It's Not The Photographer, It's The Camera!

I enjoy reading the high end DSLR discussion boards on the internet. Those gearheads go ape over minute differences in "chromatic aberration" and "barrel distortion". They peep at pixels in Photoshop to see if their lens is able to give them a sharp image blown up to the size of the side of a barn. But all they seem to ever shoot pictures of is brick walls and cans of soda at varying distances lined up on their dining room table!

I think if you are going to make a fetish over camera equipment, it should be junk store cameras, not DSLRs. There's something about a fifty year old scratched up plastic lens that makes magic happen. The proof is on exhibit at JunkStoreCameras.com.

Marcy Merrill, a professional photographer, has been accumulating cameras at swap meets and thrift stores and running rolls of film though them to see what comes out. She has captured some remarkably atmospheric images and each one is accompanied by a photo of the two dollar plastic camera that took it. Check it out...

Marcy Merrill's Junk Store Cameras

• [Anonymous]

  It may be worth injecting Vilém Flusser into this conversation. His book “Toward a Philosophy of Photography” puts forth the idea that the photographer is a mere functionary who, by adjusting the knobs of the camera apparatus and pointing it at various things, is exercising the elements of a program whose possibilities have already been determined by the manufacturers of the camera, papers, chemicals and other equipment. Only the photographer who alters the components of the program is capable of expanding the program.

• [Anonymous]

  A tool is just a tool, and the right tool for the right job is usually going to be a positive influence on your process. Fetishize any tool and someday, for instance, you are going to find yourself staring down a slotted head screw with nothing but a phillips screwdriver in your hand. While some tools are physically incapable of accomplishing some tasks (you don’t see many diana cameras in spy satellites) if a creative work is the goal then the creative use of the tool at hand can be a better choice than what you think you need… (I met a guy that fell in love with with large format view cameras because he discovered he could put what he is shooting inside the camera…). Thank god for the engineers and thank god for the artists… each would be living a poorer life without the other.

• [EricT]

  There is an old saying, “The bad carpenter blames his tools”.
  It is always the photographer. Always.

• [TPS Reports]

  Oh no! My hometown camera store is featured and it looks like the site’s already been boing-boinged.

• [Anonymous]

  I’m reminded of a story that made the rounds in the photo retail industry some years ago:
  A young man enters the local camera shop with an old, beat up camera and shoebox full of photos. He tells the clerk he wants a camera that will make better pictures. The clerk slowly looks through the entire box of photos, looks up and shakes his head. “We don’t have any” he said, “but we have some that will make them easier.”

• [thatbox]

  To be fair, at least at the forums I’ve been part of in the past, these gearheads analyzing the technical bits are doing so in order to maximize their understanding of their cameras and lenses, which allows them to improve their “real” shooting. It has the additional benefit of informing the rest of us in our purchasing decisions!

• [Anonymous]

  It’s the same with audiophiles – (defn. a person who listens to stereo equipment)

• [zeepoli]

  definitely!!! if you ask a million people which picture looked better – one that is more impressionistic and one that is the most pristine highest definition picture – i guarantee you most will choose the one that is fuzzier. i encounter this all the time shooting video. producers want to get the highest definition camera and then complain that it looks like video and cheap looking and want it to look like a 70′s movie – so then i put 5 layers of filters on it to soften the image. or i would shoot something with a small camera with some filters and people are amazed with the footage and ask what camera i shot it with – and guess it’s some fancy expensive camera and are shocked when i tell them it was some little dorky thing.

  people don’t really see that way – people see what they want to see – the more room there is – the more mystery there is in the photo the better i think.

• [Anonymous]

  I think it is a bit of both. Right now my reality is struggling as an artist to capture images on a Canon 30D that rival those taken from someone using a Canon 5D MkII. Because of the difference of Megapixels & CCD size (30D = 8Mp with Cropped sensor VS. 21.5megapixels Full Frame).

  It can’t be done, no matter how hard I try you can really see a noticeable difference in quality, Exp. when you want to crop your work.

  So In short, I think With Modern day cameras I can justify blaming my tools. It is so frustrating that I am thinking of switching to film, so that I’ll have no-one to blame for the quality of my shots, but myself.

• [Anonymous]

  Graphic design on the internet has not been improved solely by the increasing capacity of the computers creating the artwork. Partially, in a sideways manner… But not solely.

  Find the tangent, if you will.

• [Anonymous]

  I’m 99% in agreement, but the other 1% remembers when I owned one of the Kodak Disc cameras. Once in a while, it really is the camera’s fault.

• [haineux]

  On the one hand, people want to believe in Magic, and often junk cameras are usually cheap. (Occasionally, the “magic” becomes so caché that people become willing to spend $300+ on a Lomo LC-A, or $5/shot for Polaroid film.)

  On the other hand, junk cameras are usually not controllable in any meaningful way, and there are software plugins that can turn your perfectly-focused-and-exposed, Eleventy-Jigga-Pixel recording into something that looks all-but-exactly like the junk camera. Usually, it’s a combination of vignetting some of the corners, oversaturating and shifting the colors around, and distorting and blurring the image.

  I have a couple of iPhone apps that take advantage of this. They snap the picture, then apply random “Lomo-like” effects to the result. If you don’t like the effect, shake to try another. Save both pristine and “charming.”

  The REAL problem here is that I can’t add this functionality to my expensive camera! I have to wait until I get back to my computer to add the charming mystery romance.

  • [ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive]

    That site would be an encyclopedia of distortion filter ideas for an enterprising software engineer!

• [Anonymous]

  There’s certainly truth to what you’re saying, but let’s not forget that there are differences between cameras and the quality of the pictures they create. Older cameras might provide for an interesting look, but professional photographers need a camera they can consistently count on. That’s why some photographers examine every single speck of technical data.

• [candycritic]

  Here, here!

  I’m a firm believer in the photographer. I shoot with an expensive DSLR but I also shoot with a $100 Kodak easy share. Both are great but neither can make for a good shot. The other important factor that should not be forgotten as well would be timing. You have to be there in order to shoot the great shot.

• [Anonymous]

  Being the world’s worst photographer, I can say without reservation that bad photography is entirely about the guy behind the camera.

• [mn_camera]

  I have a Canon DSLR, a very nice (and slightly dated) Nikon point-and-shoot, and have made some very nice photos with them.

  My two very favorite photos were made (one each) with a Diana and a Kodak 50th Anniversary box camera.

  It’s being there to push the button, having something in front of the camera worth pushing the button for, and having the sense and good fortune to push the button at the right time, in a varying calculus of photographic enterprise.

  Your mileage may, of course, vary.

• [PaulR]

  Go see an insipid movie that’s just a little out of focus and see if you find it “charming”… Especially the dreck coming out of Hollywood, well, pretty much all the time, and tries to pass as cinema.

  Then go find a 70-mm copy of Baraka.

  Then tell me that obsession with camera/optical technical excellence negates any artistic ability.

  I’d much rather see ‘Tender Mercies’ again than Avatar.
  (Wow, Robert Duvall was in The Terry Fox Story?)

• [Takashi Omoto]

  I’ve grown to appreciate the simplicity of junk _digital_ cameras of the fixed focus sort, and carry one with me everywhere. They can make some very nice, and occasionally nostalgic, photography.

• [Anonymous]

  I like having best of both worlds. I shoot a 5D Mark II but I don’t limit myself to L glass. I also shoot medium-format (mamiya, hassie) glass on it mounted on converters for certain looks. I also happen to have a large, extensive collection of old “junk” cameras. I often will break down a body cover for the 5D (buy em in bulk on eb*y) and then mounted the old lenses on with epoxy. I’ve done, old m42 Practika lenses, Brownie lenses pulled from the box body, diana lenses ripped off the camera and my favorite which is the 80mm lens taken out of an old Autocord TLR.

  You can have both worlds, if you’re willing to sweat a little. The op is right though, pixel-peeping and orgasming over the latest lens with the lowest aberration is for newbies. Photographers who shoot for the love it just want the image, not a treatise on why one lens is better than another.

