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A bit off topic, but as somebody that doesn't know anything about photography, when I look at pictures taken by dedicated hobbyists and (semi-)professionals vs.

by smoe 6y ago

A bit off topic, but as somebody that doesn't know anything about photography, when I look at pictures taken by dedicated hobbyists and (semi-)professionals vs. normals, the main difference for me is I think almost never from the technical aspects of their cameras but the deliberateness the photos have been taken or selected. As In "oh, I like this tree, lets snapshot it to put on social media" vs. really thinking about how to capture this moment on a 2D surface. Motif, framing, lights and shadow, flow of lines, fore-, middle-, and background, etc. (As I said, I don't know about photography but those seem to be things you want to care about). I reckon, the difference of what camera you use is much more about the choices they allow you to make than some superiority in technical specs. The latter is to squeeze out the last few percent or as related to production pipeline e.g. printing on billboards. I think especially we people in tech, who can often more easily afford it, tend to jump to getting more sophisticated, expensive gear, be that photography, music, painting, etc. expecting better results, forgetting that it's all pretty worthless, if you don't get the fundamental artistry and techniques right first.

kqr 6y ago
As someone who does know a lot about photography, I can tell you that you sure can give off an impression of knowing a lot about photography.
- crispyporkbites 6y ago
  The more you know, the more you know you don't know.
- slantyyz 6y ago
  I have found that a lot of people who aren't into photography tend to draw a positive impression of a person's photographic knowledge/skill based on that person's gear (bigger, more accessories, expensive appearance). But then again, I have also found that a lot of people who are into photography will draw a negative impression of a person's knowledge/skill based on that person's gear (sensor size, brand preference, lens choices).
  - gen220 6y ago
    I find it's like programmers arguing about laptops. At the end of the day, you're arguing about something that you want to "get out of your way" as much as possible. All that time you spend arguing, you could spend programming or learning. Imagine if you were sitting next to a reincarnation of Ken Thompson at a local coffee shop... who cares if he's typing into a surface pro? The writing and the writer are the important things. In photography, it's the shooter, the subject, and the choice of frame. Gear-ogling is fun to geek over, but past a certain low threshold, it's a waste of everyone's time. I had a friend who got a chance of a lifetime to go on a photography trip to Mongolia with a pro who had worked for Nat Geo. The dude had some seriously impressive gear. He was kind enough to lend some of it to my friend, who loves to geek out over these things, while the pro used more enthusiast-accessible glass. Shiny gear is nice, but it's best thought of as a set of interchangeable tools.
    - slantyyz 6y ago
      I don't know what it is, but people want other people to be like them. You can substitute anything in the place of "laptops" - programming languages, methodologies, coffee, barbecue sauce, diets, exercise etc.
smiley1437 6y ago
Informally, it’s called ‘having an eye’ and some people are blessed with it, others work hard to acquire it, and camera technology can seem to offer it. But ultimately, you’re right, it’s still your choices as a photographer that most influence the quality of the work, and while good tech doesn’t hurt, it’s not really the tech.
- slantyyz 6y ago
  Note that it also applies to consumers of photography as well. Not all consumers of photography necessarily draw any artistic value from the photos they look at. For example, my mother would complain about my travel photos that didn't contain people, or would look for things like whether the people looked happy. She couldn't care less about the rule of thirds, bokeh or dramatic lighting. Don't get me wrong, artistry and craft matter, but I think they would be considered "enhancements". Most people would gladly accept a poorly composed image of a loved one or special moment because they value the memory over other attributes.
  - ValentineC 6y ago
    > For example, my mother would complain about my travel photos that didn't contain people, or would look for things like whether the people looked happy. She couldn't care less about the rule of thirds, bokeh or dramatic lighting. Heh, this is one thing I regret about my past photos — I have plenty of travel photos, but very few with myself in them. And while I know my composition and lighting fundamentals, my photos will rarely be on par with someone with the luxury to wait for the right moment, or something from a postcard or the best of Flickr or 500px.
    - slantyyz 6y ago
      I'm also rarely in my travel photos, but that's more because I don't like looking at myself in photos.
      - panta 6y ago
        Now, but will you think the same in 20 or 30 years?
gen220 6y ago
In 2012, I took a photography class led by a professional photographer, and she actively encouraged students to use their phones if they couldn’t get access to a DSLR, and her reasoning was exactly what you describe. To her, composition, color, contrast, textures, lines, framing, and pose was everything. That’s what she was trying to teach us, because that’s the hardest part. Mastering your camera’s settings just takes a lot of time and trial & error. And this was in 2012, when mobile phones had terrible cameras, mind you! Of course, resolution and noise are distracting when you print big, but she was trying to judge us for our eyes and hands, rather than for our cameras and mastery over their settings. They’re orthogonal if the observer wants them to be.
