Does the Camera Even Matter Anymore? Or is it about software/software skills?

[anjoca76]

I realize this photo was chosen for exactly this purpose--to stimulate debate and illustrate a point. Had it not been, I never would have given it a second thought. Proper exposure and bokeh aside, it looks like a quick snapshot on a cheap digital camera. It looks flat to me. Had I been told it was instead captured with an expensive camera and expensive glass, I would have been very surprised, not just because better gear most would likely have yielded better results, but because those who own good gear tend to be at least halfway decent photographers, if not pros, who know how to use that gear.

Knowing how to use post-processing software is essential these days for most of us, and yes, plenty of times Lightroom has saved an otherwise hopeless photograph of mine from the trash bin, but more often than not, all things being equal, my better gear gets me more interesting and higher quality results than my cheaper gear.

The OP's argument is sort of akin to saying that, with the advent of auto-tune, knowing how to sing in tune is no longer a necessary skill for recording a great vocal track. While there is some truth in that, the singers who are worth a damn and enjoy long careers don't need computerized help to sing well. Brittany Spears will never be Barbara Streisand.

 

[Sparrow]

Here's my take...

1. If I told you this was taken with an expensive portrait glass attached to pricey gear I just bought - I'd be getting congrats posts on the gear.

2. Because I took this with a cheap camera, and titled my thread as such, your defenses shot up and you're ready to attack.

In either case you can not look at the picture I posted objectively. AT ALL.

3. I think we overvalue the 100+ year old technology for what they can do.

4. We undervalue (and take for granted) the contemporary technology and what it can do. A technology so amazing that if it appeared on Star Trek in 1966, people would think that they jumped the shark and crosses the line into absurdity.

I don't think items 1 and 2 hold true for those of us blessed with the gift of sight ...

 

[Roger Hicks]

People also tend to conflate expensive equipment with the right equipment -- and 'expensive' with 'better quality'. Add in 'ease of use' and it gets even more confusing. I mean, any one of my LF cameras is worth a lot less than my M9, but for some kinds of picture, they're better.

The quality or otherwise of the original picture has nothing whatsoever to do with the arguments that have been built around it.

Cheers,

R.

 

[dogbunny]

There is a that weird 'glow' between the hair and the background and the overly soft skin of the face that doesn't smoothly blend in to the rest of the photo. It seems kind of like a hodgepodge of PS effects.

 

[celluloidprop]

Here's my take...

1. If I told you this was taken with an expensive portrait glass attached to pricey gear I just bought - I'd be getting congrats posts on the gear.

Entirely possible. Those people would be as wrong as you are.

'Objectively,' it's a bad photograph. You've blinded yourself if you've convinced yourself otherwise. Your Photoshopping served little purpose but to make a bad image worse.

2. Because I took this with a cheap camera, and titled my thread as such, your defenses shot up and you're ready to attack.

Can you point to evidence of this being the case?

In either case you can not look at the picture I posted objectively. AT ALL.

Here I think you're just taking offense because what you perceived to be an excellent photo and post-processing has been deemed otherwise by the crowd.

3. I think we overvalue the 100+ year old technology for what they can do.

4. We undervalue (and take for granted) the contemporary technology and what it can do. A technology so amazing that if it appeared on Star Trek in 1966, people would think that they jumped the shark and crosses the line into absurdity.

Both of these may or may not be true to some extent: both points are irrelevant to the original image posted and its quality/value.

 

[Pete B]

Check out these photos taken on a 4mmx5mm sensor in an android phone using a Kodachrome plug-in.
Pete

 

[isoterica]

The old adage is that you can't polish a turd. Can I say turd? Anyway.. you need to start out with something fairly decent before any post processing is done. Even if you didn't have an expensive camera you knew well enough what you were doing and got a clear enough shot of your wife to start with. You can get good photos with an old box brownie. However, if the camera wasn't good enough to do at least that then there would be no amount of processing you could do to correct the original flaws. It matters. Does it matter between a consumer grade Nikon/Canon or an expensive Leica/Hasselblad? Probably not. Professionals are more than the sum of their camera equipment but the right toys [ones designed for your needs, not your image] can make the process a little easier.

 

[Damaso]

Technically - this is a perfect portrait.

I beg to differ. And I think that answers the question, yes the camera, but much more importantly the person behind the camera matters a great deal....
http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=115726

 

[Crazy Fedya]

Check out these photos taken on a 4mmx5mm sensor in an android phone using a Kodachrome plug-in.
Pete

I think they were taken with 4"x5" Kodachrome film in 1942.😀

 

[mdarnton]

Here's my take...
1. If I told you this was taken with an expensive portrait glass attached to pricey gear I just bought - I'd be getting congrats posts on the gear.

