Here’s some more about your everyday, cheapo point-and-shoot camera, rather than expensive D-SLRs: Macro shots.

With their short focal lenghts and their small sensors (and the resulting rather large depth-of-field, that is the “depth” of the in-focus parts of the image) they’re really good for taking close-up shots. Most of those little buggers have a dedicated macro mode (have a look for a small flower-symbol somewhere on it) that allows you to get the camera really close to your subject, so that you get a good magnification. While you can achieve similar effects with a dedicated macro lens on an SLR, they easily costs 5 times as much as whole point-and-shoot camera, and you usually have a hard time getting an extensive depth-of-field. In fact, most of the time you’ll find yourself stopping down to ƒ/22 or less, and still not having enough depth-of-field. But then, stopping down the lens that much means that you also need loads of light to take the shot, and you will also get refraction problems from the small aperture… All in all, not nice.

The shot above shows the cappucino I just had a few minutes ago, snapped hand-held on my office desk, with no special lighting or anything. The camera: a 100 EUR (or less) FujiFilm Z20.

You know what happened a couple of nights ago? A really nice constellation of Moon and chapel of Saint Patrick’s College could be seen right from our balcony, including a nice cloud which added to the mood. Unforunately I left my own camera over in the office that day, so I had to dig out Steff’s 7 year old Nikon Coolpix 5700 to capture the scene.

But anyway, having the camera rested on the balcony table, and snapping off a few 8 second exposures, I had to smile a bit when our neighbours had the same idea: Unfortunately, they were trying to use their flashes to get the picture right… This made no sense, as 1) any on-camera flash is so weak that it usually never reaches more than a few meters (and the trees and tower were a couple of hundred meters, and the moon a couple of hundreds of thousands of kilometers away). Thus, all they were doing was 2) wasting their camera batteries and 3) reducing the contrast in the picture (as the flash would have lit the slight mist in the air and thus just make the blacks look “milky”).

What you need to do in such extremely dark conditions would be first of all turn off your flash. Then, make sure you rest your camera on something (a tripod would obviously be the easiest solution) and use the self-timer to take the shot (as pressing the shutter yourself would shake the camera and your picture will loose crispness).

So as I was saying in the last post, it’s not the most expensive camera that takes the photos, but the photographer with his experience and taste.

… but the photographer, that makes the photos. Many people think you need great gear to take great photos. Or shall I say, they equate a “big” (and hence automatically “good”) camera with shooting only “good” photos. While there is some truth in this, there are also a few misconceptions.

First of all, think of a cook and his pots. A ★★★★★ star cook can cook a great meal pretty much anywhere, even in your shitty student accomodation kitchen with the most pathetic, 25 year old pots. But in turn, buying some ridiculously expensive, extra special coated cast iron cooking gear alone probably won’t make you a good cook…

It’s the same with cameras. Of course, having better pots and pans helps a good cook to prepare his meals more easily, and special equipment is needed for some special treats (say a small blow torch for a decent crème brûlée). In photography, sometimes there’s no way around a decent tele lens with a wide aperture, or a super wide angle, or a flash gun. But given a few ingredients, its a cook’s experience, taste or shall I say his “art” that allows him to prepare a good meal. The same holds for a photographer: seeing interesting subjects, lines, colours, light situations, then creating strong compositions, not to mention careful post-processing — that’s actually all independent of what camera you’re using!

Anyway, I just want to rant about all the people that tell me “oh, that’s a great camera, you must be a great photographer”. No, first of all you probably have no clue about the camera, what is capable of (and what not). Second, just having the means and the guts to spend ridiculous amounts of money on photo equipment just doesn’t make you good photographer — that just means you’re either rich, or you’ve lost your senses.

It’s what comes out at the very end of the process, what’s left after you have made all those millions of decisions involved in taking and processing a picture — this is what may or may not make you a “good” photographer.