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  I took a photography class in college, and the professor had us down-scale our photos to a super low resolution before submitting them. Both to keep file sizes down, and because he was judging us on our composition skills, not the quality of our cameras.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    Resolution only matters for super duper digital zoom for super large prints. An 18MP phone cam is worse than a 2MP DSLR. Resolution is useless if the lens can't put the right light on each pixel. For a bad photographer, a good camera makes a huge difference. It has focal length/bokeh, dynamic range, shutter speed, and more to "get" a good shot that a phonecam can't.
- mnw21cam 6y ago
  There's also the factor of "The best camera is the one you actually have with you". If you have a fantastic camera sitting at home when a photo opportunity arises, it isn't much use. A mobile phone camera is often the best camera because of this.
- TheRealPomax 6y ago
  That's basically the same lesson we've been getting before phones, too, only it used to be a polaroid, or even disposable cameras, as it's important to first learn the basics, and the tech does not matter at that level. Once you've learned the basics, though, the tech starts to matter a lot and the limitations of that phone, or that disposable camera or polaroid, starts to interfere with the things you know you want to capture and how you want it to look, but simply can't.
iNate2000 6y ago
Totally I got my first DSLR in 2006. When I got a new one a few years later, my choice was mostly about what the new camera made _easier_. Because the old camera could do almost everything I wanted to do. So the new camera had knobs and buttons for things that I had to do in menus on the old one. And a couple of automatic things that I had to do manually on the old one. (Shooting brackets!)
akiselev 6y ago
That's why I jumped into large format film cameras. DSLRs are nice but when tilting the lens plane relative to the film plane on a 4x5 field camera, the effects on the scene are stunning. It requires a much more intuitive grasp of optics, though.
- eropple 6y ago
  Also a wheelbarrow of cash! Can you even get started with less than $3K?
  - akiselev 6y ago
    You can buy a used Crown Graphic with the stock lens for a few hundred, used film holders for $20-40, $50 for used tanks, etc. A frugal/patient person should be able to keep it to under $500 total - I went a bit over that because I bought a new Sekonic light meter. $2-3k is more if you're doing the enlarging yourself or shooting larger film like 8x10 where the costs rapidly grow out of control. However, if you're handy it can be a lot cheaper. Except for the lens and billows, which are relatively cheap on ebay, everything can be made out of relatively cheap material available at hardware store. The tricky part is leveling the lens and film planes.
- mcyukon 6y ago
  Never heard of that technique before! Found some videos from Ben Horne about it, that explain it well to a non medium format shooter. Quite a cool way of adjusting the DOF on a scene.
bregma 6y ago
When desktop publishing became a thing back in the 1990s anyone could put a book together. Fancy typesetting, high-dpm printing, kerning, text wrapping, heck it looked great. You still had to be able to write to create good content. That never changed. Now anyone can squeeze out polished crap at the touch of a button because the technology makes it simple to produce something that appears sort of like something that used to take experts a lot of work. It still takes experts a lot of work to produce something of quality. The rest of us just produce a lot.
- RichardCA 6y ago
  The idea that a certain type of photography is only used by the low, artless, amateur crowd that has no taste has existed throughout the entire history of photography. You can start around 18 minutes in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWoqdJ6rIoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWoqdJ6rIoo
NikolaNovak 6y ago
Absolutely. Equipment may pose constraints on what you can feasibly do (though fewer than people think). How and what you then do within these constraints is largely up to you. Will AI increasingly get better and better framing, colours, processing, etc? Most definitely. For the immediate future though, the emotion and ideas of talented, innovative photographers will still stand above.
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  Videos like the "Pro Photographer Cheap Camera"[1] series do a good job of illustrating just how true this is. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7ECB90D96DF59DE5 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7ECB90D96DF59DE5
kieckerjan 6y ago
Exactly! Point in case. My girlfriend has an art background and a crappy phone, I have a good DSLR and little experience. When you look at our holiday pictures, mine are razor sharp but boring as hell, hers are compressed to a pulp but always funny or interesting to look at. We should really swap cameras. :)
- petepete 6y ago
  I'm very much into photography and I struggle from this whenever I stray outside of my comfort zone, wildlife.
  - beamatronic 6y ago
    Just bring some wildlife with you wherever you go and include it in the photo! Should make for some interesting shots...
- fatnoah 6y ago
  This is exactly me and my wife. I'm so frustrated that she doesn't want to learn how to use the SLR. I spend hours agonizing over composition, etc. She just walks up, snaps a pic, and it's perfectly composed but looks like it was watercolors painted with a potato. :(
