On 1/30/2011 5:28 PM, Steven Desjardins wrote:
I'm clearly not saying this well. I keep saying the equivalent of "A good photographer can take advantage of better equipment" and folks keep translating it to "good equipment will make you a better photographer." To be clear, I think the former statement is obvious, I think the latter is usually wrong, and there is a clear difference between the the two.
That I can easily and rather totally agree with.
If a good photographer can take advantage of better equipment, then equipment clearly matters because they will take the trouble to buy it. To use the car example, this is like saying, "you are a fine race car driver so you should be able to set a track record in a Ford Fiesta instead of a an F1 racer". Or going into the kitchen of Chef Antoine and telling him he is a fool for buying the best cookware when a chef of his caliber clearly doesn't need it. Every photographer is stuck with the skills they have at that moment. The skills I might acquire in the future through practice are not available to me today. Therefore, for each photographer, the major remaining variable is quality of the equipment. A really good photographer can get good pictures with inferior equipment. Chances are he/she would do even better with better equipment.
Hmmm. Probably some facet of language barrier is in play here, because to me it seems you just made the logical switch again and you're advocating the "the equipment is better be better than one is a photographer" idea... But I digress.
I admit folks, I fail to see why this idea is so controversial. The best photographers often buy the best equipment. Maybe they can overcome inferior equipment, but I simply point out that very few of them bother to take this route.
Oh, right, the best photographers. True as you put it. It is just that it is rather natural to see how this rationale projects on to Boris-the-average-photog. The controversy is probably related to (if not based on) the fact that in modern times one is kind of supposed to be on top of things. It is (trying to make a car analogy here) if you came to the meet up of the gear heads with VW Golf Mk3 VR6. No matter how good is the state of the car, you would be looked down up on merely because it is not modern VW Scirocco or VW is offering now in VR6's stead... And even if you drove and outdriven all the others with your car (because you know it intimately, etc), they would still think of you in a rather special manner. This is the impression I am getting from reading the forums and other non-PDML sources. Cases to illustrate my points are most recent lenses introduced by Pentax (35/2.4 and 18-135).
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