A photographer was once invited for dinner by a friend on thanksgiving. When his friend introduced him to his wife, she exclaimed, “Oh yes! I’ve seen your work. Your fashion photography is really good. You must have a great camera.”
The photographer smiled back, but did not say anything.
At the dining table, the host announced that the food was prepared by his wife, who is an excellent chef. The food was good. The photographer spoke, very politely, “Ma’am, you cook real good food. You must have a great stove.”
There’s a general misconception that more expensive and advanced cameras take better pictures, and it holds as true as the notion that advanced guns take better shots. The gun may only be better equipped to help the shooter take a better aim, cover wider range, shoot more bullets in less time and so on, but ultimately, it’s the person behind the barrel, who takes a good or a bad shot. So is it with cameras.
With the advent of cheap and advanced point-and-shoot as well as DSLR cameras, there’s a whole generation of wannabe photographers sprouting, some of them pursuing photography as a hobby and some seriously considering a career in fashion photography or wedding photography or wildlife photography. Many of them you can even hear talk professional photography jargon like ISO, shutter speed, aperture, focal length, depth of field, lens type, resolution, colour correction, saturation, white balance, panorama, pixel ratio, view finder, wide angle and all that mumbo-jumbo, which sometimes misleads you into believing that these guys are photography geniuses. However, when you get to see the photographs they take, you tend to feel disappointed either in them or in yourself for not being able to appreciate the work of such genius. On the other hand, there are those, who capture with very basic cameras, even with phone cameras, photographs so full of life that each picture seems to tell a story. Just like owning a sports car and knowing its engine’s power, torque/rpm, ground clearance and all that jazz doesn’t make you a formula one racer, holding an advanced feature packed camera and knowing professional photography jargon doesn’t make you a photographer.
Though all this advanced technology is undoubtedly an advantage, photography is essentially an art, and what is vital to become a good photographer is an artistic vision, a keen eye and last but not the least, a sense and understanding of light. Photography, if anything, is a game of light. The better you understand where and how light falls, from which angle it falls and where and how it reflects, the more effectively you will be able to capture it. And of course, the artistic vision that is required to know what to capture is something that can not be taught. Everything else, the technology, the equipment, the technical skills including editing are merely add-ons, that only help you polish and enhance your art.
So whether you understand the technicalities of professional photography or not, there are two basic things you need to know-every guy carrying a jazzy camera is not necessarily a photographer, and every good photograph may not be captured with an expensive camera.