- beamatronic 6y ago
  Is there an online gallery?
- tomc1985 6y ago
  "compressed to a pulp" sounds like a problem with her postprocessing setup, not her camera
- smileysteve 6y ago
  Be wary though; your subjects are affected by the type of camera; A phone may be less noticed for a photo, so you get a more candid photo. The most annoying thing is using a prime lens or low light photos and people see you have a camera and get in a line to pose, and you're like, I... can't zoom out and can't get you all in focus.
alistairSH 6y ago
You're absolutely correct. And it's no different than any other art. But, there are edge cases where a cellphone camera just doesn't work very well. Capturing motion (sports, kids), low-light (bars, concerts, indoor sports), telephoto (birds and animals), and macro (100% scale, insects, flowers, some product photography). Of course, the best camera is the one you have with you. And cellphone cameras mean that we always have a camera in our pocket or purse. But, I still bring 1-2 camera bodies and 2-4 lenses on most vacations.
- phkahler 6y ago
  I just got a "real" camera a few years ago and I find it much better than any of our phone cameras. The thing is the phones have gotten a lot better and are no longer "good enough" but are actually nice. Big lenses and large sensors are still a lot better, but you often can't tell if pictures never go beyond your phone or social media posts.
- galaxyLogic 6y ago
  I think the right approach is to have both, if you are a serious photo-hobbyist. You need a phone anyway. The value of a good phone-camera is that you most always have it with you. A picture is only as good as the thing it is a picture of.
- mcguire 6y ago
  The best portraits I ever took were with a 75mm lens and 2x teleconverter. Nothing is out of proportion and the people look natural because they don't have a camera in their faces. That's hard to do with a cell phone.
egypturnash 6y ago
I am a pro artist and there is certainly some of this going on when I take a photo but to be quite honest the default photo UI is just so shitty compared to grabbing a huge ring to adjust your focus, and snapping a couple quick photos around your estimate of what the right f-stop for the situation is, that I really just don't want to get into more than trying to get a decent angle of natural lighting and some composition I don't hate. Also as Scalzi notes, the phone's wide-angle lens is rarely the right choice for a lot of good shots, and yet it's all that's available unless I wanna start carrying unwieldy accessories all the time.
vmception 6y ago
I used to be obsessed over image clarity and sharpness, and now I'm not. When using a DSLR or EVIL camera with a traditional body, I tend to degrade image quality in post for added charm.
jl6 6y ago
This is spot on, but one additional factor that makes me desire a high-res DSLR is because I know one day we will have retina wallpaper and the billboard use case will be real and mass-market. I would like to capture as much data as possible in the camera so I can re-enjoy the scene in the most immersive way in the future. Most of the pictures I take are most definitely not art, just an attempt at snapshotting now.
bitbuilder 6y ago
I spent from around 2008 to to 2019 carrying a decent camera with me almost everywhere I went. I loved taking photos, and I wanted to make sure I was capturing them in the best format I could. I also only shared on social media photos that were taken with my DSLR or whatever I was carrying at the time. I received a ton of positive feedback on the quality of the photos, with everyone commenting on the fact I must have a nice camera, asking what camera I used, etc. Last year, after playing around with an iPhone 10, I made a conscious decision to leave my camera at home for most occasions, and do the best I could with just my phone. The quality was such that I didn't feel I was losing out on much by not using a fancy camera. Since then 99% of what I post on social media has been shot with my iPhone. And yet, I still, constantly, have people telling me "you must have a nice camera, what kind is it?" They sometimes refuse to believe me when I say it was my phone. There's no real secret to it, I don't think. I spend a lot of time considering framing, perspective, lighting. I also still post-process in Lightroom (on my phone) most photos I post. Just simple things like some straightening/cropping, maybe bumping the contrast and clarity a bit. I've come to believe there are really only two things you need a nice camera (or more accurately, lenses) for: 1) nice background separation with a shallow DOF. The iPhone portrait mode is still pretty mediocre, and finicky to use. And 2) the changes in perspective different focal lengths can give you. Compression with a telephoto can give some really nice effects, and you can't beat the wide open sweep of a wide angle. The fact my iPhone now has 14mm, 26mm, and 52mm focal lengths makes that last point even more irrelevant. And it's so awesome I can quickly toggle through them, rather than swapping lenses or carrying a heavy zoom lens. Of course phone camera sensors haven't caught up yet with "real" cameras. If you're doing serious night shooting a big sensor still can't be beat. But frankly I'm amazed at just how well my phone does do in low light (just don't pixel peep on a large screen).
centimeter 6y ago
It’s true that skill and composition are tremendously important, but having a good camera makes it so much easier to achieve your artistic goals at all skill levels. You have much finer control over things that you have limited or no control over on a cell phone (e.g. aperture), and you can worry a lot less about e.g. low light performance or your ability to push curves in post without getting really bad noise or banding or whatever.
