Will a Better Camera Make Me a Better Photographer?

 Daffodils along West Cove Road

McLemore Cove, Walker County, Georgia

Olympus OM-D E-M5, Panasonic 14-140mm f3.5-5.6 II lens

 

In a word, no.

A good photographer can make good photographs with just about any camera. A not-so-good photographer with the very finest cameras and lenses may be able, with the help of auto-focus, auto-exposure, and a high-resolution sensor, to make photos that are sharp, well-exposed, and capable of enlargement to mural size, but if they are still bland, boring, and empty, all the technical perfection in the world will not make them good photos.

Of course, I'm not against owning excellent photo equipment. I think you should own the best cameras and lenses you can afford, because they can make the work easier. But fine equipment does not a fine photographer make. Good equipment can make it easier to express your vision, but it cannot provide that vision. Good photographs do not come out of a camera: they come out of you. Out of your heart, your soul, your mind, your total life experience.

So if you don't have the latest and greatest, don't feel you can't make excellent photographs. Most of the photographs that I consider my personal best were made on film, which is far more limiting than even the simplest digital camera.

When we lived in a house, I made a photo panel for each season to go above the fireplace in our great room. The panels were four feet wide. The Spring panel at the top of this post was made with a 16-megapixel Olympus OM-D E-M5 and a Panasonic 14-140mm lens -- a good lens, but not the sharpest in the world. But at 16x48 inches, the flowers are beautifully detailed and the panel looks great and actually dominates the room.

So, my  point? Use what you have and work on developing your ability to see photographs -- which, as I have written in previous posts, is mostly about learning to notice things.

Photograph and text copyright 2021, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

 

Talking about the Tools

 

 What do you think about this photo? Sharp enough? Color okay? Any visible noise artifacts? It was made at a wedding in 2018 with a Fuji X-T20 and the 16-50 f3.5-5.6 kit lens at ISO 800. 

Unlike many photo-bloggers, I don't talk much about equipment. In fact, I have been advised that I would have more readers if I did! But at this point in my life I'm a minimalist, and happily so. I have only three lenses for my Fuji system, and they are among the least expensive. I do currently have four bodies, but two of them are for sale. Most photographers would consider me severely under-equipped.

I've owned a lot of equipment in the past -- for instance, when I unloaded my Olympus gear in 1992 to switch to Canon for the auto-focus feature, I sold off four bodies and 13 lenses. And as long as I had a studio I also owned medium and large format cameras and lenses.

 

The photo at the top of this post is a very small section cropped from this one -- about a 200% crop. Yet the picture was made with one of Fuji's cheapest lenses.

But the truth is, you don't need a lot of equipment, or expensive equipment, to make photographs that will please you. As Picasso said“Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can’t even imagine in advance.”

Unfortunately, Gear Acquisition Syndrome seems endemic among photographers, many of whom have bought into the marketing lie that more/better cameras and lenses will result in better photographs. GAS can be a lot of fun if you can afford it, but it's not really photography. The great photographs from the past that you have seen and admired were made with cameras that were probably inferior to the one you now own.

A pair of Pileated Woodpeckers on a tree in the woods a few yards from my kitchen window. This is an approximately 200 percent crop from the picture below.

I once read an article about the travel photographer Gerald Brimacombe, who at that time was working with a pair of digital cameras that most professionals and advanced amateurs would consider far too limited for serious work. Yet, he chose to work within the limitations of those cameras and concentrate on what they could do, rather than what they could not do.

I think it is something like this that made so many rangefinder shooters great: since using a Leica or other rangefinder and just a few lenses doesn’t make for a lot of options, they learned to photograph the things that could be photographed with their limited equipment and let the rest of the world go by.

The rest of the picture from above. Made with Fuji's inexpensive but very sharp 50-230 4.5-6.7 telephoto zoom. Shooting hand-held from my kitchen window at a slow shutter speed proved the effectiveness of the image stabilization system.

