Comment by NovaS1X | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NovaS1X | Hacker News Reader

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>The one actual professional (as in paid as main income) photographer I know doesn't talk about the technology or the brand of camera they use at all because it's mostly moot: it's the picture and getting paid that matters. They don't carry their camera anywhere either; just an iPhone 12 mini.

>Subject matter is more interesting than the technology for me.

This has always been the case though. Amateurs and people who suffer from GAS place far too much reliance on the tool. They want to purchase the ability to create good works and become defeated when they learn they can't and quit. This has been true ever since the introduction of mass market film cameras. Many pros back in the film days carried around point and shoots or fixed lens cameras for personal use and left their F3s and 80-200mms at home.

This is just a reality of the consumer society we live in; people are advertised to incessantly and are conditioned to expect purchasing things to make them better. Thankfully art is a cathartic form of protest to this in many ways; you can't buy and compute photographic skill.

I'm semi-pro and my main gear stays at home unless I'm working on a project, personal or professional, and I carry my iPhone and a Fuji X100 for daily/personal stuff.

I'm an amateur bird photographer. My camera + lens setup is far too big and heavy to carry around when not birding.

But it makes a huge difference in image quality compared to digiscoping with a smartphone (or even the same camera with an adapter). See these images[1] taken with a smartphone + telescope, camera + telescope, and camera + telephoto lens. The telescope has more reach, but substantially worse image quality and requires a tripod. The last shot handheld is the first day I got the lens, I've gotten much better with practice.

Even when I have my camera, I've got a 200-600mm lens on it for the vast majority of the time. My phone has a 14mm equivalent focal length, so if there's a pretty landscape I'm just going to use my phone. The widest lens for the camera I even own only goes out to 28mm, so even swapping lenses doesn't get me as wide an angle as my phone can get. As a bird photographer I have no intention of ever getting dedicated landscape lenses.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/VE4kYtI

Birding is one of those rare use-cases though where gear is pretty essential. Astrophotography is another area where better gear often does lead to better pictures. That being said, it still doesn't make up for the skill of knowing your subjects, being patient, and spending all that time setting up the perfect shot; the gear just gets you in the front door. A bird shot in bad light at a bad angle with a phone is still a bird with bad lighting and a bad angle with a 200-600mm, just in higher resolution.

My point originally was that amateurs generally spend far too much time focusing on the best gear, when they should be focusing on their subject and skillset.

Agreed! Some things do just need a certain minimum level of gear to do decently, but no amount of fancy gear will make up for a lack of skill.

Agreed with both comments above. The genuine pros I come across (quite a lot btw, not that I truly understand them) seem to value consistency and reliability more than they do 'features'. They like gear that does what they expect. I was watching a portrait photographer work with flash in a studio recently. He spent 0 time tinkering with his camera, and most of the rest arranging lighting, reflectors, backgrounds, shooting charts for colour profiling, viewing things on his tethered screen and moving his model.

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