PICKING YOUR BATTLES

“It’s All Too Much” —George Harrison

By MICHAEL PERKINS

SOME PHOTOGRAPHIC OPPORTUNITIES, by virtue of being special or rare, pack more anxiety than others. A weekend of casual snaps, regardless of one’s advance preparation (or lack thereof), may not raise many hives on the average shooter. There is no great risk of losing or missing “something good” in such cases, and thus the experience is more relaxed, and may even yield great results, given the laid-back setting. Schedule the very same photographer, however, for an appointment with a unique attraction or a key personal gathering, and the stress levels can zoom. In this case, anything you can do to keep your anticipation from rocketing into panic should be tried. In short, something that has the potential to be The Greatest Place I Ever Visited or The Most Important Day Of My Life is no place to get to know your new camera.

I recently spoke with a woman whose upcoming trip to the Grand Canyon had her in a near state of hysteria, since she had never taken the time to really get to know her “real” camera, and yet felt she needed it to bring back “good” results. I asked if her camera was a gift or whether she had chosen it herself. The answer was somewhere in the middle, in that it had been “highly recommended” to her, which translates, to me, that someone beside herself had decided what kind of camera she needed. She was not just intimidated by the device itself: the idea of even opening the user’s manual was giving her blood pressure. This was a person in crisis, or at least in danger of ruining her vacation experience worrying about what she “should” be shooting with. Guess what her pictures might look like under such circumstances?

I suggested to her that she was not really “on speaking terms” with her camera, and that an important personal occasion was no time to spark up an initial conversation. She might not be able to “speak” to it about what she wanted, or what it could be expected to deliver, and, of course, the camera cannot speak or reason at all. I encouraged her to guarantee that she would return with usable and generally solid pictures by snapping everything on her phone, with which she did have a high degree of comfort. Obsessing about what your gear is doing in the moment kills the idea of your living in that moment, and that, in turn, kills pictures, as all spontaneity or experimental joy simply vanishes from the process. I assured her that her phone was perfectly capable of delivering fine images, and that, moreover, the way to attack a learning curve on an unfamiliar camera is to first shoot a lot of non-crucial things, pictures that “don’t matter”, in preparation for the important things you’ll snap after you and the camera are working as one. Her nervousness was also symptomatic of something you have no doubt seen yourself….the case of someone purchasing a “really good” camera that, however well designed, is a mismatch for how they shoot or (more to the point) how they wish to shoot. In such cases, people often buy a device that is too much camera for what they really want, then stick it in a closet and shoot with the camera they actually like. This can stem from the antique belief, long debunked but still mythically powerful, that sophisticated gear automatically produces great results. It’s crazy: we see millions of amazing pictures taken every day on very basic equipment, and still we associate great pics with complex cameras.

The lady in question went away from our chat happy (or so I believe), because she now had permission to do what she wanted to do anyway. She may, at some time, decide to immerse herself in the “training” of her other camera, but she may not, and that’s fine. In photography, you have to pick your battles, and one in which you should never engage is some kind of death struggle with your own equipment.

We have to remember who works for who.