Or “if I bought a camera for three thousand bucks,
why should I also think about shooting?!”
A strange situation today in photography – I personally came across students who called and said: “I bought a Nikon D800 plus two good lenses (24-70 and 70-200), teach me how to shoot.” Do you think such a person would turn to a photography teacher who shoots himself with a cropped camera? Of course – but not because he knows that the matter is in his hands, but simply because he has not heard of crops, and judges solely by the photographs that come out of my camera. They are usually good (because I, like any other photographer, do not show bad ones).
This situation is inspired by one common myth – what the camera shoots (apparently, in the same way as it shoots the lens, viewfinder, bayonet mount, battery, matrix). The result of the spread of this myth is the question-statement from the epigraph. If you translate this into normal language, you get the following: “a good camera shoots well” – however, like everything in our life, such a statement must not be taken out of context, which people forget, for the most part … it’s not about education or lack of it, it’s just a tendency to simplify things. And the context here would be “in good hands.” Yes, yes, that’s right:
“A good camera in good hands takes good pictures” (can be quoted)
Let’s take a person who doesn’t know how to drive a car and is explained how to drive: here is the steering wheel, it regulates the direction of movement, here are the pedals, they regulate the speed, there is also a gearbox that also regulates the speed … What car do you think he would rather drive: Daewoo Matiz with automatic or Porsche 926? On the last one, he will not even touch, most likely. It is interesting that there is simply no automatic transmission on sports cars designed for speed – you have to “pull the handle”. In the same way, by the way, on many advanced cameras – there is simply no “auto” mode … but have you ever wondered why? Was it really so difficult for engineers to add it? Or, after working out the processing algorithms, they don’t have the strength left for an extra button? Or is it just a matter of mode disk space?
‘Course not! (approx. transl. “Yeah, right now!”)
Some time ago, I wrote an article that the camera should grow with the growth of the photographer. It will be difficult for a beginner to shoot on a good professional camera, even if the camera is set to “almost auto” (P mode with auto-ISO and auto-WB set) – you still need to show the focus point, otherwise the frames will be constantly blurry, because the camera will focus on toys scattered around the room, bushes, car glass. At the same time, this will not happen with compacts – they focus “everywhere”, and if they smear, then it will not be noticeable to a normal eye. In other words, in inexperienced
hands, the best camera will be a Samsung or Sony compact or mirrorless camera – these companies have strong consumer photography, moreover, they have a strong position in the telephone business, where cutting-edge developments are now underway specifically for compact solutions. And according to the experience of use, these cameras have some of the best systems for working with white balance and intelligent scenes – yes, yes, it is in small cameras, since you can find fault with large ones for a very long time in terms of noise, detail, signal processing and dynamic range ( although the color, I must say, is on top – namely, it subjectively justifies the quality of the photo).
Why not Canon – Nikon? Well, first of all, in recent years they have become so carried away by rivalry with each other that they completely forgot about the consumer market, and those who adapted began to eat the latter very actively. Just for proof: how long have you been shooting with your compact? What phone model do you have? What about a neighbor on the subway? What about his neighbor? The passion for quality has led to the fact that since the transition to the RAW format, in which even a minority shoots on DSLRs, manufacturers have ceased to care about teaching cameras to take the correct picture without using the human brain. In other words, a DSLR only produces great results when paired with great hands. However, if the hands are not very good, then the result will be far from ideal: a white balance curve of almost 100% in cases of shooting under incandescent lamps and very often under fluorescent ones, autofocus is smeared for those cases when a person did not bother to familiarize his brain with the rules of his work – these are the predicted results, and, given the depth of field of full-frame models, the result will be even worse for them.
Is there any conclusion to be drawn? No, I’ll leave that to you to think about. You can actively comment.