• [cjchilvers]

  I started a blog New Year’s Day out of the very same frustration. In fact, out of the reaction of most DSLR maniacs, I called it (and myself) A Lesser Photographer. The truth is, it’s all about having a camera with you – any kind of camera – when you need it. Typically, the DSLRs pushed on newbies today will only get in your way. Junk cameras are a step up from this – a way to be unique in a landscape of bland, seemingly cloned photographers. It’s definitely not for everyone, but that’s the point.

• [benher]

  “all they seem to ever shoot pictures of is brick walls and cans of soda at varying distances lined up on their dining room table!”

  Never heard of flickr.com?

  • [Snowrunner]

    flickr…. tons of HDR images, lots of pictures of feet / shoes etc…

    But yes, like with all sites there are some nice photos on there (and I have an account there too).

    But the “gear obsession” that digital seems to have brought is… well, funny. Where in the past it was a small little cabal who analyzed every little lens imperfection has now turned into a mass sporting event on the net where almost everybody can partake.

    Good or Bad? Depends on what you want I guess. i have gone back to film, more fun, started doing B&W at home around a year ago and are right now waiting for the chems to arrive to do colour and slide….

    Speaking of slide: I have not seen anything digitally that can really rival that, when projected.

• [jfrancis]

  If you can paint and draw well, you can use ketchup on a french fry…

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gvGDsIYrrQ

  otoh most talented artists choose proper art supplies anyway.

• [Anonymous]

  As the old cliché goes, owning a Nikon doesn’t make you a photographer, it makes you a Nikon owner. If you have no eye for framing and no idea how to create meaning in an image you will never take a good photograph regardless of equipment. It’s always the photographer. There’s a lot more to the art than pointing and clicking.

• [patrick_bateman]

  I detect a real of hypocrisy in some of these comments. While there is no value in arguing over some minor technical difference between two bits of gear, a slavish obsession with the characteristics of a particular type of camera is no different if your obsession is with some poorly made, battered antique rather than something which rolled out of a Japanese factory yesterday. If the actual camera truly doesn’t matter, then why hold up scratched plastic lenses as somehow artistically superior?

  • [PaulR]

    Dang, that was the other thing I wanted to say…

• [Anonymous]

  still can’t frickin log in…anywho…..
  when I was in Photo School way back before some of you were born, my classmates and I in our very first Photo Class had a critique where we pinned up photos on the wall.

  This was back when we developed our own film and printed our own prints and anyways one guy shows up with a box of prints and he pulls out cotton gloves and then proceeds to carefully PIN his photos to the wall, but FRAMES the prints with the pins so as not to pierce the paper. The gloves were certainly a nice touch.

  Teacher arrives and we all talk about the photos, good things, bad things etc etc.
  He gets to this guy’s prints and starts talking about the good things, many good things actually…and then he takes one of the prints off the wall and tosses it onto the floor, the guy looks on in horror as the teacher then RIPS one of the prints in half while talking about how important it is not to get too close to the prints as you can always make another and that one may be even BETTER! there was some other lesson there too, but I don’t remember what it was we were too busy watching the guy’s head explode in slow motion.

  The guy left school after that semester. He is probably taking pictures of brick walls now.

• [Dv Revolutionary]

  When I want an atmospheric blurry picture I squint, then I ask the camera to do the same. F22 or so gives squint like results and makes the camera a one hole diffraction chamber. Literally light is behaving like a wave and messing up the picture.

  I also have a bad idea of a sony teleconverter. At one time I thought this was good enough for a video camera. It is king of chromatic aberrations. Pop the teleconverter in front of (!) a pristine 50mm prime and it’s artistic city and a lot of fun.

  No one’s stopping anyone from making their own lens filters. I have home made silk stockings to a bi-polar color polarizer (it can make the sky unbelievably blue to nauseating washed out green, hense it is bipolar). I oughta put up a web-page for how to make that…

  Lastly I have the lens baby but it’s not quite as much fun as the previous things.

