Old debate and possibly done to death?

Terrywoodenpic said:
You are more likely to capture interesting images with a camera that you are familiar with and can use instinctively. As it lets you concentrate on the subject, and not be distracted by technicalities.
This is definitely a factor in camera choice..
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Yes, that is fairly true.

But full frame still gives better IQ than apsc or M43 ;) Much in the same way that MF beats FF.

Gear makes a difference :)
 
woof woof said:
Oh good grief. Do people really believe this?

If you do anything beyond taking pictures of static objects in perfect conditions to print the size of a postage stamp of course kit matters. Unsuitable kit can get in the way and become too much of a factor in the picture or stop you taking the picture at all.

Just look at your own pictures or the ones taken by others you like and decide if they could have been taken with a wooden box with a hole in the front or some awful keychain digital from years ago. Likely they couldn't have been. The kit has to be able to at least let you if not help you to get the picture you want and believing it's all down to the photographer is just fanciful unless your needs are so basic that a wooden box or a digital keychain are enough. If kit doesn't matter you might as well just give up photography and take up drawing and painting as you'll have more chance of capturing an image than with some kit and it'll be a lot more interesting.

And BTW. Who cares what other people think? If you're relying on photography to put food on your plate then I suppose you need to but other than that? Nupe. I don't care.

Better kit is on a sliding scale with each improvement making it easier to get better results more consistently and reliably. The best camera I've had is my Sony A7cII. It has its issues but it also enables me to take pictures and do it quicker and more reliably than any other camera I've ever had. Of course kit matters.
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I don't think @AndrewFlannigan is saying kit doesn't matter, but that if you can't make interesting photographs with your existing kit, getting better kit is unlikely to help.

It may well expand the types of photographs you can tackle, but limited kit shouldn't stop a good photographer from making good (interesting) photographs, albeit within the limitations of whatever equipment they have access to.

While not laying claim to being a good photographer, if I only had a pinhole camera, I would be out looking for subjects that I found interesting and that would also suit the style of photographs produced by pinhole cameras.
 
whyone said:
But not as much of a difference as knowing and not knowing what you are doing with it.
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Perhaps the difference it makes is psychological?

I used to find that a new (to me) camera resulted in my producing pictures I felt more pleased with - until it was no longer new to me.
 
The way I look at gear is like this: if Eric Clapton was given a £10 guitar from "Woolies" he would make it sing. If I was given a £6,000 Lowden I would make it sound horrendous.
 
whyone said:
Yes it does.

But not as much of a difference as knowing and not knowing what you are doing with it.
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LeeRatters said:
Yes, but also no ;)

If you were shooting the Milky Way on M43 with an f/4 zoom and then you shot it on a Sony A75 with a 24GM, you would have a big difference to the final result with the same knowledge ;)
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Both of which will distill into one uncomfortable truth:
A decent photographer will know exactly what the limitations of any gear are, and will know exactly the gear to use to achieve the results they desire.

Controversially the flipside of that could be; if you don’t understand what gear you need, it’s not the gears fault.
 
LeeRatters said:
Yes, that is fairly true.

But full frame still gives better IQ than apsc or M43 ;) Much in the same way that MF beats FF.

Gear makes a difference :)
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Technically that is true, but it is not always the best or most practical choice.
Statistics show that that sometimes smaller and lighter kit gives excellent results,, when heavier and larger kit is more of a handicap to shooting, than a help to better images.
 
Ed Sutton said:
Have you never shown someone two photos, one clearly out of focus, of the same subject and had the OOF one preferred? I have. Many times.
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LeeRatters said:
Nope. Because I don't take out of focus photos.
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myotis said:
If only I could make the same claim :)
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@myotis sounds like you need one of these ne-fangled cameras that nail focus every frame :)

Mostly joking, but it is incredible how the hit rate has improved over the years. 10 years ago, I would be happy with 90%+ of usable frames after an event, and now it's a surprise if there are any unusable ones from a focus point of view. I'm not saying the camera does it all, but the improvements in tech have made it easier.
 
Phil V said:
Seeing as you’ve said ‘statistics’, I’m presuming you can cite a peer reviewed source for this assertion
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Well spotted
That entire sentence is meaningless.
Much like the thread.
 
