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Does gear matter?

arun.is

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Re: Does gear matter?

#41

Post by formerly_proven »

giva wrote: post #18
jebarker wrote: post #9

I'm at the early stages of learning photography. I've always taken lots of photos, but without much skill or care. I have an entry level DSLR and understand that the quality of my photos is almost entirely determined by my skill as a photographer. However, I don't really enjoy using the DSLR due to the size and weight. Any recommendations on what might be a better setup for me? I like travel and nature photography, b…

I believe that, in terms of compactness and image quality, it is hard to beat Sony's mirrorless, but personally I can't stand their ergonomics.

Well then you can just use a Nikon

Re: Does gear matter?

#42

Post by graphe »

gadders wrote: post #8
readthenotes1 wrote: post #4

My stepmom took a picture of a relative that was simply enchanting. I mentioned to my dad how nice it was and commented "she must have a really good camera" to which my dad replied, after laughing, "people have said that before and it doesn't seem to matter what camera she's using"

My wife's a pretty good family photographer (i.e. doesn't do it professionally) and she used to get the same. I bet nobody goes up to authors and says "Great book - what pen did you use?"

If the ink was nice they would.

Re: Does gear matter?

#44

Post by graphe »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #37
graphe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lidar on iPhones makes low light way better than cameras. If you don't do astronomy it will usually be better. The Samsung NX had wifi and upload to fb.

> The lidar on iPhones makes low light way better than cameras How so? My iphone 14 pro looks like a cartoon if I shoot people or animals in low light. Never had any "actual camera" look that bad, and my newest is an 8 year-old micro 4/3 model.

Mine look great, my camera looks even better if I set it up. I'm not going to go technical for most photos though because it isn't fun.

Re: Does gear matter?

#45

Post by bluesquared »

jebarker wrote: post #9

I'm at the early stages of learning photography. I've always taken lots of photos, but without much skill or care. I have an entry level DSLR and understand that the quality of my photos is almost entirely determined by my skill as a photographer. However, I don't really enjoy using the DSLR due to the size and weight. Any recommendations on what might be a better setup for me? I like travel and nature photography, b…

The Fuji X100V is practically a meme in some circles now https://fujifilm-x.com/en-us/products/cameras/x100v/

Compact, lightweight, the built-in 23mm lens is good for most travel and nature shots you'd be taking as an amateur (from a fellow amateur, no insult intended)

If you're looking for something "aesthetic" and "ergonomic" Fuji is #1

Re: Does gear matter?

#46

Post by aeturnum »

The answer I always give is "gear can matter - what is your gear stopping you from doing"? Generally people don't have a very compelling answer. If you are limited by your gear, you're going to have lots of shots that fall a little short in ways that gear might address. Well framed shots and the edge of possible shutter speeds that just need one or two more stops of ISO, shots where the colors can't be fully captured by the chip you used, etc. Mostly though, if you are using any camera made since 2010, your gear is probably not getting in your way much.

Re: Does gear matter?

#47

Post by paxys »

The answer to this question changes with time. A decade and a half ago you absolutely needed gear worth a few thousand dollars at minimum to take a good photo. Today you can put something taken from your smartphone camera on a billboard or magazine.

As tech improves every field has such jumps in baseline quality. The most complex software in the world can be written on a $500 laptop. You can record a chart topping song on a $100 microphone in your bedroom. In most sports the average enthusiast today is using better gear than the top professionals in the world had a generation ago. The cost of the gear you need to be "good enough for all practical purposes" is constantly getting lower.

Re: Does gear matter?

#48

Post by pwython »

photon_collider wrote: post #34

This is a subject that comes up frequently in photography. I think this is because many novice photographers think they need a fancy camera to take good pictures. Gear, particularly the lenses you use, matters depending on your preferred genre of photography. Beyond that, the difference between and low and high end cameras tends to be build quality and the ease of use. It's important to remember that these are just t…

Date the camera, marry the lens.

With the slew of mounting adapters these days, you can keep using even 60-year-old lenses on most camera bodies.

Like the Helios 44-2 (ca. 1958), still being used today on big features like "The Batman" in a few scenes. They mixed footage from that $500 vintage lens with $50,000 ARRI anamorphic primes.

Re: Does gear matter?

#49

Post by dataflow »

ghaff wrote: post #27
dataflow wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've seen of my friends' gears, iPhones beat conventional cameras easily if you don't do any processing . But if you're going to process your DSLR RAWs, smartphones will just lose in comparison.

You can also shoot raw with many smartphones. And there are camera apps that give you more control. I'm not sure it's categorical that DSLRs clearly win over iPhones if you process (including cropping etc.) both. As someone else noted, DSLRs really win on lenses. Also things like high burst rate, high shutter speeds, etc. (And the viewfinder can be handy for better framing and just seeing what you're shooting).

My friends weren't taking RAWs from their iPhones, so that part didn't really make any difference. (I actually don't think I've encountered anyone who does that!) I don't have an iPhone, but when I've tried RAWs on some other smartphones, they weren't nearly as good as from DSLRs. In fact I sometimes found it hard to even get the quality of their own JPEGs from the RAWs.

(Lenses can of course add another factor, but everything I mentioned is with stock lenses.)

Re: Does gear matter?

#50

Post by amluto »

zwieback wrote: post #16

Having studied technical optics (in the analog camera age) it's just so hard for me to imagine that those tiny, tiny apertures we have on our phones can replace a well designed lens. However, I'm not a skilled enough photographer to beat what my mid-range phone can do and I'm happy not to have to lug my DSLR around very often. Part of my day job is optical metrology so I realize that traditional optical design will n…

> it's just so hard for me to imagine that those tiny, tiny apertures we have on our phones can replace a well designed lens.

I don’t think they can, but they usually don’t need to. If you manage to extract a modern phone lens and stick it in front of the film of a 35mm camera or a ten-year-old digital camera, you will get utterly terrible pictures :)

Nice old lenses had nice flat focal planes. For a camera phone, who cares? The depth of field is so big that you probably can’t tell whether the focal plane is flat.

Nice old lenses tried hard to avoid distortion. Your camera probably corrects distortion in software.

Nice old lenses collected lots of light and integrated that light using the world’s most boring algorithm: just adding it all up. Your phone has a much more sensitive sensor and cleverly takes multiple frames for you so it can infer a decent picture even in poor lighting using fancy algorithms.

Really nice old lenses might have been close to diffraction limited resolution, and maybe users managed to get extremely sharp photographs with them, but they usually didn’t. Your phone camera has a much much worse diffraction limit, but it has fancy sharpening algorithms that work sort of okay, and people mostly view the photos in small formats anyway.

Nice old lenses, with the aperture wide open, had shallow depths of field. Your phone camera doesn’t, and it will try to fake it for you in “portrait mode”. It looks pretty bad, but a surprisingly large number of users don’t care :) (I personally find the way hair looks to be quite annoying, and I’m surprised that I haven’t seen a nice AI-enhanced version that can fake hair over a distant background better.)

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