What is the balance between photographer and camera in making a photograph

Ricky91t

Calina wrote: »

personally I believe it is not the the camera that makes the image but the photographer.

Quite a few people have Olympus DSLRs (and the number is growing latterly I think because of the E-520). I shot film SLR with Olympus for years. The Zuiko 50mm that I had (and still have) is probably the best lens I own.

Alot of people say this buts its only true to a certain point imo EDIT:For the record this Thread was mad for me..I would of never posted something like this.

Calina

Hmm...I see a possible interesting debate here. I'm going to spin this off to its own thread.

this was spun off from the Olymmpus thread.

Please

1) be calm
2) be reasonable
3) be nice
4) be coherent
5) be inclusive

Don't

1) flame
2) fight
3) make me cry with your shenanigans.
4) pick on each other
5) get banned, infracted or warned.

This is an interesting subject which pops up from time to time; I am of the opinion that a good photographer can take a good photograph with anything to hand within technical limits; I don't believe that a bad photographer can reliably take good photographs with a good camera.

Ricky91t

Haha cheers,
I just think there is a huge difference between a modern day compact and a modern day digital slr,there is no way that someone can produce the same quality shot for many different themes,Sport,night,Portraits(lack of DOF) etc

smelltheglove

It's a hard one isn't it. Hmmmmm, ok so you need certain things to make the right shot unless you are really lucky to be at the right place at the right time with a compact holding the exact settings required!

What I mean is, a great photographer may want to take a nice night shot with a compact and it just wont happen, but they will prob get the same result as the average joe soap taking the same pic with a great camera as the average joe soap does not know the settings. This is where the balance comes in. In my opinion if we use say a percentage as what is required I would say 20% of input may be the camera but the rest is the photographers knowledge of the camera and the eye!

Thats just my say.

Fajitas!

The camera dosn't know a good photo to a bad one.

Ricky91t

But without a half decent camera you'll never have the oppurtunity to get good photos

Calina

imo some photographers don't either

badumtish

Fajitas!

ricky91t wrote: »

But without a half decent camera you'll never have the oppurtunity to get good photos

Well, I use some cameras that wouldn't even be considered quarter decent... and get results that I like!

It's not all AF, spot metering and sensors

ThOnda

It is the photographers duty to use the kit he has in such way to produce quality photographs. Yes, you could be limited by aperture. Yes, you could be limited by focal length. Yes, you could be limited by image quality and noise.

The only way is to use what you have and creatively find out what you can do with that. Just look at Elven's photos taken by her Holga lens on her DSLR. I bet she has better lenses, but she is(was) using the Holga lens to achieve something.

Being personal, I have HUGE problems with quality of my scans, therefore I am trying to find processing techniques how to get decent picture from the files. The easiest way is to go BW and turn noise from incorrect (scan) exposure into grain.

I think that there are only few people who have kit bag filled with exactly the stuff they want for their photography. For somebody it could be Leica M8 with 35mm lens. For another Canon 1dsxMkXII with 600mm/1.2 lens.

As Fajitas said, camera is only a tool, but the person using it can turn process called photography into producing a piece of art.

Ricky91t

Fajitas! wrote: »

Well, I use some cameras that wouldn't even be considered quarter decent... and get results that I like!

It's not all AF, spot metering and sensors

I have a camera a compact digi i found it while i was on holidays in England on a walking path,the camera has no af,(a switch for macro/landscapes)crap auto white balance seriously bad exposure i couldn't see anyone here getting a keepable shot from it!So that means a camera is alot

magicbastarder

ricky91t wrote: »

But without a half decent camera you'll never have the oppurtunity to get good photos

no; a camera is just an enabler. camera X will alow you to take photos you can't take with camera Y (e.g. sports, night photos). that doesn't mean you can't take a decent photo with camera X. but cartier bresson probably took a lot of shots with settings easily reproduced on a digital P&S.