Eucris said:
The way I look at gear is like this: if Eric Clapton was given a £10 guitar from "Woolies" he would make it sing. If I was given a £6,000 Lowden I would make it sound horrendous.
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There is a lot of truth in this. Who remembers Digital Rev's "Pro Photographer, Cheap Camera Challenge"! Of course, they still had limitations based on the kit they were assigned, but they made the most of it!
 
So, to conclude, there are five, possibly six, different styles of photography so you need five, possibly six, different camera bodies and twenty four to thirty lenses if you're going to take any decent photographs.

At last, I know where I'm going wrong :headbang:

:canon::nikon::olympus::fuji::sony::pentax:
 
TimHughes said:
@myotis sounds like you need one of these ne-fangled cameras that nail focus every frame :)

Mostly joking, but it is incredible how the hit rate has improved over the years. 10 years ago, I would be happy with 90%+ of usable frames after an event, and now it's a surprise if there are any unusable ones from a focus point of view. I'm not saying the camera does it all, but the improvements in tech have made it easier.
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Yes, I agree, especially, for me with things like flying birds, but I still get a lot of mis-focussed flying bird photographs, and in bird photographs where the bird is partially hidden by branches and I can't manage to get the single point AF locked onto the bird.

With people and eye detection, it will often choose the wrong eye, or decide something closer than the actual subject looks more like an eye, than a real eye does.

With so called "intimate" landscapes, even the pinpoint AF is too big to grab the flower ( or other object) that I want to focus on within a larger scene.

And while I am getting better at changing the AF settings to suit different circumstances, I'm also still using manual focussing or zone focussing a fair amount of the time, because I find it more reliable and predictable.

Don't get me wrong, I love AF, but it's also, at times, exceptionally annoying. And a lot of the time I still prefer the stronger connection with the subject that careful manual focus brings: keeping AF for when I see the benefit.

I rarely get the focus wrong with manual or zone focussing. But I also have pictures, which I would have stood no chance of getting without AF, and I am appreciating the maasive improvements in AF that my Z8 brought over my D500 it replaced.
 
Beetnik said:
So, to conclude, there are five, possibly six, different styles of photography so you need five, possibly six, different camera bodies and twenty four to thirty lenses if you're going to take any decent photographs.

At last, I know where I'm going wrong :headbang:

:canon::nikon::olympus::fuji::sony::pentax:
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What has brought you to this conclusion?
 
myotis said:
Yes, I agree, especially, for me with things like flying birds, but I still get a lot of mis-focussed flying bird photographs, and in bird photographs where the bird is partially hidden by branches and I can't manage to get the single point AF locked onto the bird.

With people and eye detection, it will often choose the wrong eye, or decide something closer than the actual subject looks more like an eye, than a real eye does.

With so called "intimate" landscapes, even the pinpoint AF is too big to grab the flower ( or other object) that I want to focus on within a larger scene.

And while I am getting better at changing the AF settings to suit different circumstances, I'm also still using manual focussing or zone focussing a fair amount of the time, because I find it more reliable and predictable.

Don't get me wrong, I love AF, but it's also, at times, exceptionally annoying. And a lot of the time I still prefer the stronger connection with the subject that careful manual focus brings: keeping AF for when I see the benefit.

I rarely get the focus wrong with manual or zone focussing. But I also have pictures, which I would have stood no chance of getting without AF, and I am appreciating the maasive improvements in AF that my Z8 brought over my D500 it replaced.
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We're going a bit off track, but why not? The AF systems do take time to configure to your needs, shooting situation, and time to practice using them. But they are amazing. My main camera for sports/events is R1, and this has several sport modes which know how those work and tracks where your eye is looking, so it's getting close to mind reading and locking focus on the eyes/face of the active player... at 40fps... and with pre-capture so if you are a bit slow with the shutter button no problem. Culling is simply picking the very best frame from an endless stream of good ones.
 
TimHughes said:
We're going a bit off track, but why not? The AF systems do take time to configure to your needs, shooting situation, and time to practice using them. But they are amazing. My main camera for sports/events is R1, and this has several sport modes which know how those work and tracks where your eye is looking, so it's getting close to mind reading and locking focus on the eyes/face of the active player... at 40fps... and with pre-capture so if you are a bit slow with the shutter button no problem. Culling is simply picking the very best frame from an endless stream of good ones.
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I think most threads off track, but equally most threads also address the questions raised in the OP.

