Too much agonizing over little things

Thom is right on the money again (IMHO), but on this forum such an opinion sounds almost provocative. At least this is my sense after spending some time on this forum. Is something wrong here, or am I misreading this forum?

http://www.bythom.com/sins.htm

Too much agonizing over little things. Is there a tiny scratch on the front of the lens? A bit of dust on the front element? Is your camera a little bit noisier in low light than your shooting buddy's? Did you forget to set Optimal Quality for the JPEG Compression? Little things don't kill pictures. We already have it so much better than we did at the start of my career that I can usually neglect a lot of little things and still take pictures technically better than I took 20 or 30 years ago. Yet some of those older pictures endure. Why? Because the little things that were wrong with them were far outweighed by the things that were right, which is to say composition, timing, poses, unique event/perspective, etc. If you agonize over the little things too much, you never get to the proper amount of agonizing over the big things. Get the big things right first and foremost. If you then still have time, agonize over the little things.

Exactly ...

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Yves P. Photographe Share the Knowledge NPS Member PBASE Supporter Some pictures I like: http://www.pbase.com/yp8/

In my opinion, Thom is perfectly correct to the extent that he is speaking to people who put the photograph first.  I don't actually know if he himself fits this criteria, I am only acquainted with his work regarding testing and evaluation of the hardware.  I've not seen much of his photographic work published so it's not possible to say.  However, I think he is missing the mark regarding a large number of his readers who are gear-heads first and photographers second.

A very large number of the folks who spend large amounts of money on finely crafted machinery  simply enjoy mucking about with the equipment.  Doesn't matter whether we're talking about cameras, stereos, computers, cars, guns, or musical instruments.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with being pleased by handling and using well built and efficient devices.  Nobody really NEEDS a Leica and collection of matching lenses.  But if you can afford it and it keeps you out of the bars, why not.

And ultimately I would expect that since he primarily seems to be known best for his work evaluating gear that most of his readers are gear-heads who also read GEAR forums like this one.

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One day long ago, a sorcerer and a warrior did battle, as such things were commonplace in that age. Sometimes the sorcerer won, and the sum value of human abilities was improved some trifling amount. Sometimes the warrior won, and again the human race improved by some insignificant amount, for a sorcerer who can't defeat one miserable warrior is a poor sorcerer indeed.

No doubt. Just ignore these threads. But when you have a question (technical or location ) this is the forum that will give the answer in minutes because there are 100's of people from all over the world here always. You will get an answer for sure. After all this is a gear forum.

Isn't Thom's blog heavily into agonizing over the little things?

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Robin Casady
http://www.robincasady.com/Photo/index.html
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."
— Bertrand Russell

Yeah, like focus.  It's way over-rated!

entitled to your opinion.

John

I like Thom! I think he is on the money most of the time. However, if you have a scratched lens I would be a little T.O.! Wouldn't the scratch impact the outcome of the picture? I know PP probably can clean it up. However, lens are expensive these days. Otherwise, settings and the rest I would agree without hesitation. I think this was more amid at amateurs than the pro. I for one am an amateur, however, I don't really fuss over a lot of the settings most of the time. Probably why my picts are so bad! In my case Thom would probably tell me slow down and probably fuss a little more. I am at the other end of his spectrum. I try it get it right in camera, however, in PP it seems to make some corrections, knowing that I am off just a tad. Welcome to being an amateur.

A scratch will affect the contrast of an image because it disperses light and sprays it over the image. Same with dust. A tiny scratch and a few specks of dust will probably not have a noticeable effect.

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Robin Casady
http://www.robincasady.com/Photo/index.html
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."
— Bertrand Russell

Depends on the scratch/scratches.

Two examples, I had a 4X5 lens that had one pretty deep scratch on the fairly large front element. It was a VERY expensive lens but I got a great price on it because of this scratch. The old guy I knew who had shot professionally for year had told me just to fill the scratch with black magic marker/ink and it would have no effect on the images, he was right.

The other was a medium format TLR I had, when viewed from the back the taking lens looked like an ice skating rink from all the cleaning marks. Some of my best images were taken with that camera, I just had to use a lens hood and avoid shooting into the sun.

Like the original post said, dust inside a lens is just a non-issue too.

I agree with the OP, learning to "see light" is so much more important than studying the results at DXO. I do try to learn where my lenses sweet spots are and understand what I am giving up when I venture away from them, at what point in the iso scale that the sensor noise will "ruin" a final print etc.

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Stacey

Of course, getting the picture and capturing the moment with a good composition comes first - there's nothing if you don't get that right.

But all those little things add up to increase the impact of the picture, which is why they matter. Perfectly sharp focus can make a subject pop out a little more. Cleaner images have a different look than noisier images, even though noise doesn't always ruin an image. And dust on the rear/front element can show up at narrow apertures, or in bokeh circles at wide apertures. Dust won't ruin an image, but dust in the wrong place can make it feel different (especially in bokeh circles. It's really noticeable to me). Really, if all the little details didn't matter, we wouldn't buy lenses costing more than $200 or so, and would stick with old, cheap gear until it actually wore out.

I spent a week shooting with a D50 and a 55-200/4-5.6 VR. The camera had a load of problems. The pop up flash didn't work unless you pushed it down by exactly the right amount, and the mirror didn't come all the way up, meaning that the bottom of some images would come out dark. But I definitely didn't feel limited. I used the AF system in exactly the same way (AF-C dynamic area for moving subjects, single point otherwise), used the same settings (except for higher ISOs), and got pretty decent images.

