Why it matters.

[basic jammer]

Ken Rockwell this, Ken Rockwell that, Ken Rockwell can suck my balls.

A camera is made to take a picture, however different cameras are designed for specific tasks. The whole point behind if gear matters or not, is not getting dSLR quality out of a Point and Shoot. It's all about getting the right camera for the task at hand.

Gear does not matter....well a wedding photographer comparing a F-1 to a 1D mark II...thirty year old will preform just as well as it's modern counterpart, it don't matter.

Gear does matter...A sports photographer compares a XTi to an Easy Share...XTi = Epic win,

Yer kid does something stupidly funny, you have an XTi in the closet and an easy share on the desk, that easy share wins hands down.

Sitting there at work and you see Jesus in your coffee stain on the desk that cameraphone on your belt is a hell of a lot more practical than running home for your dSLR.

Need a quick shot of your lens....well sorry that $500 dSLR with just the kit lens will not take a picture of the back of your Kit lens.

The point is you don't need a thousand dollars worth of SLR to take a picture.

I agree. the market with wich one caters for also has an influence. i take pictures of middle to lower class folks who appreciate the crispness of my canon 1000d as compared to their 10 megapixel compact digital cams.

 

[JerryPH]

"The point is you don't need a thousand dollars worth of SLR to take a picture."

True. My etch-a-sketch does just fine... but becuase I really suck at it, it's hard for me to keep my subjects still for the 9 hours that I need to get it down... well kinda down. Ok, they usually end up looking like 15-20 squiggly lines... not that it means anything, but it IS a picture!

 

[revilo]

Both sides to the argument are equally valid, and actually, you need to encompass both in order to get closer to the truth. Due to my lack of experience in photographic circles, I will speak in this thread as a violinist, an area where I have infinitely more experience.

I play on a reasonably expensive instrument (£20,000 pounds might sound very expensive to you, but as some of you may know, Stradivarius violins often go for millions), lent to me by an organisation set up to lend instruments to musicians. It's a great violin, it plays very well, and with it, I can produce what I like to think is a beautiful tone. Now, as a violinist, I need to first acquire sufficient the skills to be able to play the right note at the right time, with a nice sound, in tune and with feeling. That's a given. But give me a bad quality violin, and suddenly, I really don't sound very good. I can still play technically demanding things, I can play in tune, but I cannot produce a good tone. I still have the knowledge of how to make good tone, but with the current tool, I can only make an acceptable tone. And seeing as tone is the thing I value most in my playing, and in my criticisms of other players, a violinist cannot be (fairly) expected to play well on a mediocre instrument.

Sure, there's obvious differences between my analogy and the photographer: for a start, the role that the violinist himself plays is more akin to the camera than the photographer, but my argument still applies.

 

[Battou]

Weren't you bitching about a wedding photographer using a Kodak Easyshare in another thread last week?

No, but I will in a few minuets. I made posts in that thread made by sabbath999 who was bitching about a wedding photographer with an Easy Share Z-Series.

unless you are referring to a post I made in saltface's thread, I never said it was an easy share, I just merely said it was one guy with a digital camera....you've known me long enough to know I am not so stupid as to believe that the term "digital camera" does applies soly to P-Shooters. For all I know the clown I was bitching about in that thread could be using a 1D, it's the comercials that piss me off.

In my thread I was bitching about the hordes of dSLR toating happy snappers who absolutely have to have a dSLR because todays point and shoots are not up to the task. That was the thread where you did not feel the need to get into the rest of the posts on due to it's outward apearence of being just another one of these....Well it was not, it's something different all together.

I firmly believe that SLR cameras and point and shoots have their intended reasons and a point and shoot is for spur of the moment shooting and memory saving and an SLR is for working.

now, I own and shoot seriously with both types of camera, I've even posted a picture on this forum that was taken with a 3.1 mgp p-shooter and a few dozen shots taken with a 7.1 mgp P-Shooter. this picture here was taken with that very CD33 I noted above, this one with my C-743. Could I have gotten better shots out of my SLR...maybe, maybe not, I don't care, I ain't plannin on printin them. I made my decition at the time based on what I had at my disposal. When I am preping for a birding trip...the point and shoot is the last thing on my mind even when the birds I intend to shoot are tied to the ground less than ten feet away because I just might want prints.

Point and shoot cameras are designed to take photoalbum pictures not make posters or billboards. People want to make art with them, that's fine. Andy Warhol made due with a simple Poleroid. Warhol was an accomplished photographer and some even say that his interest in photography is the center of his artistic practice, but who here knows Andy Warhol for his photography?

My major problem with threads like this is that people seem to be under the impression that the different classes of cameras are interchangable, because they think people like Ken Rockwell and Ansel Adems say so. They are not, as far as the artistic scene goes, it is no different than paper and pencils. Your vision, your materials, your rules. It is in that that the whole concept of camera doesn't matter takes shape. Art is subjective so by default the only one it absolutely has to please is the one who takes it and it goes back to rule number one.

When you get into the trade aspect of photography, I do not care how skilled you are with your little Z-series, it's innapropriate for the task at hand. I do not care if the the biggest print I could feasably desire is an 8x10 which that Z-series could easily exicute, I won't have it. That would be no different than taking your car down to a local body shop and getting it painted with arosol spray cans. Any skilled automotive painter can do professional quality paint work with spraypaint, that does not make it acceptable. So why should a professional photographer with a point and shoot be acceptable. Your sole income is based on photography and you show up to my wedding with a Leica or a Hasselblad, you're on, F-1 or a 1D or a Nikon equivalent, you've got a chance, AE-1 or XTi...we'll talk, anything less don't bother. I am a big fan of professionalism when it comes to paying someone for their trade skill and I simply believe that no point and shoot photo should have the words "for a client" attached to it, because a point and shoot is so people can take their own pictures and share them with their family.

 

[panocho]

You completely missed the gist of his post. Hendricks could likely do well on a ukulele with 2 of it's 4 strings broken, THAT was the point.

I really doubt "Hendricks" could have done such thing. His creativity was heavily based on the mastery of effects. So his music did depend on gear very much.

I don't see many pictures that are badly blurred, focused on the wrong areas poor horizon control, etc... hanging on any museum walls anywhere.

I think you should visit more museums. You will find that. Was it made on purpose? On many occasions it was, but it still proves the point, doesn't it? If you are going to do a technically poor picture on purpose, do you really need a good camera to do it?

As for the family-album-Disneyland-trip-technically-horrid pictures, it is the aim of some photographers who purposedly shoot similar photos to vindicate the aesthetic interest of such family pictures. You may not agree, and that's perfectly fine, of course, but they do hang in museums. I have even attend some exhibitions in which the artist were not responsible for the pictures themselves, but they had only gone through many family albums and picked those family pictures to make the exhibition. Not for extrictly documentary reasons, but rather aesthetic.

You completely missed the gist of his post.

Did I? I thought it was about a better camera being a positive element in the achievement of a better picture. Of course it can be, and usually is; of course "camera matters". But NOT in the sense some understand. You yourself wrote in the thread that originated this one, "the better the equipment, the better the result". And my point is to prove that that is not the case; not necessarily.