 I realize some people need the sharpest and fastest lenses available for the work they do. But I believe that in many cases the striving for bigger, faster, and more expensive is a sidetrack; a diversion from what photography is all about, which is simply making pictures.

Reasonably good equipment, reasonably good technique, and a reasonably good idea of what you're trying to accomplish can add up to some pretty good photography.

Photographs and text copyright 2021, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

The Kindness of Friends

65 Miles to Rock City

US Hwy. 127, Bledsoe County, TN

Olympus OM2n, 60-200 f4 Zuiko lens, Fujichrome 100

 

In late summer of 1993, Louise and I were going through an especially difficult time. The contractor who was building our home had just gone bankrupt, holding 83 percent of our money and leaving us with a house that was not 83 percent finished.

Our friends John and Ann Huckaba took note of our discouragement and invited us to come with them on a Sunday afternoon outing to Crossville, Tennessee to see a performance at the Cumberland County Playhouse.

Afterward, we ate at the excellent restaurant at Cumberland Mountain State Park, then walked down to the lake. Naturally, I had a camera with me, so I made a few photos of canoes pulled up on the dock.

Driving home on U.S. Highway 127 in rich evening light, we passed a barn with one of  Rock City's ubiquitous signs. I asked John if he would stop so I could make a picture. He did, and I did, resulting in one of my favorite Rock City barn photographs.

This was more than a year before I actually began commissioned work on Rock City Barns: A Passing Era, but I was gathering photographs of the barns as I found them. Having a number of good barn photos to show Bill Chapin, the president of See Rock City, Inc., was what actually sealed the deal on the book project. 

Canoes at Cumberland Mountain State Park

Cumberland County, TN

Olympus OM2n, 60-200 f4 Zuiko lens, Fujichrome 100

 

It was a refreshing and encouraging day for Louise and me We will always be grateful for the kindness of friends. And because I had a camera with me and my eyes were open to noticing things, I have two of my favorite pictures to help us remember the day.

Photographs and text copyright 2021, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

 

Noticing Visual/Verbal Puns

Stop Ahead!

Apison Pike at TN Hwy.321, Hamilton County, TN

This was in the early 1970s, so I was probably using

a Rolleicord twin-lens reflex, Agfa B&W film

 

I love visual/verbal puns and seem to find them everywhere. Admittedly, my humor is a bit offbeat and I have a finely-tuned sense of irony, but I do seem to notice things that other people pass by without a second look (or even a first look, for that matter). But that's okay. One of the primary functions of a photographer is to show people the things in this big, wide, wonderful world that they would otherwise miss.

What catches my eye? As I wrote in the introduction to my limited edition book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait, ". . .the old, the abandoned, the beautiful. The strange, the unusual. The off-beat, the quirky, and the ordinary."

Some puns are so obvious they almost hit you in the face. The barn and stop sign in the photo at the top of this post were on a well-traveled intersection just outside Chattanooga, yet I wonder how many people passed them without a glance or a thought.

Boynton Beauty Salon

Old GA Hwy 2, Catoosa County GA

Nikkormat FTN, 50mm Nikkor lens, Kodachrome 25

 

Other puns are a bit more subtle, like the second picture, but still easy to get if you look at it for a second or two.

Still others seem, to me at least, to be very subtle, like the photograph at the bottom of the post. What do you think?

Holy Ghost Fire on Burnt Mountain

GA Hwy. 136, Pickens County, GA

Canon 5D Classic, 24-85 f3.5-4.5 EF lens, Fujichrome 100

 

So what's the point of this series of posts? Simply this: Open your eyes. There's a world full of cool things to see and show.

Photographs and text copyright 2021, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

Noticing Visual Puns

Bottoms Up!

Berry College Campus, Rome, Georgia

Olympus OM, 85mm f2 Zuiko, Kodachrome 64

 

As I wrote in my previous post, I adore visual puns and am always on the lookout for them.

I have a quirky sense of humor and can often find something funny in situations where others might not.

Basically, there are two kinds of visual puns -- those with words and those without words. Visual puns without words are usually more subtle and are often more difficult for many people to discern. Today's selection, as you can see, is wordless puns. Visual/verbal puns coming soon. 