When I got back to my D600 and 80-200/2.8 AF-S, I was pretty blown away by the awesome subject isolation, sharpness, and focus speed. I can't say that the D50 made it impossible for me to get results in any situation, but all the little things added up made a difference.

Perhaps you make a point, but I think that audiophiles (for example) that obsess over silly pointless things, as opposed to trying to listen to music are guilty of the same thing.

Sure, you can like the finely crafted camera and tripod and whatever.  I really think my C1 head is amazing piece of engineering and I've dragged it out to show some machinist friends who were similarly impressed.  But it has to be functional as a tripod head to be 'beautiful'.  Otherwise it's just sculpture.

It's perfectly subjective of course and whatever floats your boat.  But if you're outside taking pictures of the sunset (as opposed to hanging out in the basement posting on DPR), then presumably you have some interest in the final product.

Personally, I like photography because it embraces both the gear head in my and my artistic side, pathetic that it is.  Now, where did that B&H catalog get to?

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RG www.lostrange.com

No, I don't think the point here is that we all should just go shoot with D50s and a poor man's zoom. The point is that we -- myself including, -- have often become too obsessive about gear, too pixel-peeping kind of crowd. I'm trying to cure myself of it. I've spent a good deal of time and a great deal of money chasing gear, hoping that the next best thing would transform my photography, and I'm noticing that the returns on this path do truly diminish. I've been recently looking at my old shots taken with much less capable gear, and many of them just work every bit as well as those taken with the latest and greatest. And some shots taken in a hurry with less than perfect shutter/aperture/ISO, etc also work -- because of the subject matter. The subject matter is what often gets lost in the endless discussions about that extra 1/2 a stop of high ISO or an extra frame per second, buffer size, etc. All these things sure do contribute, but I think very often they might be overvalued. It is more or less like not seeing the forest behind the trees. That's the main issue, I think.

Most of us should agree with Thom's comment "Yet some of those older pictures endure. Why? Because the little things that were wrong with them were far outweighed by the things that were right, which is to say composition, timing, poses, unique event/perspective, etc."

With equipment today you can have all that and more.

Agonizing over the little things is what brings people here--to look for answers. When everything is working as it should then it's not as necessary to post about it, so it makes sense you'll see more complaints. As they should complain when products don't work.

I'm sure people agonized over equipment 30 years ago, but since they were less connected to the world, the agonizing wasn't obvious. What is obvious though, is the dramatic increase in photos/cameras.

Oh no, that's about as far away from my point as you could possibly get...I definitely didn't recommend that people go out and shoot with nearly broken cameras.

I can see that as the main issue. But I think we actually agree (or at least don't disagree). Let me try to put my point differently...it takes a decent photographer to see the big picture, capture the right moments, and get good shots. It takes an excellent photographer to get those pictures, and get all the little technical details right at the same time. And like it or not, sometimes gear plays into that.

When I got my D600 and put my Sony a580 to backup use, I got far better results in challenging situations like low light sports shooting. I noticed, and other non-photographers noticed the difference too. I was getting more shots in perfect focus, release priority meant that I was missing far fewer moments, and the low noise/shallow DOF offered by full frame just gave images a lot more pop. On the other hand, it really didn't make a difference for most casual shots (people, still objects, landscapes), but the D600 was more enjoyable to use there

I also completely agree that equipment gets overvalued. Paying attention to how equipment is used and concentrating on the big picture makes far bigger difference than even major equipment upgrades. Actually, I find it rather entertaining to see some people bragging about how their shiny new camera has more magnesium alloy, or basically saying that their camera is more expensive and therefore must deliver better pictures somehow. Those people definitely aren't seeing the forest behind the trees. And sometimes I'm guilty of that too, thinking of what more expensive gear can get me.

By the way, have I mentioned how frustrating it is to not have release priority? The feeling you get while pushing down the shutter release, and then just watching the wonderful action/perfect moments go by, perfectly sharp through the finder but with the shutter not releasing because the camera's trying to confirm focus, and then seeing the shutter release happen a second later - after the action is done. Then, the follow-up feeling of wanting to chuck the camera across the room.....but you can't because you still need it to finish the job.

I was thinking the exact same thing.

We warned, he has complain about his copyrighted material, which copied, being pasted in DPR forums.  Just give the link next time.

My first slr was bought in the late 60's and was a Pentax H1A and I think a 50mm f1.4 lens.  Some of the images of my girls were really very good, sharp with the background smooth.  The manual focus was so easy with large, bright viewfinders and when in focus the subject just popped into clear focus.  Actually in a lot of ways such as the viewfinder, it was much better than our dslr viewfinders which are really hard to focus manually because of the lack of a good grid.

Auto focus on all the new Nikons is complex with many different settings and auto focus does not work on certain situations.  I do think I get too wrapped up in the many different settings for everything on a dslr and loss site of what is really important which is the lighting and proper compostion of an image.

Larry

Talk about agonizing over little things. If anything posting snippets like this only help to drive traffic to his site. Especially when the link is include as the op did. There is also a chance a post like this would fall under fair use as well. If he is really worrying about it he needs to take his own advice.

Guys, it's completely fine as long as you aren't trying to pass other people's work off as your own. In other words, citing the source and clearly quoting it when you're taking it word by word is enough. Otherwise, it'd be a pretty big impediment on freedom of speech wouldn't it? It'd be ridiculously difficult to comment on other people's work.