Are you obsessed with the technology only?

Oh, Sheeeep !!

I thought it was Great Astounding System

( referred to any equip items )

Agreed.

Perhaps surprisingly (to others), I don't have a favorite photographer, mostly because I don't know very many - probably just a few famous ones from history is all I could name. I'm pretty sure I couldn't name a single current photographer other than myself and my friends and coworkers.

An analogy is writing novels without ever reading other people's novels. It is not impossible that good novels could get written that way, but I don't think it's likely.

You're assuming I want to do what I think many photographers want to do - create "good" images, whatever that means. When I see those types of images, such as in galleries, I nearly always think they're all garbage. What that tells me is that what others think are "good" images do nothing for me. That could be because my preferences are unusual or that I just don't think of photography the way others do. Maybe both. For example, taking beautiful pictures is something like 1% of my interest in photography. I told that to someone once and the response shocked me as much as what I said shocked him. He said, "what else would you do?"

It’s okay to master a craft. You don’t have to use it to produce art.

Hi,

Not really, no. What drives me when it comes to gear is what I can do with newer stuff which I could not with older stuff.

My original camera as a box camera. It could take a picture. With one of everything: Lens, aperture, shutter speed. That was all. And that lens was a single piece of glass. So, it didn't take much camera technology to improve upon that.

Enter the 35mm SLR. Wow! Settings! And interchangeable lenses. Wild! But then I figured out the smaller negatives showed up with limited print size capability. Those box camera negatives enlarged far better. Hmmm.

Things that make you go Hmmm....

Enter the Mamiya 645 medium format camera. Has all the great stuff the 35mm has, and a larger negative. But not useful for all kinds of shooting. I needed both small and medium formats.

Time passed. Digital arrived. My first was a 1.3 MP that was the size of that Mamiya and used 35mm lenses. The Nikon E2. It became immediately obvious that the technology needed improvement. So I added a Kodak 460. And, again, improvements but not nearly enough.

Next up, the Nikon D1. Repeat. Then the D1H and D1X. Repeat. A side trip to Canon and the 1D and 1Ds pairing. Repeat. Back to Nikon.

Now it was Nikon F5 based Kodak 720x and a 760c and also a Kodak Pro Back on a Contax 645. And I found myself, for the first time with digital, at a point where I could shelve the film cameras. Yay for Technology! That was 2003.

In 2018, I finally bought a Nikon Df. That replaced all three Kodaks. But I did have many years of digital photographic contentment there.

Then came the Lighthouse Project in 2020 and the 16 MP of the Df proved insufficient. So I went with an older medium format camera which works out just fine for the project. A Pentax 645D. A very low cost 40 MP. And so back to the combination of small and medium formats.

But it isn't these pieces of technology themselves that drove me. It's what each could do, in turn, that other pieces could not.

Stan

I don't think anyone really produces art with photography.

I don't think I completely suck as a photographer. A Pulitzer prize winning photographer once told me I was a good photographer. But it's all about what sorts of things you like to shoot and images you like to make. Sometimes, I think I make pretty good images, but that doesn't mean you'll like them.

As to the topic, let me give you some examples, if I can. I like pictures of the moon. The moon, however, can be a challenging subject, mainly because it occupies only about 1/2 of one degree of angle of view from the Earth. So, for a good while, this was the best I could do:

Later, I got a bigger lens and a camera with smaller pixels, which enabled this:

Even bigger hardware got me these:

If you look at them at full size, you can see quite a progression of resolved detail, simply because I used bigger and better hardware for the later shots.

This isn't always the case with photography. Some subjects lend themselves to using small and modest hardware and still getting good shots. I think I have one or two shots in my favorites that were taken of relatively stationary subjects in good light at around 50mm equivalent. But that's not always possible. I don't care how good your skill is, if you shoot with a 35mm film camera with a 50/1.8, you will not get the shots I just posted.

Wow!

I know, many photographers violently disagree with that statement, but I don't state that lightly or without a great deal of thought.

Regardless, if you want to discuss that, let's take it to a new thread. I didn't intend to make that the focus of my posts.

Bold statement 🙂

I guess is depends on what you mean by "art" - it's not really a term which be determined by a forensic compliance checklist. A lot of art is simply declared to be so by critics and salesmen. Other work is recognised to be art by those who appreciate the work.

I might consider my own photography "art" because it is intended to be so, but that doesn't mean anyone else will necessarily agree. I'm reading Michael Kenna's book Trees at the moment. There are images in the book that look like art to me and there are other images that look like he stepped outside his front door and snapped the first tree he saw. But he clearly thinks they are all art (or at least his publisher does). Good book overall.

Those moon shots I posted don't display at the size at which I posted them. Do I have to upload to get images at the correct size instead of linking them? I'm not used to this forum software.

EDIT: If I right-click and open them in a new tab, they do display at the right size.

Personally, not much interested in the technology at all. I just love to take pictures. It doesn't matter a whole lot what I am using at the time, but I will be trying to push whatever it is to the limit and enjoying the experience. The ultimate technical quality of the images is way down the line in importance, good enough is good enough for me. And the extra gadgets the camera has is way down the list also. The enjoyment for me is the act of operating a quality instrument and seeing how well I can make it perform and having a photo record of the experience.

If you upload them, the full size images appear as a link button at the end of your post. If you also want a lower quality preview image in the body of your post, there is a create preview button as part of the full size image link you can see when you are in edit mode. Looks like this:

Myself personally, absolutely not. I've seen amazing photos throughout my lifetime. That's evidence enough that old gear can also create magic when a good operator stands behind it.

You need to get out more and take more photos. PERIOD.

Go out, every single day. Different places. Take photos of different things. Don't make excuses. Just get out and take photos.

I've played electric guitar for a very long time. It's the thing in my life that I'm best at. My advice to others who ask about buying a guitar is always the same. Get a used, beat up guitar. For two reasons. 1, because the guitar doesn't matter, and 2, if it's "expensive" or "pretty", you'll obsess over it, you'll be afraid of messing it up, and you'll never play it.

And the last piece of advice: If you don't want it bad enough, you'll never become great.

These three pieces of advice also apply to photography. The camera doesn't matter. If it's the newest, most expensive gear, you'll obsess over it and won't use it. If you don't want it bad enough, you'll never be good at it.

You have to realize that the gear doesn't matter. It's the only way.

What if the gear does matter for the types of shots you like to take?

I know people who do this don't realize this, but some people don't do that. I think I've been shooting for 47 years, I bought my first camera 43 years ago, I have over 400,000 shots in my two Lightroom catalogs, and I don't think I've ever just gone out looking for something to shoot, even once.