Why Camera Gear Matters — Maybe.
Dietrich Ruehlmann writes that camera gear matters — a LOT. I have a different take.
Dietrich Ruehlmann is rapidly becoming a friend of mine. His quirky sense of humor shines through in everything he writes, and his writing and photos tell me he knows his stuff. His piece on this subject is well-reasoned. I do not mean to be disputational; I do not even disagree per se. It’s that for years I have asserted that you make the thing work. I am very much a cameras-don’t-matter guy, overly fond of saying, “Ya do what works.”
Who has never heard this quote from a giant of 20th-century photography?
“The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.” — Ansel Adams
I’ve confessed elsewhere that when I was starting, a wannabe, I returned a perfectly good camera to the store because it “didn’t take good pitchers.” Seriously. I did that. I am not proud of it. I only tell it because it illustrates a too-common beginner problem: blaming the tool.
Dietrich writes:
No, Ansel did not say that camera gear doesn’t matter. In fact, he famously used a donkey to carry his equipment into the backcountry and spent weeks, months in the darkroom. He simply stressed the importance of the photographer’s vision, not that gear isn’t necessary.
I don’t think St. Ansel was saying that gear didn’t matter. I think he meant that any gear was only as good as the hand, eye, and brain behind it. It’s the principle that a Stradivarius is only a fine instrument if you can play it.
Beaumont Newhall narrated Larry Dawson’s 1957 film, Ansel Adams, Photographer, and described Adams’s photographic gear:
“…A fine craftsman employs different tools for different purposes. Item: one 8 x 10 view camera, 20 holders, 4 lenses — 1 Cooke Convertible, 1 ten-inch Wide Field Ektar, 1 9-inch Dagor, one 6–3/4-inch Wollensak wide angle. Item: one 7 x 17 special panorama camera with a Protar 13–1/2-inch lens and five holders. Item: one 4 x 5 view camera, 6 lenses — 12-inch Collinear, 8–1/2 Apo[chromatic] Lentar, 9–1/4 Apo[chromatic] Tessar, 4-inch Wide Field Ektar, Dallmeyer […] telephoto. [The list went on.]
I thank heaven that I never “got to experience” wet collodion photography. I never even “got to experience” hauling the mass of gear partially listed above. I trained with 4x5-inch cameras at a time when they were already obsolete. We were not permitted to use “miniature” cameras for the first two semesters. That’s like a batter swinging two bats before stepping up to the plate; when you drop the extra weight, you feel stronger.
I often wondered how any of the wet plate guys would have felt if they’d been able to use my Nikon L12. From the Crimean War onward, those guys schlepped astounding tonnages of gear, chemicals, dark tents, and more, indeed using donkeys or mules or wagons with horses to be able to take pictures in the field. Talk about “the camera you have!?” Welp, it sure beat trying to do daguerreotypy. Fuming mercury on a mountaintop? Anyone?
There’s a story about Wm. Henry Jackson losing a month’s work when his mule slipped on a trail in the Yellowstone and dumped his load of finished 16x20 glass plates into a canyon. The party had to retrace and retake all the pictures. The mule didn’t fall, but I wonder how badly Jackson wanted to boot the beast after his smashed plates.
I am a photovore — photographic omnivore. I am interested in everything and will cheerfully shoot anything that crosses my line of sight. I have no genre, no style, no specific subject matter, although I am a pretty good event guy. If I pay attention to the YouTubians, I am doing it wrong. Wrong camera, wrong lens, wrong format…
I agree there are significant differences between and among cameras, even within the same line. Some cameras are better suited to some jobs than others. Some are highly specialized and unsuited to any but the jobs for which they are designed. But most cameras, professional and amateur, are intended to do generally the same thing; get the picture. My opinions are formed from 50 years of photography. I’ve learned things. Experience helps. I believe I can make nearly any digital camera do almost anything, often far above its design specs.
For many years, training and working in analog was like putting weights on the bat and being grateful that we didn’t have it worse. Film was what we had. We made it work. We knew its limitations and figured out ways to overcome them.
But we also occasionally pipe-dreamed about a day when we could “load film between our ears and blink,” as our instructors remarked, likely inspired by a quote from another giant of 20th-century photography:
I feel that modern digital may be as close as we’ll ever get to that ephemeral ideal. I knew in 2007 that I would never again expose a single frame of film.