I think this is definitely true. If you look at the photos of people on this board, and I regularly do check out people's posted pix to see where their comments are coming from, you would see that most of the commenters on this board (not this thread, necessarily) aren't really very good photographers and wouldn't know a good picture if it bit them on the butt. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they gave it thumbs up based on the equipment used, since I see that constantly on this, and other, fora, too. This is a common enough problem that there's a whole company that's successful on the basis of opposing that (Holga).

 

[sevo]

. Proper exposure and bokeh aside, it looks like a quick snapshot on a cheap digital camera. It looks flat to me. Had I been told it was instead captured with an expensive camera and expensive glass, I would have been very surprised,

Well, no, I would not. The snapshot character of the picture is through its flaws in composition and lighting (plus some mushyness, but that may be due to postprocessing or even web downsizing), not through obvious camera flaws in the original take. I've seen enough M9 shots that were quite similarly flawed - perhaps even worse, as the very close flash on that compact has almost the looks of a professional "shadow killer" ring flash where the offset hotshoe flashes on a M9 tend to produce ugly amateurish killer shadows when similarly abused.

 

[hteasley]

It's an unappealing photo, to my eyes, and the addition of some PS help does nothing to change the essential "meh". That flood-flash interior portrait look is not one I enjoy, and no amount of fake bokeh will help that. Of course, it's possible that someone could show me a flood-flash interior portrait that is awesome, but I haven't seen one yet.

Good digital photo retouching is, to my understanding, equivalent to good processing and printing was for film. Good photos with errors can be saved, but bad photos cannot be transformed into good photos, for the most part.

 

[NickTrop]

I maintain there is nothing wrong with this portrait technically...

1. it is sharp, corner to corner
2. there is no pin cushion, no barrel distortion
3. colors are perfectly accurate
4. there are no blown highlights
5. dynamic range is not an issue, is acceptable for the content
6. there are no flash-produced hot spots.
7. the bokeh is perfect. If I didn't point out that it was non-optical, few if any would notice.

I detect some taking umbridge that I would use the word "perfect" to describe something I shot. I was refering to the technical aspects of the picture. Contrarily opinion on this thread - pointing out "over-sharpness of hair" is just so much pixel-peeping, and "Perfect is it? Well I show that OP what for..." - ism. As for the softening/glow effect - I like it. It's far more subtle that diffusion filters I've seen (more on that in a moment) which, "my guess" would be acceptable since that was applied optically, rather than in post.

Thus, there is nothing technically wrong with the image. The softening applied suits my tastes and - unlike using a filter and adding this optically? I can take it out and/or adjust it dynamically. I find this level of softening (slight) to be more natural than doing so optically, which is overkill to the point of visual cliche - typically.

Similarly, the amount of background blur (starting to hate the term "bokeh" for some reason") is a variable, whereas optically it is fixed - married to the camera-subject distance and aperture selection. I can shoot f8 and blow the background to smitereens if I so choose. I can select the number of virtual apertures... and if I do it correctly? Indistinguishable.

I stand by my original statement. The advances in the back-end technology are taken for granted and many of said advances negate the need for high-end gear on the front-end. I don't need filters, I don't need reflectors, I don't need to be concerned with barrel distortion or pin cushioning. I don't need to be concerned with color temp.

So, let me turn the question around. What would shooting a woman sitting on a sofa with a $3,000 portait lens have added?

As I see it, it simply doesn't matter all that much anymore - or certainly anywhere near as much as it used to. The attributes that imparted value to certain gear are being unrealistically coveted, while the incredible and amazing contemporary mature technology - a computer processor, ram, video... alla dat is being undervalued/taken for granted. And there is a refusal to acknowledge what - to me, is obvious.

... Just my take. Agree, disagree.

Carry on.

 

[Sparrow]

I maintain there is nothing wrong with this portrait technically...

1. it is sharp, corner to corner
2. there is no pin cushion, no barrel distortion
3. colors are perfectly accurate
4. there are no blown highlights
5. dynamic range is not an issue, is acceptable for the content
6. there are no flash-produced hot spots.
7. the bokeh is perfect. If I didn't point out that it was non-optical, few if any would notice.

Thus, there is nothing technically wrong with the image. The softening applied suits my tastes and - unlike using a filter and adding this optically? I can take it out and/or adjust it dynamically. I find this level of softening (slight) to be more natural than doing so optically, which is overkill to the point of visual cliche - typically.