• [patrick_bateman]

  I think this whole thing is a tad simplistic. In my experience the “problem” with DSLRs is that they’re too good and so it actually takes more skill to compose and capture an interesting shot without showing anything distracting, unintended etc. On the other hand it’s easy to get a lazy, stylised photo out of a broken old piece of junk.

  I think a fair summation of the potential of each combination would be:

  Bad photographer + any camera = bad photos
  Good photographer + old/battered camera = good photos
  Good photographer + good camera = amazing photos

  It takes about 4 seconds of Flickr to find 100 things that could only be done with a high quality piece of glass stuck on a reasonable body. There are also many, many situations I can think of where the flexibility of a modern DSLR create possibilities which simply don’t exist with older cameras.

  If what you want is the retro look, it’s fairly easy to achieve whatever you’re after using a high quality image from a good digital (example) – but you certainly can’t use an old junk camera to produce the effects of a modern camera.

• [libelle]

  There are people who fetishize the equipment over the use of the equipment (as we used to say in the 80s, “a yuppie is someone who confuses the equipment with the sport”).

  Nothing wrong with that. You see it in with cars, cameras, guns, game consoles, power tools, and so on. It’s the kind of talk-story some people enjoy the most. Nothing wrong with that, just so long as you take it for what it is.

  Sometimes it’s just like politics and religion, it’s a deeply held belief and an expression of identity, vested with the power of ego.

  Sometimes it’s frustrated scientists (so-called “measure-baters”).

  The day I learned to really laugh at it was when I overheard an exchange between two photographers, one of whom was condemning a particular lens as being “so bad as to be useless” and the other, after a half hour of discussion of its relative merits, finally departed with “well, that’s the lens I used for my National Geographic cover.”

• [ChesterKatz]

  Your mouth makes really nice compliments.

• [Anonymous]

  Harry Mattison (one camera, one lens) once compared those gearhead phtotogs to the guys you knew in high school who always talk about sex but never actually talk to a girl.

• [Coal]

  I have a high end DSLR, a low end point and shoot, a cheki instant camera and an iPhone, all of which I use regularly. The pictures I get with the high end DSLR are without exception vastly superior to those I get from the others. This surprises me, because apparently it’s the photographer and not the equipment that gets the pictures, so the results should be absolutely identical regardless of the medium.

• [Anonymous]

  The reverse is obviously true as well. An old camera won’t make you better.

  Actually, if you do have failings in your technical ability the more powerful your camera is the more it can compensate for you. If you have a camera that doesn’t help you out, you’re stuck.

• [oscar]

  Given the fetishizing of the Lomo, Holga and Diana cameras (and the existence of the Lensbaby) I’d hardly say she’s alone in her love of toy cameras.

  It’s a cool site and hobby, but boy, that site is a usability disaster.

• [Outtacontext]

  Having been a photo prof for many years I’d like to just say that it’s easy to teach someone how to use a camera (manual or otherwise) but it’s a lot harder (next to impossible) to teach someone to be creative.

  I haven’t had an SLR (digital or otherwise) since I shed my Pentax 6×7. What I found was that if it was a pain to lug around a heavy camera I simply wouldn’t take many photos. So when digital came out I started with a small Pentax Optio S5, graduated to a Panasonic TZ3, and just recently got a Canon G11 (my first manual and RAW digicam). The Canon is still light enough to feel unencumbered when I walk around but a bit more control and quality; perhaps not as much as a DSLR but if I take a good pic then I feel good.

  I recently went to the museum where I work to shoot an installation of an exhibition for our blog. When I got there our digcam’s battery went dead so I grabbed my iPhone shot a panorama and stitched with AutoStitcher and people were quite happy.

  You do what you need to do with the camera you have.

