The camera determines what kind of photos you can take and the person determines how good they are. I think that's obvious.
However, there are two additional points I'd like to make:
- Gear can inspire. A sense of trust in the gear can free the photographer to concentrate on artistic expression
- Gear that inspires does not have to be better gear. It can be "worse" gear, but something that still brings a personal connection. Sometimes having less capability allows one to more easily grasp the rules of the game and how they can be maximized towards creativity
This is for my money the very best post of this very, very long discussion! It's short, succinct and makes what I feel are the most important points. It's extra refreshing to read such a thing after wading through the OP's overly long statements... which I have some sympathy for as I realize that I often take way too many words to make a point that could have been said with far less. That being said though, I never go on for anywhere near as long as the OP.
LOL I really wanted to make the case for people to stop saying something that is dismissive, deceptive, and hinders growth. Anyway, everything Jason said is spot on. And in my defense, there are things I made clear in that long post that people still accused me of later like being a gear enthusiast/worshipper rather than a photographer. Acknowledging that the camera plays a vital role in a complex process still somehow got interpreted as me saying that the camera is the most important thing and that you could buy better photographs by spending more money on a "better" camera. The only time any camera is "better" than another is if it helps the photographer reach their potential and enjoy their art. Old or new, cheap or expensive doesn't matter.
That the "camera plays a role" though to me is a kind of "goes without saying" type of statement. The only real question then is how much and my argument is that it's far less than a lot of folks seem to think...
The first sentence here, "The camera determines what kind of photos you can take and the person determines how good they are." says most of what I really feel needs to be said on the matter. I would only elaborate on the point of "The camera determines what kind of photos you can take," in that I think that this part has a lot of flexibility built into it. For example, folks would say that a camera with slower focus would be a limiting factor in shooting action photos. In a certain sense it is and yet in the film era cameras that had to be manually focused and weren't as easy to use in other ways were employed to shoot action type shots that are still admired today.
The only trick there is maybe allowing more people to engage in that type of photography who might have been frustrated by learning manual focus skills and quit. It wasn't impossible to get good shots, but it sure could be frustrating sometimes. I finally got to where I could manually hit focus during soccer games and baseball pretty darn quickly and get lots of keepers. Modern cameras have spoiled me with better tracking and way more keepers.
As far as "getting more folks to engage in photography," I don't see that there's a big difference in cameras these days as cheaper more consumer friendly ones can be used in full auto and so can the most expensive pro level ones. What I see though is that whether or not you are talking about contemporary digital gear or old manual focus film gear that at least a basic understanding of how photography works is really needed to get anything like consistently good results. Even if you're talking about the latest and greatest tech as far as auto-focus, none of that is going to matter if you don't understand (or refuse to educate yourself on) the fact that the camera focuses on the area that's in the little square in the middle of the frame, so that if you want something in focus that isn't smack in the middle of the frame, no matter what camera you're using, if you don't know how to make that adjustment, the image will be out of focus. Same kind of issue with images that have very dark or light backgrounds, or if you're photographing snow - no matter how great the automation is in your camera, it likely isn't going to make that kind of adjustment for you. You simply need to understand a bit about how this stuff works, no matter what kind of gear you may be using. Here's the thing though... the really important part of it, the "tech" side of photography, whether your dealing with old tech or new isn't really all that difficult to learn so I'd say there's really no excuse not to. I'd say that a certain level of automation might make things go a little more smoothly and to enable a few more keeper shots, but it's foolish to think that this sort of thing can really be any kind of shortcut to having a more thorough understanding of the process. Automation doesn't really make someone a good photographer who decides that they have better things to do than to actually learn the process...
What I see is that great photographers end up using whatever it is that they have, with whatever the limitations of the technology at the time they were working, their budget or even self imposed limitations (as in, "I'm going to get as much mileage as I can out of this one simple camera and one lens").
Great photographers back in the film days were most often the ones who had the patience and passion to learn very difficult skills on whatever they could afford or their employer had on hand. The fact that new technology has enabled more people to get involved and enjoy previously very difficult types of photography is great!
Photography is really as difficult as you make it. There were very simple automated point and shoot cameras with film years ago just as there is with digital today. If you want to really "get under the hood" so to speak, it's much cheaper and more convenient to do that these days as one doesn't need to set up a darkroom (with all of the mess that entails) to process images, but there is actually more tweaks that can be done in the processing stage with digital than ever could be done in a darkroom so in that respect there is even more that's possible to learn with that. With ether technology though, the basics are still the same: shutter speed, aperture, exposure, DOF, etc. By far the biggest factor though (the one that makes any photographer really stand out from the pack) with either the old or the new tech - is the sense of design, imagination, story telling ability, etc that the photographer brings to it - all of the things that aren't purely technical and are more up to the person behind the camera, than with the camera itself...
