On Apr 13, 2011, at 7:56 PM, Jim King wrote: > Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote on Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:25:25 -0700 >> [Much commentary clipped from the original]
>> Equipment cannot make photographs. Only people can. People with eyes, >> sensitivity, and skill to know how to work the equipment. Truly >> ..."equipment often gets in the way of Photography." > > Well said, Godders. I'd like to hear more comments in this vein from other > regulars here. > > Regards, Jim > -- > Jim, I read this piece last night (after W. Robb kindly pointed out how I needed to access the site. Duh.) My recollection/interpretation of the key points the author was making is as follows: a. Close enough is good enough. Set the camera for the conditions and take photos already. b. Intuition is better than logic. Well, he doesn't actually say that, but the whole lens-design bit about how good experienced lens designers can do better than a computer program is in that same vein. I agree with (a). I think we all (except Bob W. and Frank) sometimes let ourselves be driven by a fascination with the electromechanical gee-whiziness of our cameras, and we strive for vanishingly small degrees of precision in aspects like exposure, color balance, focus etc., thereby losing some ability to see, to visualize, and to create an image that we and others will care about. Trust me; the research on cognition clearly shows that we have limited capacity, and attending to technical details must diminish the extent to which we are attending to the image as image. I disagree with (b). Intuitive decisions are no better than logical decisions; see Chapter 7 in my 2009 book on developing leaders for links to relevant research. I would agree that an experienced designer is far more likely to generate an innovative solution than an inexperienced designer, but the tools they use will have no bearing on the outcome. A designer who has grown up on CAD/CAM and who is good at his job is just as likely to be good as is a designer who grew up grinding lenses by hand using polishing cloths made from passenger pigeon skins. Actually, the modern designer is likely to have an edge since he can try more iterations and hence has more trial-and-error learning opportunities. My general assessment is that the author is a romantic, yearning for the good old days when life was simple. It is unfortunate that he picks on a particular consumer product as the focus of his discussion, because it leads people to talk about the goodness and badness of Leicas more than the merits of his apparent assumption that things used to be simple and are no longer so. BTW, i recently had my father-in-law's M-2 refurbished, torn shutter curtain repaired, etc. It sits here on the shelf by my desk. Every time I pick it up I am surprised by what a large heavy unwieldy camera it is. It may be simple, but it is pretty primitive. For usability I'll take a Minox EL, Olympus OM-1, Pentax ME-Super, LX, or MZ-S any day. And of course the current generation DSLRs provide so much more functionality than the Leicas ever had. And they allow us to take pretty good images as long as we remember that close enough is good enough. stan -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