TheRealPomax 6y ago
The question is what you see from the person taking those photographs: both will probably have a portfolio of gorgeous deliberate shots, but the person with the actual camera will have a porfolio with a wide variety of types of photos (not subject matter but actual shot: framing, perspective, distance, depth, etc) whereas the portfolio of cell phone photos will be mostly the same, give or take crops and digital edits. Just viewing lots of photos from lots of different people doesn't tell you the story of what you can do with the tech you're looking at: you really need to look at what individual people are able to get out of them, and cell phone cameras still drastically lose out there, even the ones with "multiple cameras". There are some elementary things that the effectively-pinhole-cameras on a phone just can't do that are trivial with a physically manipulable lens.
amelius 6y ago
> I think especially we people in tech, who can often more easily afford it, tend to jump to getting more sophisticated, expensive gear, be that photography, music, painting, etc. expecting better results, forgetting that it's all pretty worthless, if you don't get the fundamental artistry and techniques right first. Yes, the main point is the diminishing artistic returns from more expensive gear.
thisisnico 6y ago
Also to be fair, this comparison isn't fair. The phone has post-processing of the images to improve quality and low-light. DSLR's give raw images so that the photo editor can make those optimizations as necessary. Also, auto-modes on DSLR's are abysmal, especially in low-light settings. A good photographer with the right settings could make the first picture look incredible.
- criddell 6y ago
  There's no reason for the DSLRs to be abysmal in any regard. Google, Apple, and Sony have shown what's possible with a tiny sensor and lens when you add in computation. Can you imagine what they could do with a big sensor and big lens? It feels like that's the space Nikon, Canon, and the other big camera companies should be working on. Is there any innovation coming out of the camera companies?
  - thisisnico 6y ago
    I agree with this. If I buy a modern DSLR, utilizing the same tech as phones with automatic image optimization, I can only imagine how incredible the quality of the Image be by default. It's possible, but they really need to devote the engineering resources to this.
  - AuryGlenz 6y ago
    There's plenty of innovation on the hardware side - the move to mirrorless cameras has been the largest jump since digital became a thing (although most pros a sticking with DSLRs for now). Sensors are continually improved, and lenses are better every year. The software side...not so much. The amount of customization in cameras isn't up to par. For instance, Nikon DSLRs have an image quality button. That's a button that I never want to hit, as it can change the quality from RAW to 'Basic JPEG.' The only way you'll notice that happened is if you see the amount of images you can fit on your card jump up. There's no way to disable it, and on the D750/D610 it's right next to the damned primary ISO button, and they even swapped places between those two cameras. Fuji has some good film emulation postprocessing for their jpegs. I will say though that a lot of the postprocessing that's done on cell phones is to make up for their limited capabilities. I actually have everything turned off on my DSLRs, as the postprocessing effects the jpeg that's built in to the RAW file. That means what you see on the back on the camera isn't necessarily what you took.
ip26 6y ago
The capabilities of a dedicated camera do help learn about all these concepts. How do you even begin to learn about aperture & depth of field or motion blur if you can't experiment with it? A great chef can cook an amazing meal in a pie tin over a camp stove, but that's not the best way to learn.
roosterdawn 6y ago
I love this point and I've repeated it so often over the years to friends and colleagues who end up at this point. A good forcing function is to always ask, when you're getting a new tool, whether you've exhausted the capabilities of your current setup. It's hard to be honest about this, but consider what skilled practitioners can do with lo-fi equipment, and you might find it'll force you to re-evaluate what you can do with yours. At a certain point, I stopped looking to new gear (as it pertains to music) and started focusing on trying to push the boundaries of what I had. As it turns out, I wasn't anywhere near close to pushing what I had to its limits, which proved I should just focus on technique and craftsmanship. Since then, I've grown a lot more.
AuryGlenz 6y ago
I'm a professional. I could do most of my work with cheap DSLR without much difference (although full frame vs. a crop sensor has some differences that couldn't be made up). It's the edge cases where a top of the line camera/lens can become necessary. I've had church ceremonies where I've had to be at 6400 ISO at f/1.4. There are times where you need to work quickly and don't have time to get a perfect exposure, so having extra latitude in post production is key. There are also performance issues such as the ability to keep focus on a moving or dark target. I'm primarily a photojournalist wedding photographer and I end up taking ~6000 pictures for a 10 hour wedding, and that'll get winnowed down to 1000 or less. The amounts are all over the place but that ratio is roughly what I've heard from other photographers. Don't feel bad about bad photos; the primary advantage to digital is that we can do that without wasting film.