I was able to witness this kind of phenomenon play out in real time some decades ago when I was a college student and took lots of photo classes. I'd see the same folks doing the most impressive work whether or not they were doing an assignment that used a view camera, a pinhole camera, 35mm, etc. it wasn't even these folks' mastery of technique that set them apart, but more their sense of design and their creative vision (the difficult to define skill of being able to tell some kind of compelling story with your photographs). There were other folks who really had the technique dialed in and got the most consistently perfectly exposed, tack sharp, smooth contrasts in their shots and yet their work still didn't have the spark of waht I considered to be the most gifted students. In assignments that were anything goes as far as gear and folks were using their own stuff, there wasn't really a correlation between the quality of work done by the rich kinds with Leicas or medium format gear and others who were shooting with pretty cheap ordinary 35mm cameras.
It's not that the gear doesn't matter at all, it's just that it's not nearly as important in the overall scheme of things when it comes to creating truly compelling photography as lots of folks here seem to think that it is.
I think saying "the camera doesn't matter" would be almost as bad as saying "the photographer doesn't matter" in that neither is true or helpful. What you said, the fact that there is some context and nuance, is actually a useful thing to say. It is especially relevant when you look at the GAS and gear worship so many in these forums suffer from.
Again, the fact that the camera matters and in fact is essential for photography very much should go without saying...
I feel that the whole "the type of camera that I use is vitally important" crowd is largely folks who have the greatest investment in their gear and are trying to justify it... I'm on Flickr a lot and I like to check out the work there. One thing that I notice is that when I check out the EXIF data on my favorite shots, they're just as likely to be shot with older, less capable gear and even cell phones as they are to be shot with the most contemporary, high resolution, high performance stuff...
And the great thing about photography is that there are so many situations where many or even most cameras are just fine. Each individual may have a much more limited subset that they find enjoyable or useful. While the photographer certainly matter much more to the process's creative aspect, it's not terribly useful to claim the technological aspect is essentially irrelevant.
If someone asks me for camera advice I never have a canned answer. I ask them what they want to shoot, how much they want to spend, and whether they'll carry around a larger camera or if they want the smallest thing possible. I don't even lean towards any given brand. I may tell them what I use and what I think, but I show them where the information is and help them interpret it. If any old camera would do giving advice would be way easier. And in the end I always tell them they should go hold it, use it, and buy from the local camera shop.
If beginner folks ask me what camera to buy I tend to offer suggestions of something cheap, like what I have - m43 gear... which has the added advantage of being relatively small so one is more likely to actually carry and use the thing. The fact is that cameras these days are all capable enough that it makes little sense to start with a larger, more expensive system as it more than likely won't be necessary to shoot whatever may be required and might turn some folks off in it being something that they feel like they spent too much on, have to spend too much more to get another lens or two for what they want to use the thing more and don't enjoy lugging the thing around. With two folks that asked and I made this recommendation to, the one who followed my advice has really gotten into photography and the one who ignored my advice, who bought a far more expensive FF camera seems to be frustrated with the whole thing and doesn't seem to have used the gear very much.
The beauty of the tech today is that the gear matters even less than ever as a relatively cheap, smaller format camera even with cheaper, slower lenses (the speed means less because we can crank ISOs so high) can be used very well for almost anything you ask it to do. A cheaper M43 body (for example) with a few of those very inexpensive slow lenses (and even a cheap but fast prime or two) can be effectively used for portraiture, street shooting, macro, landscape, shooting the kid's soccer game, video, even making fairly good sized but very sharp enlargements, etc... What we should really be talking about is how the gear these days is less and less important and how much more democratic the whole photography medium can be (I honestly think that the "democratic" aspect of it rubs some folks the wrong way as they would like to believe that they can do better because they've spent so much on their gear). Because we all hang out on the gear forum and absorb so much info on the latest and greatest tech there's understandably a bias that creeps in which says that all of this stuff really is important, but if you actually take some time to look at photographs and get inspired by that (rather than the gear) you'll begin to see just how modest the gear that was used actually is... particularly if you're referring to photography done with gear made in the last 10 or so years...
I know you weren't talking to me, but thanks for the post. Thanks to Jason also.
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my flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/128435329@N08/