Remember, this all a matter of simply noticing things.

Flower Bed

Along an old highway in southwest Georgia.

Canon 5D Classic, 24-85 f3.5-4.5 EF lens, Fujichrome 100

 

Above the Crowd

Along an old highway in southwest Georgia.

Canon 5D Classic, 24-85 f3.5-4.5 EF lens, Fujichrome 100

 

Photographs are from my limited-edition book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait. Photographs and text copyright 2021, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

 

Noticing Quiet Beauty

Red Glider

US Highway 129, south central Georgia, May 2011

Canon EOS 5D Classic, 70-200mm f4L Canon lens

from my limited edition book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait

 

The world is full of beauty. Often, though, it's quiet beauty -- beauty that doesn't shout for your attention. Some people are oblivious to it; many others see it, enjoy it for a moment, then pass on. A few notice it and record it in photographs to be enjoyed by themselves and others. 

That's what I do. My name for my portfolio of "art" photographs is "Images of Tranquility." My photographs are mostly quiet, and I hope, quietly beautiful. I don't do spectacular. I just see what I see and try to record and show it.

What catches my eye? The old, the abandoned, the beautiful. The strange, the unusual. The off-beat, the quirky. I am a visual historian of an earlier America and a recorder of the interface between man and nature; a keeper of vanishing ways of life. And I do dearly love visual puns.

Photograph and text copyright 2021, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

 

The Photographer's Eye

Praying Tree

Seen on an old highway in southwest Georgia.

CanonEOS 5D Classic, Canon 70-200 f4L lens

 

What does it mean to have a photographer's eye?

I think the indispensable ability is the ability to notice things. 

After that comes a sense of light. Very often, it's the light itself that makes a subject noticeable. Learn to study light -- observe how it falls at different times of the day and different seasons of the year until you can almost feel the way it works with your subject. This is a lifelong learning process and I'm still working at it.

The third element is composition -- the ability to arrange the subject in the camera's viewfinder so that whatever it is that caught your eye stands forth most clearly. If necessary, zoom your lens or move, so that your frame is clean and uncluttered, including only the essential elements that tell the story.

Good street photographers such as Erwitt and Henri Cartier-Bresson have an almost magical ability to simultaneously notice both a subject and the light and compose a photograph in an instant. Others, myself included, are not so fast. But not all kinds of photography demand such quick reflexes. Jay Maisel notices and photographs an incredible number of interesting subjects. Some of them do demand quick reflexes, but many of them are just sitting there, as it were, waiting for someone to notice and photograph them.

As Robert Louis Stevenson said,

             "The world is so full of a number of things                                                                              I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

Photograph and text copyright 2021, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

 

More about Noticing Things

You think maybe he was unhappy with the postal service or perhaps UPS?

(Found on a makeshift plywood shed beside an old highway in southwest Georgia

-- from Georgia: A Backroads Portrait.)

Canon EOS 5D Classic, 24-85 f3.5-4.5 EF lens

In the first decade of this century I had been slowly gathering pictures for my book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait. In 2011, I decided to finish the job, and in May of that year took some money I had received for an architectural photography assignment, loaded an air mattress and sleeping bag in my 2002 Dodge Grand Caravan, packed my Canon 5D Classic and  20D cameras and some lenses, and set off on a trip around the perimeter of Georgia, photographing whatever I found wherever I found it. Among the many interesting and unusual things I saw was this crudely-painted sign on a little plywood shed in a thicket beside an old highway in southwest Georgia. 

The ability to notice things is essential to good photography, or at least to the kind of photography I like best. The great Elliott Erwitt had an almost supernatural ability to walk down any street and come back with little gems -- photographs of people or things (or dogs) that most of us would never have noticed.

And while Erwitt's milieu was street photography and most of his pictures were of people and dogs, I think the art of taking notice applies at least in some degree to all kinds of photography. It's definitely responsible for most of my best pictures.

Photograph and text copyright 2021, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone