Photography Has Nothing To Do With Your Camera

Wow, your camera must be really expensive for you to be able to produce a photo like that. It was one of the most insulting things ever said to me in my entire photography life.

Like a writers pen, my camera is a tool that helps me create the art that is the photograph of what "my eye" sees. Anyone can access the most expensive or "best" camera but can they create an image that could be seen as art to be enjoyed by many?

The era of digital photography has created an environment where almost every person you see or meet will have a camera with them. The mobile or smart phone has taken care of that. Some of the smartphone built in cameras produce very high quality images in terms of the pixel density or megapixels. The point is that the technology does not produce the art, it's the photographers vision that sees the art in a scene.

There are some photographers who don't actually "press the shutter release" in some circumstances but they are still "the photographer" because it is they who imagined the image, set the scene, assembled the technology and lighting, and told the other person to "press the button".

Set another person the challenge to produce a similarly artful image and give them the cameras and technology to achieve it and you may only get a very ordinary reproduction of the scene they are looking at.

The thing is that the camera you have is only a tool to help you create the art and beauty that you see in a subject and it is up to you to capture that by using the tools you have available. They say the best camera is the one you have with you when you need to capture a scene and this is very true. No camera, no image and you're left to explain and describe what you saw to someone who may not have the imagination to envision what you are describing.

I was having a discussion with a fellow camera owner about the camera he'd just bought. His view was that it was quite cheap at around £300 so probably was not all that good. I tried to explain that it was just another "box with a hole in the front" and that he needed to look for the beauty in things and endeavour to capture that rather than just take photos.

I went on to explain that I thought that the lens on the camera was far more important than the box that lens was attached to. He looked sceptical and remarked that it was all very well saying that because I had a much better camera costing around £1000. A demonstration was in order. Here are 2 photos exported as a jpg file together. One was shot with a Canon G2 4 Megapixel digital camera, the other with a Canon 5D MkII 21 megapixel camera. Can YOU tell which is which?

The two photos were shot within minutes of each other using the exact same lighting but with different camera and lens combinations. Looking at the original files close up there is a difference but for onscreen and standard printed images up to A4 size there is no real difference.

Chasing Technology

People seem to be on a never ending treadmill toward technological improvement. It seems that the faster we run towards that new tech the faster new and improved tech is put in it's place. Where photography is concerned I truly believe that it is the lens on the camera that can make the most impact on the quality of your photographs. More pixels will mot have the same impact for most of us because we are just not printing the photographs we capture at a big enough size to warrant those extra pixels. Once we get up to about 12 megapixels there is very little value in spending the extra hundreds or even thousands of hard earned cash to update your camera.

Spend on the lens

If you already own an SLR or DSLR camera, you should look at how you can improve on the glass you have. Getting higher quality lenses that have the option of wider apertures and maybe some Neutral Density filters to help control the light is where you money should go.

With all that in mind, go and create your art. Take more photos and enjoy the memories they bring back to you.