Does Your Camera Matter?...

“There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.” – Ernst Haas

I was reminded of this quote the other day when I saw a post online titled “Will the Sony a7 III Cause You to Jump Ship?”

This is typical of the obsession with gear in photography today. Everyone wants more megapixels, more AF points, faster frame rates, mirrorless cameras, EVF (electronic viewfinders), IBIS (in body image stabilization), and on and on. People are not satisfied with the lenses they have so they keep buying the latest f/1.2 Art lens thinking that will improve their photography.

And when a new camera comes out, it foretells the death of Nikon or Canon, or Sony, or DSLRs.

Or the incessant comparisons between cameras: “We compare the Sony A 7 R III to the Canon 5D Mark II to the Nikon D850. Which camera is better?” Really?

And thanks to the manufacturer’s marketing efforts and photography blogs, and YouTube videos the obsession with gear continues. I think that in no other art form is there such an obsession with the tools used to produce the final work of art. (I doubt if you’ll find that sculptors obsess over their tools asking questions of which chisel is better, should I buy this chisel or wait for the next version. Or painters posting comparisons of different manufacturer’s brushes or canvases.)

For me, none of that really matters. What matters is the image, the photograph you produce. What matters is your vision. What matters is what you feel about your subject. What matters is how you framed your image, the quality of focus, the depiction of time, and how you arranged the content of your image.

And don’t get me started on megapixels. I dare say that most people who get into these discussion are not making huge prints but are mainly posting to web sites. You really need a 50 MP camera to post to Flickr?

And if you print, most affordable printers can only manage A3 or A4 paper size. I’ve printed images on A3 paper that came from a 3 PM camera and they are gorgeous.

Here are some images that were taken with the following cameras:

Canon Powershot S410 - 4MP 

CoolPix 5700 - 5MP

Olympus EPL1 - 12MP

Nikon D1 - 3MP

Nikon D1X - 5MP

Nikon D50 - 6MP

Nikon D300 - 12MP

Nikon D5100 - 16.2MP

Nikon D7000 - 16.2MP

Nikon D610 - 24.3MP

Nikon D750 - 24.3MP

Nikon D7500 - 21MP

Motorola G3 - 13MP

Can you match the photograph to the camera and megapixels?

I didn’t think so. Because “There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.” – Ernst Haas

‘Tri-X, f/8, and be there.”