This thread made me recall a couple of things I heard over the years. One was the book by cancer survivor and Tour de France winner, Lance Armstrong, "It's Not About The Bike." The other was from a cattleman's field day many years ago in Greeley, Colorado. The subject was "quality in beef cattle. Someone asked if there was any particular breed of cattle that had more quality. One buyer replied that cattle came in many different colors, but green money has a certain quality about it. "You can make money with any kind of cattle," he concluded.
Now, to paraphrase Lance Armstrong, it's not about the lens. You can make pictures with any kind of lens, or camera, or film. And as the cattle buyer said, pictures have a certain quality about them and you can make pictures with any kind of equipment. What seperates Ansel Adams from the rest of us was his ability to see...to visualize. I think you could give Ansel Adams any combination of camera, film and processing chemicals and he would come up with an "Ansel Adams" picture. It was Adam's ability to take an ordinary scene and turn it into a work of art that made him special not his equipment. I still stand by the old axiom that photography is simple...the only difficult part is keeping it simple. The only important thing for a photographer to learn is how to paint with light and to reproduce what he sees in his mind. Ken On Tuesday 14 May 2002 01:05 am, William Robb wrote: > > The whole friggin point isn't about whether the zoom is a better > compositional tool or not. It's not about composition at all. > It's about learning how to see what light does when it hits an > object, how that gets translated into an image. This is best > learned with a 50mm lens (if we are using the 35mm format as an > example). It matches (more or less) the field of view of the > human eye, and consequently, produces a picture with a > perspective we can immediately relate to. -- Kenneth Archer, San Antonio, Texas [EMAIL PROTECTED] - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