AnCatDubh

The camera gives you technical capacity. The technical tools for any job usually work out along the lines that entry level equipment (of reasonable quality) will probably get you 90% there in terms of the technical capacity. So entry level DSLR's can produce some smashing results if the result sought is based on something within that 90% capacity. Then you may need to go further in technical terms to enable some additional capacity - better bodies, improved lens, etc.

Knowing how to use the capability of the tool is capacity - the skills which you must learn as a photographer to produce desired results. Skills unlike the technical tool start at 0% and increase depending on the time and effort put into the discipline - the research you undertake, the time spent understanding what others are doing and the practice time you spend at it. Depending on an individuals aptitude for the discipline they may advance to 40% capability or 90% capability.

Its complicated though by the availability of post procesing to the masses. Even something like Google's picasa will work wonders on some poor quality images (where the capability of the photographer wasn't advanced enough to cater for the specific scenario and the desired output). This i'm sure is one of the wonders of the the digital era.

There is a fourth factor though - how about luck! Yeah, i'm sure its happened to us all at a n earlier time in our photography journey - you know when you had a poor quality camera, not very may photography skills, and on occasion you just took really nice and pleasing images. Luck probably decreases in proportion to the capacity of the photographer increasing in so far as the photographer has set out with acquired skills to get a desired end result.

I've seen a number of threads in various forums recently where people have compared their work at an event to that of a 'program mode' shooter to conclude that the 'program mode' shooter regularly comes up with better hit/miss ratios - probably because the program mode shooter assisted by the camera's on board computer has a boost over the skills capacity of a photographer trying to master the tool.

I think even with poor equipment, an individual with good shooting capacity can produce great images but it is situational and subjective.

Good thread for discussion though.

Fajitas!

I use a 40ish year old Russian rangefinder, with no metering, no autofocus, and a white balance depending on the film I'm using.

I get keepable shots from it

I use a Chinese made plastic camera with a plastic lens and some basic pictures denoting focus points.

I get keepable shots from it.

I could go on

5uspect

And I'm sure you've got great shots from pin hole cameras too!

Different cameras let you do different things. The dSLR is probably with most versatile of the lot. Where as a less sophisticated camera may limit you technically it shouldn't limit you artistically to a great degree.

Shiny

If you are shooting low light, you have to have a decent camera to
pull off (wedding album quality) shots.

I saw the results from other point and shoot cameras at ISO's over
800 and the results were terrible.

I wouldn't let my 30D go beyond ISO 800 as I felt the quality degraded
too much after that point.

So to conclude, in broad daylight, its all fair game but when you are in
tricky situations it is the fast camera/glass that will come out on top.

Dragan

I'm not sure i like the idea that technology makes a better photo.

It would seem in some way to devalue everything that was done before the latest advancements. I'm also of the opinion that film and digital are two different monsters that allow you to take two completely different paths if you so choose.

Then you have to have a think about what is "a photograph" and what it is that makes that good or bad.

Then you to decide if you can honestly take away from a fantastic photograph simply because the photographer may have had limited resources to hand.

It's complicated but i'm willing to bet the majority of the traits of any photo that truly appeals to me will largely be there because of the photographer and not the camera.

ricky91t wrote: »

But without a half decent camera you'll never have the oppurtunity to get good photos

I would maintain that every camera has an area that it will be able to take decent quality shots in. Or, at the very least, a decent photographer will be able to do something with what it can produce.

I think for me, a camera needs to be able to do absolutely everything before it can be considered and equal component to photography as the actual photographer. It's abilities need to be limitless but i absolutely consider the abilities of the photographer, as a whole entity in the context of this discussion, to be.

sunny2004

If it has full manual controls then you are half way there..
the rest is up to the photographer's eye or ability to "see" an image !

challengemaster

Each one compliments the other, and is needed by the other.

Without a camera, a photographer is useless.
Without a photographer, a camera is useless.

