OK, so I’m tired of all this bullshit on the web about how your camera doesn’t matter, no need for that 4000 dollar setup, etc. Then there was this crap (which I got via kottke, a pretty good blog usually) about how the old masters, those before autofocus and autoexposure had it about the same as anyone with a point and shoot. The photographers he mentions for the most part shot with Leicas, cameras renowned for their speed, quality, and ability to work in low light even with the ISO 400 films of the time. (The author of that piece confuses old color emulsions, which were very slow, with black and white, which have been reasonable since the mid nineteen thirties). Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of my personal heroes, whom he mentions by name, was famous for almost always using a 50mm f/2 lens and ISO 400 Tri-x, moderately fast film with incredible tonalities possible.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to make good photos with cheap or lesser cameras. I’m even using some of the shots from my old G9 in the book I’m trying to produce. But telling people to buck up and try harder in the face of the crap that is the consumer camera market right now, well, that’s bullshit. The factors that are comparable are not the important ones to photographers. The important things are all related to creative control and perspective. The reason little digital cameras mostly suck is you have little control over how the thing sees; it’s very hard to fit your vision into a little screen. Here’s a list of the things that do matter, though:

1. Format size. This comes before every other consideration, as it is a defining characteristic of how the camera will work, its weight, how the image is printed, how depth of field is established, all sorts of things. Bigger gives higher technical image quality, and smaller means better ease of use. My personal choice is the 24x36mm rectangle- a good balance between optical and tonal qualities and the ability to move around. Notice I say here “format” and not “megapixels”; the difference being that format is very important and megapixels aren’t anymore.

2. Shutter Lag. THIS WAS ALMOST NUMBER ONE. That’s because it’s so often overlooked and it’s perhaps the most important to the most photographers (potential and actual). A camera’s shutter lag needs to be small, less than one tenth of a second, for it to be remotely useful in getting a moment, which for me is all of photography. Most crappy (P&S) cameras, you could press the shutter button, go have lunch, come back, start a pot of coffee for the afternoon, and then, finally, the camera will make the exposure. Completely unacceptable. In most old manual cameras, this wasn’t a problem, because the mechanical path from the shutter to the button was short and fast.

3. Focal Length. You may say that for a given photographer, they will have many lenses, but many tend toward one end of the spectrum or another- James Nachtwey uses wide angles a lot, Cartier-Bresson preferred the fifty (normal in his preferred 35mm format), paparazzi live and die by their telephoto lenses, and if you ask ten photographers, you’ll get ten answers, all unique. I’m a normal and wider kind of photographer, 50 and 20.

4. Minimum F/stop- This determines the most amount of light that the lens can allow to pass through. I cart around a huge honking 50mm f/1.2, which gathers light somewhat akin to a radio telescope collecting signal, but that’s because I work in dark rooms with sketchy nonexistent lighting a lot. For most people, f/2 is plenty for most situations.

OK, so for most point and shoots, the lenses suck, the format sucks, the viewing sucks, and the shutter lag is longer than a smoke break. It’s a miracle these things make pictures at all. You almost have to be a savant to get anything good out of them. To the people out there that know better, please stop bullshitting amateurs into thinking that their camreras are capable machines, because more than likely the machine sucks and they haven’t a hope of getting better with it.

PS- Ken Rockwell, while being a little odd a lot of the time, has a lot of good smart things to say about photography and cameras, so long as you know he’s joking half of the time. The other guy makes some good points, too, but really, if the camera didn’t matter, we’d all be painters. Now go take some pictures.

Posted by Matt on 2009-02-23T00:00:00Z GMT