• [Super Nate]

  Drat! I got here way to late. The picture of that camera at the end reminds me of a great picture book my son and I read (tell each other stories while we look at it). About a child that finds a magic camera washed up on shore.
  http://www.amazon.com/Flotsam-Caldecott-Medal-David-Wiesner/dp/0618194576/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263746058&sr=8-1

• [airshowfan]

  I have a couple of big DSLRs and some long L lenses to put on them. I take pictures of airplanes going at almost the speed of sound, and I want to get pictures where I can see the details of the airplanes’ surfaces. (This means that the airplane should fill the frame, unless my sensor has a high-enough res and low-enough noise and my lens is sharp enough to allow me to crop). Unless the airplane is VERY close to you (closer than the 500-foot minimum that most regulations put between aircraft and people), you can’t get a pleasantly sharp picture with a cheap camera; it’s simply impossible. If the shutter-delay is too long, if the autofocus isn’t the best on the planet, if the lens isn’t sharp, and if the dynamic range isn’t good enough to capture the bright spots AND the dark spots of a vehicle lit by the harsh sun… then my pictures don’t capture as much detail. Noticeably so. Each time I get new gear, I notice how I get good autofocus on more and more situations, I notice how the picture is less grainy, I notice how I capture more subtle details of the airflow around the airplane, I notice how the detailed areas of the surface make it deeper into the shadows and into the brightly-lit shiny areas. I notice how I can read the pilot’s name next to the cockpit more and more often. In fact, I can compare my pictures over the years and see them getting better, from a sharpness/detail point of view. Part of that is that my panning is better, but part of that is that I get better gear. I’m really pushing what the gear can do, so these small differences in autofocus speed and lens sharpness are NOT inconsequential to me. I look at the best aviation pictures in magazines and posters from 6 or 7 years ago, and they are noticeably grainier and less crisp than the pictures I and other photographers have produced over the past 5 years.

  You try getting a picture like these with anything other than a top-notch SLR:

  http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=36416320&l=4c13852ff5&id=203796

  http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=35491211&l=380808884b&id=203796

  http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=35206440&l=659f56f0c0&id=203796

  On the other hand, I realize that there are many areas of photography where the subject is much easier to focus on, and where it doesn’t make a difference if you don’t capture every feature of its surface. I take a lot of snapshots with my iPhone. On one wall of my house I have a series of pictures I took with point-and-shoots in the 2 to 4 megapixel range; The 4x6s look beautiful. I have a small Panasonic on me most of the time, for when I want a picture that’s wider or sharper or less grainy than what the iPhone could take (especially in low light). The Panasonic’s pictures are still quite grainy (compared to my SLRs), but they’re good enough, especially given how small the camera is. Nothing beats a full-frame DSLR in low light (nothing digital, anyways), but sometimes a DSLR isn’t practical to carry around.

  A better camera is a more versatile tool. It gives you more possibilities. If you want to shoot hand-held in near darkness, or if your subject is doing MACH 0.98, then a cheap and/or old camera won’t give results quite as good as a newer one, it’s simply impossible. Or, some shots that you could get “every time” with a 1D and an L lens would require a lot of luck if you had “lesser” gear.

  But in many situations, a slightly better tool isn’t worth the hassle or cost. And besides, the less versatile your tool is, the more creativity (and, like I said, luck) is required to get something good out of it, so it’s more exciting when you do. On the other hand, there are some shots I got that still require a lot of luck even with a 1D and L glass, and that would be impossible with anything less sharp.

  As for the old-school look of cameras that weren’t sharp, leaked light, had all kinds of optical distortions, etc… Can’t you just fake all that in Photoshop? Or get a Lensbaby.

• [Sparrow]

  Some of the best pictures I ever took were taken with a 110 point and shoot, because I had it with me when the scene presented itself, and the lighting and composition were just right. I got pictures at places where I would never have considered taking a delicate and expensive SLR. Of course, I got some really good shots with a 35mm SLR, and even a 120 plastic lens thrift store special. I’ve also missed out on some great shots while fine tuning the manual settings on my OM-1, and had a zoom lens broken while trying to shoot in a crowd. Unless you appreciate it as a form of sculpture, having a really expensive camera doesn’t make much difference unless you actually use it to take really great pictures. Shooting an old Brownie Hawkeye or a Diana for a while really changes the way you see things, and you learn to take advantage of the limitations of the camera to produce better photos.