Thirdfox

A "good" i.e. normally expensive, camera will allow most people to take "competent" images.

Competent images are normally good enough for most people... so nowadays I feel that 70% of the work is done by the camera and 30% to the "creative eye" (as someone earlier had said that they thought it was a 20/80 split). As in the creativeness often unfortunately is not needed to make a good image but that last 30% does add the extra spice to make an image stand out from the rest. This balance varies in each of the different photographic fields of course, journalistic photography often has much less creativity than non-reportage types like "visual art" photography.

5uspect

Dragan wrote: »

I'm not sure i like the idea that technology makes a better photo.

I wouldn't say a "better photo" but newer technology allows technically superior images. That in no way makes the photograph better. Of course technology can open new avenues for photography such as infrared, stroboscopic and high speed photography.

All the digital instruments in the world don't make electronic music good. :pac:

4sb

I think that there is a third participant in this equation, namely the audience for the photograph.

If it's "snapshot" then technology plays a large part in providing sharp, well exposed, photographs, compared to cameras of even a few years ago.

In the commercial / scientific marketplace, then the client, via the photographer, dictates the tool: with current technology there are more tools available than ever before. Press / journalism fits in here too I think.

In the art photography market, then the artistic vision of the photographer chooses what the tool is.

As for the enthusiasts / hobbyists - the spread is probably widest. I guess the majority will profoundly believe (I know I do) that the equipment doesn't matter, but I lie awake thinking that if only I had xyz my options would be so much better. It doesn't help when I amn't sure what I like (not the somewhat related what I'm good at).

MagicMarker

I think an image taken with a P&S is sufficient but the quality is inferior to a DSLR, i noticed this immediately when i god my DSLR..

If the only thing that mattered was the photographer's skills and eye for a good photo, then they'd all be using a P&S.

Borderfox

I think you have to be able to see the shot already and then join the picture in your head with the in the camera if that makes sense.

ThOnda

Previsualisation?

congo_90

smelltheglove wrote: »

It's a hard one isn't it. Hmmmmm, ok so you need certain things to make the right shot unless you are really lucky to be at the right place at the right time with a compact holding the exact settings required!

What I mean is, a great photographer may want to take a nice night shot with a compact and it just wont happen, but they will prob get the same result as the average joe soap taking the same pic with a great camera as the average joe soap does not know the settings. This is where the balance comes in. In my opinion if we use say a percentage as what is required I would say 20% of input may be the camera but the rest is the photographers knowledge of the camera and the eye!

Thats just my say.

I agree op to a point where sometimes its what we see that the camera 'doesn't' that makes the photo. That little bit too much over exposure on purpose etc

Shiny wrote: »

If you are shooting low light, you have to have a decent camera to
pull off (wedding album quality) shots.

I saw the results from other point and shoot cameras at ISO's over
800 and the results were terrible.

I wouldn't let my 30D go beyond ISO 800 as I felt the quality degraded
too much after that point.

So to conclude, in broad daylight, its all fair game but when you are in
tricky situations it is the fast camera/glass that will come out on top.

again i agree here that a compact may struggle at night, high speed shooting etc but in *most* situations both cameras could perform just fine depending on user.

emul

This is a good topic on which I recently had to change my mind!! I have the "eye" to see a photo when I look around (without the lense). It's then up to me to look through the lense to see if when framed it makes sense / looks good etc.
Then (and this is where I had to change my mind) as I shot in RAW I now have a digital negative which I must process in my darkroomto a get a photograph, which is up to my standard to be printed etc. Many times I have arrived home and upon reviewing shots I find I have snap, because I forgot to compose the shot properly or pick the best spot or lens!!

I am starting to experiment with HDR only to bring further detail and depth to my shots, to my eye some HDR are graphic creations/images not photographs - but thats me wanting to be an "old fashioned photographer".

My flickr open for C&C http://www.flickr.com/irishmul