't get much of my disposable income. If I cared more about it, I'd probably spend more time and money on it.

 

I've always touted this theory (admittedly because I usually couldn't afford the gear in question) and he states the premise very well.

To me, the decision to buy gear starts with the following questions:

1. What photography problem will this gear allow me to solve that my current gear doesn't?

2. How often do I run across this problem?

3. How much does a solution cost?

4. Will it solve this problem frequently enough to be worth the money?

5. Will the solution create additional problems?

 

 

Since I finally broke down and bought a new camera that is technically a better camera than I am a photographer, the video sort of speaks to why I feel the need and some genuine inspiration to go out and try to shoot some images worthy of it.

For me, the trick is finding some place where I want to go take photos. I love taking them when we're on vacation. But between vacations, I only feel inspired if I shop around for a subject that's sufficiently photogenic to make it worth my time.

 

Try Googling "most scenic places in [your city]"

 

Whenever my wife is out of town, I'll try to spend a golden hour at one of those places. I've picked up at least a few worthwhile pictures from each trip.

 

With a pang of painful realization, I just figured out that every camera I've owned over the decades was a better camera than I was a photographer.

I owned an Intova CP9 for underwater photography from 2011-2015. If you want to get rid of that painful realization, you can always buy one of those.

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Interesting set of posts in response to your original post and to the DP video. One of the best photos that I ever took was done w a Minolta A camera - http://camerapedia.wikia.com/wiki/Minolta_A - which is as basic as I have ever used. No exposure meter. Shot as a Kodachrome slide that had no exposure latitude. Shot in an alley with a wide light range. Pure good luck. I wish that I still had the slide. I would scan it and print it again.

 

I think that the comments of the guy who did the presentation could be reduced to - a good photographer can get a good photograph w any camera even if it is inexpensive; a bad photographer can't get a good photograph with any camera regardless of the price of his equipment.

 

We have all seen people who use the spray and pray technique of photography and I can be guilty of this as some times. I remember that I was on a Kenai Fjord boat trip once and there was a guy who was shooting probably 20 or 30 pictures per minute for the entire 6 or 7 hour trip. I always wondered how you process that many pictures and I am totally sure that he never actually saw much of the beauty of the trip.

 

Just my thoughts.

 

DON

 

 

Great post Don!

 

My "first: REAL camera was a "Practica" that I picked up in Russia when I was working there. Not much to it, but it took great pictures. When I got back, I started processing my own film, loading my own film and buying more and more equipment. Started shooting weddings - but that got old real fast. Brides.....Oh my God....

 

Shoot, I started perusing every pawn shop in town and picked up some great equipment for next to nothing. Grabbed a Nikkor FishEye for my F2AS for $50...:D Bought a used Motor from the local Newspaper for $50 - worked like the day it was purchased.

 

But like you, I agree that it is the "shooter" more so than the equipment. I have some beautiful portraits and scenics hanging on my walls that were taken with the old Practica and a Minolta X-700 that I bought for $25. Go figure..... :D

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Great post Don!

 

My "first: REAL camera was a "Practica" that I picked up in Russia when I was working there. Not much to it, but it took great pictures. When I got back, I started processing my own film, loading my own film and buying more and more equipment. Started shooting weddings - but that got old real fast. Brides.....Oh my God....

 

Shoot, I started perusing every pawn shop in town and picked up some great equipment for next to nothing. Grabbed a Nikkor FishEye for my F2AS for $50...:D Bought a used Motor from the local Newspaper for $50 - worked like the day it was purchased.

 

But like you, I agree that it is the "shooter" more so than the equipment. I have some beautiful portraits and scenics hanging on my walls that were taken with the old Practica and a Minolta X-700 that I bought for $25. Go figure..... :D

 

Talk about small worlds. I once owned what I think was a Prakticaflex. It was the single lens reflex w/o a prism so that you used it as if it was a twin lens reflex looking down at the viewfinder. I won it in a contest and it was really a dog. I couldn't even give it away. Now though I wish I still had it just to have it. I don't collect older cameras but I sometimes keep old cameras.

 

Right now I am staring at my old Canonet - http://mattsclassiccameras.com/rangefinders-compacts/canon-canonet/ - which I bought in Venice on a trip to Europe when I was in college. I travled to Europe with my Minolta A and maybe 30 rolls of film. The Minolta A died in Venice which was not a good place to buy a camera especially as I had not budgeted for a new one but I did have 30 rolls of film that I had to use so there was no alternative. I will bet that the old thing still works in spite of the fact that it is more than 50 years old. The meter still does as it does not require a battery. Some day I should buy a roll of film and try it.