• [MaxFrancardi]

  “…I think if you are going to make a fetish over camera equipment, it should be junk store cameras, not DSLRs. There’s something about a fifty year old scratched up plastic lens that makes magic happen…”

  AMEN TO THAT!!!

  I really believe that in photgraphy (both still and moving) composition is the key
  After all, a good photgrapher is trying to tell a story, not endorsing hardware

• [chudez]

  in defense of all gearheads:

  i don’t think anyone with more than a passing interest in photography would debate the fact that it’s the photographer that creates the image, not the camera. what the gear does provide is the opportunity and flexibility to take certain types of pictures. freezing the motion in fast sports, for example, would be extremely difficult with a point and shoot. again, a good photographer would still know how to make a great image, working within and around the limitations of his equipment, but give the same photographer a fast zoom…

  as for gearheads, well, they’re not just in photography but they are everywhere, aren’t they? photography attracts gearheads because there is so much gear to geek-out on (there is even a site for camera bags). so yeah, you’ll find forum posts discussing vignetting, chromatic aberration, sensor noise, backfocus issues, and so on, but this isn’t any different from a motorist site where you have people going into the littlest detail of a car’s engine (down to reprogramming the engine controller chips), or a PC modding site, where they discuss overclocking CPUs, or an audiophile site where they discuss amps, preamps, cables, turntables and speakers to a ridiculous level of detail.

  gearheads are being disparaged in the article above, ostensibly because they don’t appear to take photographs of interest, but rather all they do is take pictures of “brick walls and cans of soda at varying distances lined up on their dining room table”. well, first-off, photography forums are rarely dedicated to gear and gear alone. a typical forum would have a subsection for sharing pictures, a different section for photography technique, another section for people who want to sell stuff and the gear discussion section disdainfully mentioned in the article. and the gear discussion section has pictures of “brick walls” for the same reason that PC modder sites use benchmarking tools; it is the technical aspects that are relevant in these discussion threads and it’s easier to set-up a controlled test environment with soda cans on the dining room table than outdoors in natural light with rapidly changing sunlight conditions. if you’re looking for pictures of merit, then maybe you’re looking in the wrong place. it’s like looking for art in a corner garage or in the laboratory; sometimes it’s there, but you would have better luck going to the museum or art gallery.

  and aren’t we all missing the point of these forums? isn’t it the whole point to have a venue to discuss whatever subject matter pleases you with other people of similar interests to your heart’s content? i have even benefitted from these longwinded discussions — it was one of these threads that convinced me to get a 50mm fast prime. when Canon/Nikon/Oly/Pentax/etc comes up with the “Next Big Thing”, it’s forums and sites like these that i turn to to figure out what works and what’s bollocks and i owe a lot to these guys sharing their opinion.

  the negativity in a lot of the posts above surprises me. yes, we all know it’s the photographer, not the gear. but discussing the gear is important in itself and it also can be so much fun. so why the chip on the shoulder?

• [skeletoncityrepeater]

  If you DARE – check out what audio engineers squabble about in a similar fashion! http://www.gearslutz.com/ the discussions are endless regarding a/d d/a conversion, preamps, etc etc etc etc etc.

• [Anonymous]

  The ‘magic’ those old cameras add to a picture surely hide the uninteresting rubbish bad photographers produce.

• [TaraMewser]

  I use a pretty good digital camera and run some images through the Poladroid app which converts your image into one looking like an old Poraroid print. You can get the app at
  http://www.poladroid.net/

  It’s available for both Mac and Windows OS’s and is a lot of fun to use.

• [carbonadam]

  Hehe. I just took obsessive shots on my table tonight with some new lenses. I also know the value of a piece of crap camera and how it can generate gold. As long as you are not only shooting soda cans all the time and you get out and shoot the real world you are ok. Right? God I hope I’m not crazy. I guess there are worse things to be obsessed over.

• [narrowstreetsLA]

  Here’s a hilarious parody: camera geeks critique great photographers in history.
  http://theonlinephotographer.blogspot.com/2006/06/great-photographers-on-internet.html