I am a one-camera guy. I schlepped so much kit for so long that I can’t hang a bag on my sloped shoulders. When I had my studio, I had gear lists like Ansel’s. We could make a serious case that we needed all this stuff because it was all specialized. Once I tried that little point-and-shoot, I believed I could do nearly anything with it alone.
I agree that not all cameras are as comfortable to use as others. I have pretty big hands, so the compacts I favor can be awkward. On my Sony “half-frames,” I’ve had to disable controls because I kept hitting them with my thumb, but I also can work around it by reassigning a function to another button that I am less likely to hit accidentally.
“One camera” does not mean only one camera. When I started, I soon superseded the L12 with a Nikon P5000, a point and shoot in the same family but a little bigger with a little more flexibility. Nikon says the “P” in that line stands for Performance. I used the P5000 for about three years and loved it, but the L12 was either in my pocket or not far. Cameras break, seldom give warning, and if you are on assignment you absolutely positively must have at least one backup.
When Nikon released the P7000 in 2010, I was camped by the door, and I used it constantly, but the P5000 backed it up until I was gifted a P7100 (Now With More Bells and Whistles!). I still had the P5000 in case of a meltdown, but the P7100 became primary, backed up by the P7000.
And once, my having both saved a vacation.
Well, part of one anyway. We were on a ferry going from Rhode Island to Long Island. I was happily shooting from the promenade with the P7100. We were approaching this “sparkplug” lighthouse. The P7100 just quit, locked up. I tried pulling and replacing the battery (which still had a good charge), but nothing I could think of would get it working.
The P7000 was down on the car deck. You’re never supposed to go to the car deck when underway, but I couldn’t imagine not being able to continue shooting. I ran down, grabbed the P7000, switched it on while racing back up, and got the above picture just as another ferry was gliding into the mist.
While my preference is always to use only one camera at a time, there is value in keeping your last one as a hedge against sudden meltdowns.
Nowadays, I still use only one camera, a Sony A6300, but I have a matched pair of them. I shoot some events as a volunteer, and it’s far more efficient to work two bodies with overlapping zooms, but each body is identical and set up identically. There is no hesitation or grinding of mental gears. It’s somewhat ironic that it took me almost ten years to work my way back up to interchangeable lenses. I’m glad I did, but I still favor compacts. For me, the little Sonys are the best of both worlds.
There are many arguments about the importance of sensor size. I just came across this story by Vishesh Mulchan titled Going Full Frame. It’s a great story, but one thing that struck me was Vishesh’s tribulations with the YouTube Gurus muddying the waters. Vishesh has indeed gone full frame, and that’s great, for him. I have no intention of doing so. I am wildly mad for and committed to what I still call “half-frame.” I will put my work up against anybody's. I know I could make billboards from my APS-C files because you don’t get your nose onto a billboard.
Of my over-19,000 pictures on Flickr, I still proudly show stuff going back to 2007 from that goofy little L12. I think the work still holds up, even though that camera and subsequent ones only put out JPEGs, but I always re-processed them. Sometimes I still go back and reprocess them with improved tools and techniques (I was smart enough to retain untouched SOOC JPEGs so as not to lose quality).
I freely admit that working around the limitations of P&Ss with fixed zooms was sometimes exhausting. It was a significant reason for my decision to return to ILCs. I don’t have too many lenses. I don’t think I have GAS. (Well, I do, but I’m nearly 80. TMI?)
One off-putting thing about modern high-end digitals is that they are so incredibly sophisticated that some come with 164-page manuals (that few actually read). It’s no longer a simple matter of inputting basic settings based on the film speed; my cameras sometimes mess up because I messed up when programming them. The things they can do are astounding! Getting them to do those things can be frustrating. We want to load (film) and blink, but there is no (as yet) direct connection between brain and finger.
I suspect that lenses are more of a limiting factor than cameras. Nikon’s P7000 series compacts all had fixed 7X zooms from 6.0 to 42.6mm (28–200mm equivalent). That range covered a lot of ground but maybe the wide wasn’t wide enough and the long not long enough. My current crop covers a full-frame equivalent range from 15mm superwide to 450mm telephoto, also a lot of range, but maybe not long enough for wildlife. If I were keen to shoot wildlife, maybe I’d want something ~600mm-ish equivalent. The cameras wouldn’t change. I love my compact Sonys with their byzantine menus and watch-where-you-put-your-thumbs miniaturization. My take is that cameras is cameras. You celebrate New Year your way, I’ll celebrate it mine.