by smoe 6y ago

kqr 6y ago

As someone who does know a lot about photography, I can tell you that you sure can give off an impression of knowing a lot about photography.

crispyporkbites 6y ago
The more you know, the more you know you don't know.
slantyyz 6y ago
I have found that a lot of people who aren't into photography tend to draw a positive impression of a person's photographic knowledge/skill based on that person's gear (bigger, more accessories, expensive appearance). But then again, I have also found that a lot of people who are into photography will draw a negative impression of a person's knowledge/skill based on that person's gear (sensor size, brand preference, lens choices).
- gen220 6y ago
  I find it's like programmers arguing about laptops. At the end of the day, you're arguing about something that you want to "get out of your way" as much as possible. All that time you spend arguing, you could spend programming or learning. Imagine if you were sitting next to a reincarnation of Ken Thompson at a local coffee shop... who cares if he's typing into a surface pro? The writing and the writer are the important things. In photography, it's the shooter, the subject, and the choice of frame. Gear-ogling is fun to geek over, but past a certain low threshold, it's a waste of everyone's time. I had a friend who got a chance of a lifetime to go on a photography trip to Mongolia with a pro who had worked for Nat Geo. The dude had some seriously impressive gear. He was kind enough to lend some of it to my friend, who loves to geek out over these things, while the pro used more enthusiast-accessible glass. Shiny gear is nice, but it's best thought of as a set of interchangeable tools.
  - slantyyz 6y ago
    I don't know what it is, but people want other people to be like them. You can substitute anything in the place of "laptops" - programming languages, methodologies, coffee, barbecue sauce, diets, exercise etc.

smiley1437 6y ago

Informally, it’s called ‘having an eye’ and some people are blessed with it, others work hard to acquire it, and camera technology can seem to offer it. But ultimately, you’re right, it’s still your choices as a photographer that most influence the quality of the work, and while good tech doesn’t hurt, it’s not really the tech.

slantyyz 6y ago
Note that it also applies to consumers of photography as well. Not all consumers of photography necessarily draw any artistic value from the photos they look at. For example, my mother would complain about my travel photos that didn't contain people, or would look for things like whether the people looked happy. She couldn't care less about the rule of thirds, bokeh or dramatic lighting. Don't get me wrong, artistry and craft matter, but I think they would be considered "enhancements". Most people would gladly accept a poorly composed image of a loved one or special moment because they value the memory over other attributes.
- ValentineC 6y ago
  > For example, my mother would complain about my travel photos that didn't contain people, or would look for things like whether the people looked happy. She couldn't care less about the rule of thirds, bokeh or dramatic lighting. Heh, this is one thing I regret about my past photos — I have plenty of travel photos, but very few with myself in them. And while I know my composition and lighting fundamentals, my photos will rarely be on par with someone with the luxury to wait for the right moment, or something from a postcard or the best of Flickr or 500px.
  - slantyyz 6y ago
    I'm also rarely in my travel photos, but that's more because I don't like looking at myself in photos.
    - panta 6y ago
      Now, but will you think the same in 20 or 30 years?

gen220 6y ago

In 2012, I took a photography class led by a professional photographer, and she actively encouraged students to use their phones if they couldn’t get access to a DSLR, and her reasoning was exactly what you describe. To her, composition, color, contrast, textures, lines, framing, and pose was everything. That’s what she was trying to teach us, because that’s the hardest part. Mastering your camera’s settings just takes a lot of time and trial & error. And this was in 2012, when mobile phones had terrible cameras, mind you! Of course, resolution and noise are distracting when you print big, but she was trying to judge us for our eyes and hands, rather than for our cameras and mastery over their settings. They’re orthogonal if the observer wants them to be.

