Ming Thein: Gear articles are most popular

Solarflare

No longer a newbie, moving up!
Joined
May 24, 2012
Messages
2,898
Reaction score
395
Process, equipment, creativity, photography and a confession
It is an indisputable fact that photographers are all obsessed with equipment to some degree. Though online forums are perhaps a poor barometer of public opinion because one only visits if you are looking for equipment reviews or spoiling for a fight with a troll, I’ve noticed the same thing here – after running this site for more than three years, the most popular posts are consistently the ones that are equipment reviews, to do with system choices, or hardware. Philosophy comes a very distant second – by a factor of three or more – and then only images, which are dead last. Surely I can’t be the only one thinking this ratio is a little odd, given that the whole purpose of the exercise is to produce images?
I dont think thats too surprising.

Gear and maybe also philosophy articles might help me make better pictures.

Articles about images require that I like Ming Theins pictures specifically, which often might not be the case.
 
The internet is a place where geeks, esp techno heads, often come to talk and thus there is a disproportionate impact of gear talks over other factors. However there are other elements too;

1) Gear reviews are popular because they generate ad-revenue. This makes them prime targets for blogs and websites; thus much of the "official" info is focused around gear which then in turn promotes much of the discussion that follows in other sites.

2) A lot of people come to forums and groups to ask "what camera should I get" type questions.

3) A lot of people are beginners - thus often early conversations are gear, equipment and method focused. You can't art till you can use the tools.


I would also say that art has, in general, been VERY badly taught at schools for a good few generations. As a result we have a multitude of people who consider art to be some kind of mythological force that, like The Force, you are born with or not. Thus you've a huge number who lack the language and confidence to speak about art; whilst also having a lot who just won't even bother trying because "its art and I did bad in art at school and its beyond me".

Most have a significant lack of any formal or informal grounding; you can see this even in the literature around photography which puts far too emphases on a handful of theories (rule of thirds anyone?).
 
I dont think its a "photography" thing though.
how many chef's talk about cooking more times than the amount meals they cook in a day?
how many mechanics talk about tools or repair more times in a day than they work on a car?
its the same for photographers. we get on a forum, do a bunch of talking, and sometimes we go take a picture.
just because we are not posting every picture we take does not necessarily mean we are talking more than photographing....it just means we dont post every picture to a forum.
 
As overread hinted at, this is almost entirely a function of how SEO and google work.

There's basically no way to drive traffic to a post about a picture you took. What would people even search for? But a post about a specific camera? Everybody who searches for that camera can stop in and take a read.
 
Gear and maybe also philosophy articles might help me make better pictures.

Articles about images require that I like Ming Theins pictures specifically, which often might not be the case.

Also, hold on here a sec, am I interpreting this incorrectly or are you really stating that articles about gear (and philosophy) are more helpful in producing good photography than studying images?
 
It's the same in most hobbies...the "tools" are talked about a lot, the end results, not nearly as much. As salmon fishermen, we talk a lot about rods, reels, fishing line brands and types, lure models, hooks, scent products, and so on; we do NOT discuss the fish we catch and or catch and kill to anywhere near the extent we discuss the tools and equipment used in the pursuit of quarry. Photography is about the pursuit of images, and each person pursues his or her own images...it's an individual,personal, private matter, not really well-suited to reading about the picture-making exploits of some blogger from far-off Asia, working in a city I will never visit, in a continent I could care less about on a personal basis. Ming's pictures are his own thing...they are his pursuit.

The tools and equipment are available to everyone--the tools and equipment are what the industry offers, and what hundreds of thousands of practitioners will use, and so in a sense the tools are universal to the industry; the fish caught, or the pictures made, will be individual, owned by only one person, and their creation, their ownership,that is not "shared". I mean...Ming Thein got his start blogging by shooting close-ups of his fancy watches and posting them...I don't give two sh*+s about his fancy watches, so anything he had to say about his pictures in the early part of his career were meaningless boasting to me.
 
Last edited:
Also, hold on here a sec, am I interpreting this incorrectly or are you really stating that articles about gear (and philosophy) are more helpful in producing good photography than studying images?
I said no such thing.

I said if people do not like Ming Theins pictures, then they probably wont bother with them.
 

Most reactions

Back
Top