 

One of the other guys on this thread posted about what he spends money on. If I had say a $3000 photo budget, I would rather spend $1000 on a camera and $2000 on a photo trip or on visiting interesting locations as opposed to blowing the whole 3K on a camera. It is a matter of choices.

 

DON

Edited by donaldsc
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the other guys on this thread posted about what he spends money on. If I had say a $3000 photo budget, I would rather spend $1000 on a camera and $2000 on a photo trip or on visiting interesting locations as opposed to blowing the whole 3K on a camera. It is a matter of choices.

 

DON

 

Well said. I did a bit of comparative math and figured that If I take my photo budget over the last 25 years and subtract the modest money I have made as a paid photographer, then put the remainder up against our travel budget over the same period, it comes out ridiculously in favor of travel. Heck, I spent more on wood and cabinet hardware in the last year than I spent on photography gear. I bought my latest camera with the intent that I will use it as an goad to travel more and work harder on my photography. Ok...it's a really neat camera and I love technology. But I do love to travel more and if I had to choose, I would also choose travel. I consider myself very lucky to be able to afford a modest upgrade and still be able to travel and point it at something other than a bookcase or pet.

 

Dave

Edited by pierces
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Talk about small worlds. I once owned what I think was a Prakticaflex. It was the single lens reflex w/o a prism so that you used it as if it was a twin lens reflex looking down at the viewfinder. I won it in a contest and it was really a dog. I couldn't even give it away. Now though I wish I still had it just to have it. I don't collect older cameras but I sometimes keep old cameras.

 

Right now I am staring at my old Canonet - http://mattsclassiccameras.com/rangefinders-compacts/canon-canonet/ - which I bought in Venice on a trip to Europe when I was in college. I travled to Europe with my Minolta A and maybe 30 rolls of film. The Minolta A died in Venice which was not a good place to buy a camera especially as I had not budgeted for a new one but I did have 30 rolls of film that I had to use so there was no alternative. I will bet that the old thing still works in spite of the fact that it is more than 50 years old. The meter still does as it does not require a battery. Some day I should buy a roll of film and try it.

 

One of the other guys on this thread posted about what he spends money on. If I had say a $3000 photo budget, I would rather spend $1000 on a camera and $2000 on a photo trip or on visiting interesting locations as opposed to blowing the whole 3K on a camera. It is a matter of choices.

 

DON

 

Indeed. Indeed. I think that we all understand the process of the camera "taking" a photograph. When we were using film, All film cameras - with few exceptions - took photos the same way. Now, with digital cameras, they (basically) all operate the same way - auto or manual.

 

So yeah, I would be with you on the $1,000 budget (or lower) and $2,000 on a location. :D

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Talk about small worlds. I once owned what I think was a Prakticaflex. It was the single lens reflex w/o a prism so that you used it as if it was a twin lens reflex looking down at the viewfinder. I won it in a contest and it was really a dog. I couldn't even give it away. Now though I wish I still had it just to have it. I don't collect older cameras but I sometimes keep old cameras.

 

Right now I am staring at my old Canonet - http://mattsclassiccameras.com/rangefinders-compacts/canon-canonet/ - which I bought in Venice on a trip to Europe when I was in college. I travled to Europe with my Minolta A and maybe 30 rolls of film. The Minolta A died in Venice which was not a good place to buy a camera especially as I had not budgeted for a new one but I did have 30 rolls of film that I had to use so there was no alternative. I will bet that the old thing still works in spite of the fact that it is more than 50 years old. The meter still does as it does not require a battery. Some day I should buy a roll of film and try it.

 

One of the other guys on this thread posted about what he spends money on. If I had say a $3000 photo budget, I would rather spend $1000 on a camera and $2000 on a photo trip or on visiting interesting locations as opposed to blowing the whole 3K on a camera. It is a matter of choices.

 

DON

 

Yep...I picked up the 35MM Practica at a little shop in Moscow in '78....had that damned thing for many years....always took nice photos and more than once I heard the chatter "What the hell is that camera?" I guess to the untrained eye, it looked like something from Mattel, but it really was what the Soviet Union was using then.... :D

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Talk about small worlds. I once owned what I think was a Prakticaflex.

 

I had a Prakticaflex in the early 50s! It was the poor man's Exacta with its Zeiss lens. The lens for the Prakticaflex was poor and I kept borrowing a friend's Canon rangefinder! Very quiet as compared to the Praktiflex' clattering shutter.

 

How things have changed! Like Dave's mantra - it is a good time to be a photographer!

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I had a conversation with a member of a local photography club, and I asked him how much he thought someone should spend to get decent camera gear.

 

His response (as best I remember it):

"Photography is a hobby. Like most hobbies, it will take all of the disposable income you have to spend on it. The more you have, the more it will take."