frosted-flakes 6y ago
I took a photography class in college, and the professor had us down-scale our photos to a super low resolution before submitting them. Both to keep file sizes down, and because he was judging us on our composition skills, not the quality of our cameras.
- sukilot 6y ago
  Resolution only matters for super duper digital zoom for super large prints. An 18MP phone cam is worse than a 2MP DSLR. Resolution is useless if the lens can't put the right light on each pixel. For a bad photographer, a good camera makes a huge difference. It has focal length/bokeh, dynamic range, shutter speed, and more to "get" a good shot that a phonecam can't.
mnw21cam 6y ago
There's also the factor of "The best camera is the one you actually have with you". If you have a fantastic camera sitting at home when a photo opportunity arises, it isn't much use. A mobile phone camera is often the best camera because of this.
TheRealPomax 6y ago
That's basically the same lesson we've been getting before phones, too, only it used to be a polaroid, or even disposable cameras, as it's important to first learn the basics, and the tech does not matter at that level. Once you've learned the basics, though, the tech starts to matter a lot and the limitations of that phone, or that disposable camera or polaroid, starts to interfere with the things you know you want to capture and how you want it to look, but simply can't.

iNate2000 6y ago

Totally I got my first DSLR in 2006. When I got a new one a few years later, my choice was mostly about what the new camera made _easier_. Because the old camera could do almost everything I wanted to do. So the new camera had knobs and buttons for things that I had to do in menus on the old one. And a couple of automatic things that I had to do manually on the old one. (Shooting brackets!)

akiselev 6y ago

That's why I jumped into large format film cameras. DSLRs are nice but when tilting the lens plane relative to the film plane on a 4x5 field camera, the effects on the scene are stunning. It requires a much more intuitive grasp of optics, though.

eropple 6y ago
Also a wheelbarrow of cash! Can you even get started with less than $3K?
- akiselev 6y ago
  You can buy a used Crown Graphic with the stock lens for a few hundred, used film holders for $20-40, $50 for used tanks, etc. A frugal/patient person should be able to keep it to under $500 total - I went a bit over that because I bought a new Sekonic light meter. $2-3k is more if you're doing the enlarging yourself or shooting larger film like 8x10 where the costs rapidly grow out of control. However, if you're handy it can be a lot cheaper. Except for the lens and billows, which are relatively cheap on ebay, everything can be made out of relatively cheap material available at hardware store. The tricky part is leveling the lens and film planes.
mcyukon 6y ago
Never heard of that technique before! Found some videos from Ben Horne about it, that explain it well to a non medium format shooter. Quite a cool way of adjusting the DOF on a scene.

bregma 6y ago

When desktop publishing became a thing back in the 1990s anyone could put a book together. Fancy typesetting, high-dpm printing, kerning, text wrapping, heck it looked great. You still had to be able to write to create good content. That never changed. Now anyone can squeeze out polished crap at the touch of a button because the technology makes it simple to produce something that appears sort of like something that used to take experts a lot of work. It still takes experts a lot of work to produce something of quality. The rest of us just produce a lot.

RichardCA 6y ago
The idea that a certain type of photography is only used by the low, artless, amateur crowd that has no taste has existed throughout the entire history of photography. You can start around 18 minutes in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWoqdJ6rIoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWoqdJ6rIoo

NikolaNovak 6y ago

Absolutely. Equipment may pose constraints on what you can feasibly do (though fewer than people think). How and what you then do within these constraints is largely up to you. Will AI increasingly get better and better framing, colours, processing, etc? Most definitely. For the immediate future though, the emotion and ideas of talented, innovative photographers will still stand above.

EvanAnderson 6y ago
Videos like the "Pro Photographer Cheap Camera"[1] series do a good job of illustrating just how true this is. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7ECB90D96DF59DE5 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7ECB90D96DF59DE5

kieckerjan 6y ago

Exactly! Point in case. My girlfriend has an art background and a crappy phone, I have a good DSLR and little experience. When you look at our holiday pictures, mine are razor sharp but boring as hell, hers are compressed to a pulp but always funny or interesting to look at. We should really swap cameras. :)

petepete 6y ago
I'm very much into photography and I struggle from this whenever I stray outside of my comfort zone, wildlife.
- beamatronic 6y ago
  Just bring some wildlife with you wherever you go and include it in the photo! Should make for some interesting shots...
fatnoah 6y ago
This is exactly me and my wife. I'm so frustrated that she doesn't want to learn how to use the SLR. I spend hours agonizing over composition, etc. She just walks up, snaps a pic, and it's perfectly composed but looks like it was watercolors painted with a potato. :(
beamatronic 6y ago
Is there an online gallery?
tomc1985 6y ago
"compressed to a pulp" sounds like a problem with her postprocessing setup, not her camera
smileysteve 6y ago
Be wary though; your subjects are affected by the type of camera; A phone may be less noticed for a photo, so you get a more candid photo. The most annoying thing is using a prime lens or low light photos and people see you have a camera and get in a line to pose, and you're like, I... can't zoom out and can't get you all in focus.

