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[OM] great photos from cheap equipment?

Subject: [OM] great photos from cheap equipment?
From: William Sommerwerck <williams@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2002 06:40:13 -0800
If I've sent this twice, I'm sorry. I had a crash and wasn't sure it went out.

"I took my college class with a Kodak Instamatic. The professor took one look
at that equipment and pronounced in no uncertain terms I would receive no
higher grade than a C, and this assumed I would do everything else perfectly.
Sure enough, he gave me a C at the end, which was, by the way, the lowest grade
I ever got in college. My final photograph was better than okay, though, and
this teacher admitted as much -- albeit grudgingly. <grin>

"Other things being equal, superior equipment must count. But first the
photographer needs to get that far through other means."

A very famous photographer -- I forget who, but he was one of the great
photojournalists of the first half of the 20th century -- once remarked that we
hadn't even _begun_ to exhaust the aesthetic potential of the box camera. A
teacher who, a priori, determines your final grade merely on the basis of the
equipment you're using, isn't someone I'd want to have me teaching _anything_.

I think it was David Vestal who had his students set their cameras -- even
Leicas -- to a fixed aperture and shutter speed, and at the hyperfocal distance
for that aperture. He wanted his students to pay attention to the subject, not
to the technical aspects of making the picture. (This is significant, because
Vestal was a real fussbudget about technical quality.)

If I taught photography, I'd have my students use a Polaroid OneStep, for the
following reasons:

1. The OneStep is a fixed lens, fixed-focal length camera. You're "stuck" with
one way of viewing the world, and you have to figure out how best to make it
"work" photographically.

2. The film is relatively expensive. You can't snap off multiple shots in the
hope that one will be good.

3. You can see the picture almost immediately, and decide whether you got what
you wanted.

4. The use of a cheap camera should disabuse the student of the notion he needs
expensive equipment to take good pictures.

I've taken great pictures with every camera I've owned -- including
wonderbricks and Polaroids. An interchangeable-lens SLR makes it easier to take
great pictures (or at least technically competent ones), but it can't
compensate for a photographer with no "vision."


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