Similarly, the amount of background blur (starting to hate the term "bokeh" for some reason") is a variable, whereas optically it is fixed - married to the camera-subject distance and aperture selection. I can shoot f8 and blow the background to smitereens if I so choose. I can select the number of virtual apertures... and if I do it correctly? Indistinguishable.

I stand by my original statement. The advances in the back-end technology are taken for granted and many of said advances negate the need for high-end gear on the front-end. I don't need filters, I don't need reflectors, I don't need to be concerned with barrel distortion or pin cushioning. I don't need to be concerned with color temp.

So, let me turn the question around. What would shooting a woman sitting on a sofa with a $3,000 portait lens have added?

As I see it, it simply doesn't matter all that much anymore - or certainly anywhere near as much as it used to. The attributes that imparted value to certain gear are being unrealistically coveted, while the incredible and amazing contemporary mature technology - a computer processor, ram, video... alla dat is being undervalued/taken for granted. And there is a refusal to acknowledge what - to me, is obvious.

... Just my take. Agree, disagree.

Carry on.

... class?

 

[jippiejee]

I don't think the OP was as serious as everyone is taking him. This was clearly a joke. Post a bad point-and-shoot picture with some horrible post-processing to the board, and attention is gained. Of course this wasn't serious. I think he just meant to get us all out of our hibernation and formulate why good photography still relies on good equipment.

 

[sevo]

So, let me turn the question around. What would shooting a woman sitting on a sofa with a $3,000 portait lens have added?

A portrait lens might have changed some thing or other - blur in a three-dimensional field is different from postprocessing blur. However, the best portrait lenses (Imagons) in that domain tend to go for $300 or less. And if we ignore that potential for a "soft focus vs. blurred" difference and look at generic high end lenses, you may well be right in that postprocessing away the advantages of a expensive high resolution lens could leave you with the same results as any budget kit - but that is more of an argument against bad postprocessing than for bad lenses...

In any case, images of the own spouse/lover/children are bad examples in debates on technical merits or deficits - unless you are the kind of photographer that marries models for a purely photographic relationship, your images will be biased towards the personal aspect, and your own pick tends to be the essence of family snapshotness.

 

[traveler_101]

I don't think the OP was as serious as everyone is taking him. This was clearly a joke. Post a bad point-and-shoot picture with some horrible post-processing to the board, and attention is gained. Of course this wasn't serious. I think he just meant to get us all out of our hibernation and formulate why good photography still relies on good equipment.

Oh, I don't think it is a joke, but it should not be taken literally either, i.e. it is not about gear. it is a challenge thrown down to us to define in what way, if at all, photography is about the subjects we photograph. Has photography become an exercise of applying formal computer-generated parameters to images, thereby creating them out of the machine's stylized version of our collective imagination as opposed to creating them through our experience?

 

[Jamie123]

I maintain there is nothing wrong with this portrait technically...

1. it is sharp, corner to corner
2. there is no pin cushion, no barrel distortion
3. colors are perfectly accurate
4. there are no blown highlights
5. dynamic range is not an issue, is acceptable for the content
6. there are no flash-produced hot spots.
7. the bokeh is perfect. If I didn't point out that it was non-optical, few if any would notice.

No disrespect meant but, in all honesty, 'technically' it is an awful portrait and I do not know in what universe this would serve as an example of good retouching. The skin on her face has no structure at all. It's just a blurry mess. You should never blur skin in retouching. That's a cheap trick to save time and it never looks good. I don't know if you did it or it happened in-camera but it looks awful.
Secondly, there's no separation in skin tones at all. The face looks completely flat.
No flash produced hot spots? Well, there are those two spots dead-center in her eyes. Sometimes the snapshot look works. Here it doesn't.
The 'bokeh' doesn't look right. It seems to me that, for the window in the background to be that blurry, the sofa cushion behind her head should've been slightly more out of focus. Does it matter? Not really. There's little point in blurring the window as the main background for her head is the sofa.

But if you don't see it, you just don't see it.

 

[damien.murphy]

The right camera helps you get the shot, simple as. This seems to be something people forget or overlook on a regular basis.

 

[igi]

I maintain...

1. it is sharp, corner to corner
2. there is no pin cushion, no barrel distortion
3. colors are perfectly accurate
4. there are no blown highlights
5. dynamic range is not an issue, is acceptable for the content
6. there are no flash-produced hot spots.
7. the bokeh is perfect. If I didn't point out that it was non-optical, few if any would notice.

I detect... I shot. I was refering to...

...suits my tastes... I find this level of softening (slight) to be more natural...

I stand by my original statement...

As I see it, it simply doesn't matter all that much anymore...

to me, is obvious.

... Just my take. Agree, disagree.

Carry on.

If it's all about you, then nothing can be wrong.