alistairSH 6y ago

You're absolutely correct. And it's no different than any other art. But, there are edge cases where a cellphone camera just doesn't work very well. Capturing motion (sports, kids), low-light (bars, concerts, indoor sports), telephoto (birds and animals), and macro (100% scale, insects, flowers, some product photography). Of course, the best camera is the one you have with you. And cellphone cameras mean that we always have a camera in our pocket or purse. But, I still bring 1-2 camera bodies and 2-4 lenses on most vacations.

phkahler 6y ago
I just got a "real" camera a few years ago and I find it much better than any of our phone cameras. The thing is the phones have gotten a lot better and are no longer "good enough" but are actually nice. Big lenses and large sensors are still a lot better, but you often can't tell if pictures never go beyond your phone or social media posts.
galaxyLogic 6y ago
I think the right approach is to have both, if you are a serious photo-hobbyist. You need a phone anyway. The value of a good phone-camera is that you most always have it with you. A picture is only as good as the thing it is a picture of.
mcguire 6y ago
The best portraits I ever took were with a 75mm lens and 2x teleconverter. Nothing is out of proportion and the people look natural because they don't have a camera in their faces. That's hard to do with a cell phone.

egypturnash 6y ago

I am a pro artist and there is certainly some of this going on when I take a photo but to be quite honest the default photo UI is just so shitty compared to grabbing a huge ring to adjust your focus, and snapping a couple quick photos around your estimate of what the right f-stop for the situation is, that I really just don't want to get into more than trying to get a decent angle of natural lighting and some composition I don't hate. Also as Scalzi notes, the phone's wide-angle lens is rarely the right choice for a lot of good shots, and yet it's all that's available unless I wanna start carrying unwieldy accessories all the time.

vmception 6y ago

I used to be obsessed over image clarity and sharpness, and now I'm not. When using a DSLR or EVIL camera with a traditional body, I tend to degrade image quality in post for added charm.

jl6 6y ago

This is spot on, but one additional factor that makes me desire a high-res DSLR is because I know one day we will have retina wallpaper and the billboard use case will be real and mass-market. I would like to capture as much data as possible in the camera so I can re-enjoy the scene in the most immersive way in the future. Most of the pictures I take are most definitely not art, just an attempt at snapshotting now.

bitbuilder 6y ago

I spent from around 2008 to to 2019 carrying a decent camera with me almost everywhere I went. I loved taking photos, and I wanted to make sure I was capturing them in the best format I could. I also only shared on social media photos that were taken with my DSLR or whatever I was carrying at the time. I received a ton of positive feedback on the quality of the photos, with everyone commenting on the fact I must have a nice camera, asking what camera I used, etc. Last year, after playing around with an iPhone 10, I made a conscious decision to leave my camera at home for most occasions, and do the best I could with just my phone. The quality was such that I didn't feel I was losing out on much by not using a fancy camera. Since then 99% of what I post on social media has been shot with my iPhone. And yet, I still, constantly, have people telling me "you must have a nice camera, what kind is it?" They sometimes refuse to believe me when I say it was my phone. There's no real secret to it, I don't think. I spend a lot of time considering framing, perspective, lighting. I also still post-process in Lightroom (on my phone) most photos I post. Just simple things like some straightening/cropping, maybe bumping the contrast and clarity a bit. I've come to believe there are really only two things you need a nice camera (or more accurately, lenses) for: 1) nice background separation with a shallow DOF. The iPhone portrait mode is still pretty mediocre, and finicky to use. And 2) the changes in perspective different focal lengths can give you. Compression with a telephoto can give some really nice effects, and you can't beat the wide open sweep of a wide angle. The fact my iPhone now has 14mm, 26mm, and 52mm focal lengths makes that last point even more irrelevant. And it's so awesome I can quickly toggle through them, rather than swapping lenses or carrying a heavy zoom lens. Of course phone camera sensors haven't caught up yet with "real" cameras. If you're doing serious night shooting a big sensor still can't be beat. But frankly I'm amazed at just how well my phone does do in low light (just don't pixel peep on a large screen).

centimeter 6y ago

It’s true that skill and composition are tremendously important, but having a good camera makes it so much easier to achieve your artistic goals at all skill levels. You have much finer control over things that you have limited or no control over on a cell phone (e.g. aperture), and you can worry a lot less about e.g. low light performance or your ability to push curves in post without getting really bad noise or banding or whatever.