So, yes AF does take time to configure, and this was my initial problem with AF. I wasn't all that interested in it and didn't want to spend the time trying to work out all the options, and accept that switching AF modes "while shooting" was now just as much part of being a photographer, as changing aperture or shutter speed.
 
TimHughes said:
Culling is simply picking the very best frame from an endless stream of good ones.
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My camera is nowhere near as sophisticated as the R1, but here’s what I’ve been saying for years:

My actual ‘keeper rate’ might not be significantly better than 20 yrs ago (there’s only so many images I can use). But the quality of what I’m throwing away is light years ahead of what I was chucking away before. It’s no longer mostly out of focus or rubbish exposures, now it’s just shots I don’t like as much as the keepers.
 
Terrywoodenpic said:
Technically that is true, but it is not always the best or most practical choice.
Statistics show that that sometimes smaller and lighter kit gives excellent results,, when heavier and larger kit is more of a handicap to shooting, than a help to better images.
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But the OP isn't asking which kit is smaller and easier to carry up a mountain. He's asking FF vs apsc for IQ.

And, smaller and lighter kit can give excellent results. But they won't give better results.
 
TimHughes said:
There is a lot of truth in this. Who remembers Digital Rev's "Pro Photographer, Cheap Camera Challenge"! Of course, they still had limitations based on the kit they were assigned, but they made the most of it!
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Which proves the whole point that better gear will give better results and throws all the 'gear makes no difference' people off the bus or out of the window or whichever other phrase you'd prefer to use.
 
LeeRatters said:
Which proves the whole point that better gear will give better results and throws all the 'gear makes no difference' people off the bus or out of the window or whichever other phrase you'd prefer to use.
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Isn't this one of those statements that was never meant to be taken literally, and is only emphasising that compared to the contribution the photographer makes to a photograph, the contribution from the equipment is negligible?

And most of the time, this is correct. For example, If you aren't making good photographs with M43, it's unlikely you will magically start making good photographs with FF. Nor is switching from Nikon to Sony likely to make you a better photographer.

There are three occasions where I think it's wrong.

One is the clueless beginner, when starting out with a modern auto-everything camera or even a smartphone, will almost certainly make better pictures than they would with a manual-everything camera.

The second is the "expert" photographer who has reached a stage where they are being held back by some aspect of their camera gear.

The third is when they have a specialist interest. For example, wildlife photography is much more challenging without a long lens. But equally, these types of issues are often things a "good" photographer will find a workaround for.
 
myotis said:
For example, wildlife photography is much more challenging without a long lens. But equally, these types of issues are often things a "good" photographer will find a workaround for.
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Indeed.

It's worth reading up about Eric Hoskins, who more or less defined bird photography in the middle of the 20th Century, while working with equipment that most modern camera users would find unusable...

Eric Hosking - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
AndrewFlannigan said:
Indeed.

It's worth reading up about Eric Hoskins, who more or less defined bird photography in the middle of the 20th Century, while working with equipment that most modern camera users would find unusable...

Eric Hosking - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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I'm very familiar with Eric Hosking.

Although, nearly all of my early photography reading was from library books, I suspect the first photography book I ever bought was Eric Hosking's "An eye for a bird", soon after it was published.

In a post somewhere on here, I listed this book, along with "Flying birds" by David and Katie Urry, and Paul Strand's "Tir A'Mhurain: The Outer Hebrides of Scotland" as the books that convinced me I wanted a career in photography.

The ethos of bird photography has changed a lot since those days.

In my late teens I can remember turning my Dad's car into a hide, and setting up a 7x5 Kodak Specialist pointing at a fence post (some distance from the car) under which I had scattered bird food.

The camera was triggered with a long air release, and I had to pretty well guess when to press the shutter. Not helped by the delay between squeezing the air bulb and the shutter actually firing. It was important not to disturb the birds while feeding, so I had to wait until the food ran out before getting out of the car to turn around the dark slide and put out more food. Then wait for the birds to come back.

I seem to remember that at the end of a long day; I had three exposures, one of which, a starling which appears to be waving at the camera with one of its wings, I still have somewhere.
 
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Ed Sutton said:
We can all be guilty at times. ;)
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Indeed.

There's hope for those of us who are self aware and at least try to correct such faults. For those of us who lack such awareness... :coat:
 
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