Comment by moneypenny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moneypenny | Hacker News Reader

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Photographer/photojournalist here. What a panamax-sized-load of complete nonsense. "Don't use the kit lens!" Says who? Some kit-obsessed "coffee enthusiast". And I'm keen on indoor-outdoor breathing! Let's be buddies!

Marco Arment knows fuck-all about

(a) quality (b) photography (c) camera hardware (d) captioning photos

There isn't a sentence in that blog post that isn't either wrong or half-true.

Use the camera however you want. When you start finding that your tools can't keep up with your imagination, improve them. Photography is about light, and capturing it, first and foremost. See the light, see it change, make it change, appreciate it, capture it, and stop reading trash from insecure baldhead attention whores who take godawful photos like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcoarment/5196670116/in/photo...

Sure, some people think sharp lines, high contrast and Schneider-Kreuznach-like resolution == high quality. And it does, in context. If you want sharpness, high contrast and resolution. You may also want to play an Ibanez RG1570 in the same context. But to others, artistic quality is a more useful way to describe things - and it can cheerfully describe all types of optics in that useful way, a way that doesn't need to stick things on a scale of good to bad. Marco appears to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and caught me on full-flame-on mode - but he's also being narrow-minded and only looking to one context, which doesn't help anybody make better pictures, it just helps them make sharper and bigger pictures.

"...insecure baldhead attention whores..."

Not sure why I read that far, frankly, but I stopped there. Mr. Arment expressed an opinion. He didn't attack you personally. Why did you resort to name-calling?

Why would you even consider writing a post like this? There are a million ways to disagree, and you chose to go with mean-spirited and the throwing of wild allegations. Your post says much more about yourself than Marco.

A bit harsh and snarky, but true.

I shoot a lot. I have an apartment full of cameras, dating from the 50s all the way through the present. I've shot everything from fuzzy shitty optics from the post-war years all the way to extremely expensive primes made last year.

And it is the last thing that matters when you're looking to take good pictures. Your understanding of light, timing, subject matter, and composition will take you miles further than paying thrice the price for something marginally sharper.

Unfortunately the vast majority of photography discussion online is not really about "photography" so much as it is "photographic equipment appreciation". For these people it stopped being about the images and is all about the scientific pursuit of optical capture. They spend more time shooting test charts than shooting outside, and when they do get outside it's pictures of bark (to compare sharpness and contrast!) or pictures of flowers (look at the bokeh!).

This blog post is no different.

Discussion about photography (you know, the art form, where it's about the picture and not the gear you took the picture with) is actually very hard to find online. I've only really had good luck finding offline communities to get my photo fix.

Photographer/photojournalist here as well,

Lets forget for a moment about you unfortunate adjectives and appreciations (I don't care if this guys is a "coffee enthusiast" and nor should you for the purposes of this article. The whole "insecure baldhead attention whores" its even worse, makes me think the insecurity is placed in the wrong person in this situation)

Now here's the thing,

> but he's also being narrow-minded and only looking to one context

Yeah, of course. Its his opinion on a very specific situation and he's not trying to say otherwise. There are kit lenses that are more or less ok but most of them are bad compared to good zoom lenses. Marco's advice in this case is pretty sensible: If you are not going to care about using a very good lens, a cheaper compact camera might give you sharper images.

Compact cameras these days come with a lot of features that will suffice to teach you the basics of photography (aperture priority, shutter speed, manual focus...) and if you later want a better system, its a good backup.

Of course you can create awesome images with a kit lens, and of course sharpness is not the only factor that goes into determining the quality of a picture. But it could be in the context he's mentioning -journalist that take a picture to go with their articles- and journalist in those cases will be better served by a smaller and lighter camera.

Do you want to do art with your images? Go nuts, make a pinhole camera out of a Pringles can, use a 50 year old soviet camera or a kit lens or a compact Chinese 50 dollar digital camera with 8 MB of onboard memory. This is not the people this advice is given to. Artist find their way of expressing themselves with the medium they prefer, without regards -or sometimes thanks to- their limitations.

In this case, by trying to point out the snobbery you think you saw in the advice, you've actually out-snobbered it.

"Photography is about light" - indeed.

But most kit lens have a sub par aperture stop limiting the amount of light that can reach it. Yielding poor/blurry photos indoors and other locations where light is not ideal. Of course if the user understands the use of iso, shutter speed (w/tripod) & flash to compensate they can get a decent shot either way.

The 5D comes with a decent enough kit lens, 24-105 L lens, but it stops at f4. Try shooting with that indoors. Plus not all cameras come with a decent kit lens. Getting a 24-70mm L f2.8 or even a cheap 50mm f1.4 prime would be a better option for low light even tho you'd loose the extra zoom.

Best solution is if you are thinking of getting into DSLR world think about the lens 1st and then the body. The body is like a computer and will expire while the lens are a life long investment.

I think he's coming from the perspective of someone who uses his camera phone as his primary camera. I'm no photographer, but I've often gotten better pictures from my iPhone than my default SLR camera kit. Why bother spending $500+ when you already have a camera of comparable quality in your pocket? If you spend that much money on a piece of professional equipment, you might as well go all the way.

The common kit lens for the Canon 5D mk3 is the 28-105 L lens, which is a very good lens (I have it). Yeah, I agree with you, Marco is being too general here.

The kit version of the 5D Mark 3 is also about 8x more expensive than what Marco is discussing.

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