 

Photography isn't my primary hobby. It usually comes in about third or fourth on the list. Accordingly, it doesn't get much of my disposable income. If I cared more about it, I'd probably spend more time and money on it.

 

 

To me, the decision to buy gear starts with the following questions:

1. What photography problem will this gear allow me to solve that my current gear doesn't?

2. How often do I run across this problem?

3. How much does a solution cost?

4. Will it solve this problem frequently enough to be worth the money?

5. Will the solution create additional problems?

 

 

 

For me, the trick is finding some place where I want to go take photos. I love taking them when we're on vacation. But between vacations, I only feel inspired if I shop around for a subject that's sufficiently photogenic to make it worth my time.

 

I agree, except I don't really have time outside of vacations to find really cool places to shoot. But I switched to Sony because my problem with my old gear pops up constantly on vacations. If vacations weren't the overwhelming place I take photos, I probably wouldn't have switched.

 

Still, having sold most of my old gear now, I've discovered that unless you change bodies much, it doesn't cost you that much to upgrade. Lenses have pretty good resale value. Some are better off buying used first so someone else takes that big initial depreciation hit, but many other lenses don't depreciate much from used.

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I switched to Sony because my problem with my old gear pops up constantly on vacations.

I'm not particularly understanding what problem your Sony is solving.

 

For example, my new ($400) TG-5 Tough overcomes several limitations of my GoPro knockoff and my compact super-zoom.

1. The GoPro knockoff had an extremely wide-angle lens, making all photos look 3x further away than they actually were.

2. An endangered hawk landed in a tree about 6' overhead, but the wide-angle lens turned a magical, up-close encounter with nature into a "meh" picture of a bird high above us in a tree.

3. Even though a 3x to 5x zoom does well for most scenery shots, the GoPro knockoff couldn't manage that ... while the super-zoom couldn't go on trips/excursions where it was likely to get wet.

4. I was reluctant to do certain types of adventures (like whitewater rafting in the Grand Canyon), because I couldn't take a decent camera with me to record the experience.

 

And it's still a compact camera, so it's not creating additional problems (by being too large for me to want to take it places).

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It's funny, but I have a friend who plays Bass Guitar (session musician) with some of the best in the business. He has been our tour with Heart, Jackson Browne, and countless others. He currently has 15 Basses and as many Amplifiers. A couple of his basses were in the $10,000 range and one - he says he paid well over $15,000 for :eek:

 

We were talking g one night several years ago and we began talking about "equipment". I asked him what the hell he needed with all that crap and he told me - Different guitars have different tonal qualities, same with Amps. Then he asked me about my camera equipment and (funny as it may seem) my answer was fairly close to his. Of course, as photographers, we all know that there are many different cameras for different purposes, just like lenses, flashes, meters etc, So - it's nice to know that we are not that much different from Musicians, I guess.....:)

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I'm not particularly understanding what problem your Sony is solving.

 

For me, it was size and weight. My old camera was a big full frame Nikon dslr. Switching to mirrorless, while on paper doesn't look all that much different, actually feels like a big difference in person. It's not stretching my bag anymore when I put it in with the lens attached. I can hold it with one hand without much effort. I can arrange things so that my camera bag has more room to fit jackets or other extra stuff beyond camera gear. Just makes traveling easier and less tiring. Do I wish it were smaller, sure. But more the lenses than the body. So, for me, it was an appreciable difference so I felt it was worth it.

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Many years ago I made a living with a camera. It was frequent at weddings in particular that I’d be told “oh I’ve got a better camera than that”, at that stage I shot with three Canon AE-1s, why? Because I wanted the same camera, two with colour for film changes and one with b&w, last thing I needed was to worry about where a control was on each body, sure I could have used F-1s or something but the AEcdid the job for a lot less $$$

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Many years ago I made a living with a camera. It was frequent at weddings in particular that I’d be told “oh I’ve got a better camera than that”, at that stage I shot with three Canon AE-1s, why? Because I wanted the same camera, two with colour for film changes and one with b&w, last thing I needed was to worry about where a control was on each body, sure I could have used F-1s or something but the AEcdid the job for a lot less $$$

 

 

Yep. I was in the "wedding business" for about 2 years. Used (primarily) a Mamiya 645, Always liked that medium format babe. Made good money - hell, excellent money. However, lugging the lights, backdrops and all the other sundries got to be a bit of a drag. Not to mention the Bride and her Mother.....Lordy...I never met a Bride that wasn't hiding a monster under that wedding dress. :evilsmile:

 

Then, you had to factor in the lab, the proof books, the albums....the reprints. and no matter who the customer was, they always acted as though they were being ripped off. One day I just said "enough". Quit shooting weddings and lost a bunch of major headaches. ;)

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