3 ms·

ingent learning a few things about composition and picking an interesting place to take your first pictures than it is making sure you have the best camera.

twic 13y ago
You don't need to have the best camera, it's true. But you do need to have an adequate camera, where adequacy relates to the purposes you have. For example, i used to have a little digital compact. It had autofocus; the autofocus wasn't perfect, or even particularly great, and there was no way at all to focus manually. I have countless pictures which were ruined by being out of focus, and there was nothing i could do about it. I now have a camera which lets me focus manually, which means that a picture's being in focus or not is now entirely in my hands. The former camera was not adequate for the photographs i wanted to take; this one is. An interesting point is that a 40-year-old film camera would also have been adequate, although much less helpful in other ways. This feels like it could be a good metaphor. C is a 40-year-old SLR covered in dials and switches, enormously capable but a nightmare to work with to anyone but a master; JavaScript is a digital compact which automates everything whether you like it or not. Java is a modern dSLR, capable and more automated than C, but still clunky. Rust is a Leica M9, still manual but modern in other respects. Go is a bafflingly-horrendous-to-outsiders Lomo camera. PHP is a Fisher-Price toy camera. Clojure is a Lytro, weird but capable of amazing things (but weird). Scala fans think their language an E-M5, but it's really an EOS M.
- cbsmith 13y ago
  > The former camera was not adequate for the photographs i wanted to take; this one is. Right, but that doesn't necessarily comment on its effectiveness as a tool to assist in learning how to take good photographs. > An interesting point is that a 40-year-old film camera would also have been adequate, although much less helpful in other ways. This is more in line with what I'm getting at. There are perfectly good (even great) cameras out there, but there are cameras that are better suited to helping you get up to facilitating the learning process, and others that will hamper it. While perhaps not the most essential component of the learning process, they still kind of matter and are a perfectly reasonable aspect for someone to discuss.

twic 13y ago

You don't need to have the best camera, it's true. But you do need to have an adequate camera, where adequacy relates to the purposes you have. For example, i used to have a little digital compact. It had autofocus; the autofocus wasn't perfect, or even particularly great, and there was no way at all to focus manually. I have countless pictures which were ruined by being out of focus, and there was nothing i could do about it. I now have a camera which lets me focus manually, which means that a picture's being in focus or not is now entirely in my hands. The former camera was not adequate for the photographs i wanted to take; this one is. An interesting point is that a 40-year-old film camera would also have been adequate, although much less helpful in other ways. This feels like it could be a good metaphor. C is a 40-year-old SLR covered in dials and switches, enormously capable but a nightmare to work with to anyone but a master; JavaScript is a digital compact which automates everything whether you like it or not. Java is a modern dSLR, capable and more automated than C, but still clunky. Rust is a Leica M9, still manual but modern in other respects. Go is a bafflingly-horrendous-to-outsiders Lomo camera. PHP is a Fisher-Price toy camera. Clojure is a Lytro, weird but capable of amazing things (but weird). Scala fans think their language an E-M5, but it's really an EOS M.

cbsmith 13y ago
> The former camera was not adequate for the photographs i wanted to take; this one is. Right, but that doesn't necessarily comment on its effectiveness as a tool to assist in learning how to take good photographs. > An interesting point is that a 40-year-old film camera would also have been adequate, although much less helpful in other ways. This is more in line with what I'm getting at. There are perfectly good (even great) cameras out there, but there are cameras that are better suited to helping you get up to facilitating the learning process, and others that will hamper it. While perhaps not the most essential component of the learning process, they still kind of matter and are a perfectly reasonable aspect for someone to discuss.