Waterbury, Connecticut
Should I buy a new camera?
This is a question I'm asked quite often. The answer varies depending on who’s asking, but there’s a consistent pattern, which is to say, “probably not.”
Is your camera broken? OK, digital camera obsolescence is so fast that it’s probably stupid to repair a camera that isn’t the latest model. But if your current camera still works, then the question is whether a replacement is “worth it.” The answer to that, I think, is to ask whether the new camera will directly improve your pictures.
So, let's say you are constantly frustrated because you want to make larger prints than you can successfully with your current files. You’d dearly love to make 17x22 prints but can’t stand what happens to the files when you interpolate them over 11x17. If the new camera has 50% more pixels, without sacrificing related factors like dynamic range or high ISO performance, then it will likely address your problem directly.
If what you dearly want to do is make pictures of birds in flight, and all the reviews say the latest model has vastly improved AF follow-focus tracking, then buying it will likely make a direct improvement in your pictures. It wouldn’t have the slightest impact on my pictures.
Let’s say the new model has a whopping two steps more usable high speed ISO. But, if you hardly ever find your current camera’s high ISO capability to be a problem, that feature really isn’t worth anything to you, it’s not going to improve your pictures.
So the simple thing that’s needed is to take a hard-headed, clear-eyed look at whether something about the new camera will really make a direct improvement in your pictures. If not, then my simple suggestion is to take that money and spend it on making pictures.
Use the money for a series of weekend shooting expeditions. Maybe take a workshop. Or if you don’t have a high-end printer, get one, along with lots of ink and paper, and start learning how to make really fine prints from your work.
There are two things that will do more than anything else to make you a better photographer: make lots of pictures, and make lots of prints from them.
10 comments:
First of all: I enjoy(ed) the Weeds Redux series very much. It puts into concise images what I try to train myself: Seeing, without categorizing, taking enjoyment in shapes and colors. That it's a series makes it stronger in my eyes, and I could imagine wandering along a wall with "Weeds" prints.
Re. text: My own blog followed a similar pattern: the words became less, now reduced to a mere title and a place indication. It's not all bad, and I don't know how many viewers really miss my paragraphs, but it certainly affects negatively the google success, as all google can use is text.
Your advice re. the purchase of a new camera is certainly valid.
But it probably will get accepted the most by those who know already. That gear buying impulse can be overwhelming (I speak from experience), and I can accept your advice only now as I have the feeling that my own capacities have grown to a certain level and feel less constrained by the camera itself.
Oh, and I should add the example of Juha from http://lightscrape.blogspot.com/
The work he showed over the last years is strong and was created with the LX3, a small sensor camera with an equally small zoom range of 2.5x and only 8 MPix in square format. By gear failure he's momentarily restricted to his camera phone, yet his imaging remains strong.
Thanks for the thoughts, Markus.
"but it certainly affects negatively the google success, as all google can use is text"
can you elaborate on that a bit? I have none of your IT expertise.
Markus, with ~200,000 captures in three years, Juha is most certainly following—entirely from his own initiative—the first part of my advice about improving your photography. He's out there making pictures. I think it's working for him as a learning experience.
As an aside, recently I happened to check the file numbers on my GF1 (I routinely change them on download to a yymmdd_xxxx format so I have to check the preserved exif data to see the camera numbering) and it seems that in the year plus two weeks that I've owned it, I've made just over 31,000 exposures. There were also a few thousand exposures with my Pentax equipment, which was displaced by the GF1 much more than I had expected. Because of circumstances beyond my control, I've done almost no large format work in the past year, but I'm about to change that quite soon.
Carl, just take "Summer Haze, II". All you give google to index is your name and the blog's name plus the words summer, haze, washington, connecticut. These are the only terms (plus the fact that there's an image) available for people to find this post.
"Weeds Redux, XIV" is really loquacious in comparison: Tens of sentences, lots of nouns that help google to decide if it should be in a hit list returned for a certain request. Search engines still are text based, and from little text their algorithms form a smaller probability that this is among the searched content for a certain query.
Thanks, Markus. I read a very good book by a well known author about a year ago on the whole Google phenomenon, but I still haven't wrapped my head around the concept of Search (with the capital letter indicating a sort of holy grail).
Your explanation is wonderfully simple and direct. What I take from it is that if I write a lot more, I'm likely to see a substantial increase in traffic, almost all of which will scream EEEK! and click away, never to return...
Nice advice on getting a camera, just the way it is. Most cameras are good enough. But I think the shopping impulse is rather strong and can only be resisted by the act of taking photographs.
I think the same applies to most areas of craft. Maybe sometimes it might even be a good thing to switch gears for a while (from artmaking to gear, hmmm...) - as long as one realizes that the flow of doing, not owning stuff, is the real thing.
Sometimes of course one may confuse the enjoyment of having done (or planning to do) with the doing itself. But you get only a moment of pleasure of the first, and a lifetime of learning from the latter.
Regarding Google, one aspect of it is the captioning - provided one wants to get a lot of hits. (I'm not so interested in that.)
Normally when you put a caption on a photograph, you think of something non-obvious, derived maybe from your artistic impulse, to complement what is visible for the viewers of the photograph. So, if there is a bicycle on the photograph, you wouldn't put the caption "Bicycle" on it. But in order to be found by Google, there is no other way than the obvious.
Well, that can of course change the moment Google invents "The Eye Which Understands". ;-)
"as long as one realizes that the flow of doing, not owning stuff, is the real thing"
Perfect, Juha.
On the topic of "as long as one realizes that the flow of doing, not owning stuff, is the real thing".
I was thinking about cameras when writing this, but I guess this may be true in a wider sense as well, hmmm... Maybe even life as a whole?
Your last paragraph is certainly correct: it is possible to increase traffic by including the right buzzwords. This however does not preclude any statement about the value of that traffic. But for example from Andreas Manessinger I know that the posts with the most views are the technically inclined, the tests and opinions about gear and the photoshop tricks.
As this is not what I want to offer, I accepted the consequence of not being very attractive in terms of search engine optimisation.
Another factor should not be forgotten however: what counts for google, too, are links from other websites to your web presence. Such in-links increase your ranking in the search results and make it more likely that a viewer may click on your link.
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