There’s a pretty harsh debate going on these days between Michael Reichmann of Luminous Landscape and Ken Rockwell. This started with a rebuttal, titled Your Camera Does Matter, written by Reichman in response to Rockwell’s Your Camera Doesn’t Matter article.
This is an old and tired debate and, when it starts up again with words like “clowns of cliche”, it doesn’t look like it is going very far this time either. Still I cannot resist throwing in my two cents of an opinion, which is that Ken is basically right and Michael, while not being totally wrong, is at least misrepresenting Ken’s position.
Michael is not wrong because, obviously, it would be foolish to say that the quality of the equipment you are using is not going to influence the quality of the product. But that’s not what Ken is saying. What Ken is saying, and what I agree with is that you will not get better pictures simply by using better equipment, unless you define “better” as sharper, cleaner, bigger, with more dynamic range or all these things together. Photography is art (well, at least we like to think that it is) and those qualities do not make a picture artistically worthier than a small, noisy, fuzzy, distorted Holga picture.
When Michael writes:
Discussing the merits of one tool over another is relevant. Some lenses, cameras and other photographic tools are better than others. In some cases they are objectively better, while in others their degree of betterness will be subjetive and will depend on the specific needs of a particular photographer.
It appears as he hasn’t ever read Ken’s website, because if he had he would have seen tens of articles discussing the merits of cameras and lenses.
So isn’t Ken a bit hypocritical by saying that cameras don’t matter and, on the same website, extolling the virtues of the latest Nikon offerings, like the D300 which he nominates “the world’s best amateur camera”?
And what to make of this?
4×5″ Cameras Still Rule the Roost: For serious photographers who need quality, versatility and convenience, 4×5″ has been the king for decades. I often point out that while Outdoor Photographer magazine does almost nothing but push the new digital products of its advertisers, their showcase and cover shots are usually made on 4×5″ cameras.
Well, what I think Ken is getting at (and I hope he is reading this and feels like commenting, in case I missed the point) is that a particular kind of camera, with particular qualities, will let you make a particular kind of picture, which you will not be able to do with an inferior camera. It’s true that you cannot shoot a great landscape picture with a pinhole camera, but it might as well be that the low-quality street scene shot with the pinhole camera is better (according to some subjective but shared by a sufficiently large number of people) than the perfectly sharp landscape. And it is not only possible, but highly probable, that millions of people will buy an expensive camera and hope to replicate an Ansel Adams masterpiece. They will usually fail and blame the camera for their failure. What they don’t realize is that their camera truly does not matter.
Well written.
I recently bought a Nikon D40, and though I’d love (and I’m still debating) to purchase a D300 I think buying some decent lenses would be a better investment.
The debate can be summed up very easily. It all boils down to what you are trying to accomplish.
So, really there is no right or wrong. Rather, what you are doing determines the outcome. Use the tools (or lack thereof) as appropriate for that situation.
Just my two cents.