TheRealPomax 6y ago

The question is what you see from the person taking those photographs: both will probably have a portfolio of gorgeous deliberate shots, but the person with the actual camera will have a porfolio with a wide variety of types of photos (not subject matter but actual shot: framing, perspective, distance, depth, etc) whereas the portfolio of cell phone photos will be mostly the same, give or take crops and digital edits. Just viewing lots of photos from lots of different people doesn't tell you the story of what you can do with the tech you're looking at: you really need to look at what individual people are able to get out of them, and cell phone cameras still drastically lose out there, even the ones with "multiple cameras". There are some elementary things that the effectively-pinhole-cameras on a phone just can't do that are trivial with a physically manipulable lens.

amelius 6y ago

> I think especially we people in tech, who can often more easily afford it, tend to jump to getting more sophisticated, expensive gear, be that photography, music, painting, etc. expecting better results, forgetting that it's all pretty worthless, if you don't get the fundamental artistry and techniques right first. Yes, the main point is the diminishing artistic returns from more expensive gear.

thisisnico 6y ago

Also to be fair, this comparison isn't fair. The phone has post-processing of the images to improve quality and low-light. DSLR's give raw images so that the photo editor can make those optimizations as necessary. Also, auto-modes on DSLR's are abysmal, especially in low-light settings. A good photographer with the right settings could make the first picture look incredible.

criddell 6y ago
There's no reason for the DSLRs to be abysmal in any regard. Google, Apple, and Sony have shown what's possible with a tiny sensor and lens when you add in computation. Can you imagine what they could do with a big sensor and big lens? It feels like that's the space Nikon, Canon, and the other big camera companies should be working on. Is there any innovation coming out of the camera companies?
- thisisnico 6y ago
  I agree with this. If I buy a modern DSLR, utilizing the same tech as phones with automatic image optimization, I can only imagine how incredible the quality of the Image be by default. It's possible, but they really need to devote the engineering resources to this.
- AuryGlenz 6y ago
  There's plenty of innovation on the hardware side - the move to mirrorless cameras has been the largest jump since digital became a thing (although most pros a sticking with DSLRs for now). Sensors are continually improved, and lenses are better every year. The software side...not so much. The amount of customization in cameras isn't up to par. For instance, Nikon DSLRs have an image quality button. That's a button that I never want to hit, as it can change the quality from RAW to 'Basic JPEG.' The only way you'll notice that happened is if you see the amount of images you can fit on your card jump up. There's no way to disable it, and on the D750/D610 it's right next to the damned primary ISO button, and they even swapped places between those two cameras. Fuji has some good film emulation postprocessing for their jpegs. I will say though that a lot of the postprocessing that's done on cell phones is to make up for their limited capabilities. I actually have everything turned off on my DSLRs, as the postprocessing effects the jpeg that's built in to the RAW file. That means what you see on the back on the camera isn't necessarily what you took.

ip26 6y ago

The capabilities of a dedicated camera do help learn about all these concepts. How do you even begin to learn about aperture & depth of field or motion blur if you can't experiment with it? A great chef can cook an amazing meal in a pie tin over a camp stove, but that's not the best way to learn.

roosterdawn 6y ago

I love this point and I've repeated it so often over the years to friends and colleagues who end up at this point. A good forcing function is to always ask, when you're getting a new tool, whether you've exhausted the capabilities of your current setup. It's hard to be honest about this, but consider what skilled practitioners can do with lo-fi equipment, and you might find it'll force you to re-evaluate what you can do with yours. At a certain point, I stopped looking to new gear (as it pertains to music) and started focusing on trying to push the boundaries of what I had. As it turns out, I wasn't anywhere near close to pushing what I had to its limits, which proved I should just focus on technique and craftsmanship. Since then, I've grown a lot more.

AuryGlenz 6y ago

I'm a professional. I could do most of my work with cheap DSLR without much difference (although full frame vs. a crop sensor has some differences that couldn't be made up). It's the edge cases where a top of the line camera/lens can become necessary. I've had church ceremonies where I've had to be at 6400 ISO at f/1.4. There are times where you need to work quickly and don't have time to get a perfect exposure, so having extra latitude in post production is key. There are also performance issues such as the ability to keep focus on a moving or dark target. I'm primarily a photojournalist wedding photographer and I end up taking ~6000 pictures for a 10 hour wedding, and that'll get winnowed down to 1000 or less. The amounts are all over the place but that ratio is roughly what I've heard from other photographers. Don't feel bad about bad photos; the primary advantage to digital is that we can do that without wasting film.