DRILLING DOWN TO IT

By MICHAEL PERKINS

ONE OF THE MANY ONLINE PHOTO CONSIGNMENT SITES, which, of course, make lots of money by buying what shooters no longer love, claims, in its welcome page, that “research (?) shows that nearly half of U.S. photographers have cameras or lenses that they haven’t used in two years.” As evidence, this is both unprovable and un-unproveable. It may be total bushwah, and it may also be God’s truth. But for many people who’ve been shooting for a while, it kinda sorta feels….reasonable.

What would be more interesting to me, however, in terms of specious claims about what equipment we do or don’t use, would be a breakout (pie chart? bar chart? Venn diagram?) of which percentage of even our most favorite cameras we never, ever use, for anything. It’s not a stunning revelation that cameras are larded up with a lot of techo-fat, features upon features, menus upon menus of stuff that sounds wonderful in the brochures but doesn’t serve our most repeated or desired functions. The fact is that lots of gear can place many layers and barriers between what we see and how we set about to trap our vision in the box. We can get so besotted with the setting-up phase, the romantic dance of making a technically flawless picture, that we get sidetracked from how simple a process it really is….or should be.

Aperture. Shutter Speed. ISO. Lather, rinse repeat. Change one part of the triangle and the other two will be changed as well. That’s it. Class dismissed. Now get out of here and go make pictures.

Is this image made on a cheap point-and-shoot? Or a $2,000 pro tool? A Leica or an iPhone? Analog or digital? Can it, in fact, have been produced equally well by all of those, if the photographer applies vision and care?

Manufacturers drag us from one model camera to another, laying in just enough innovation or novelty to render our current equipment “obsolete” and to artificially engineer desire for the latest thing. I spent a career in mass media and can attest to how effective this approach is. It sells a crap-ton of cameras, as well as cars, apparel, audio gear, and breakfast cereal. But for photographic purposes, it can actually weigh a shooter down, delay the moment of decision, or, worst of all, create the belief that the other guy’s camera, being more advanced than our own, guarantees said other guy better pictures. And, since I have already used “bushwah” once in this tract,  I’ll now characterize this belief as “malarkey”.

The mechanics of making an image are inherently as consistent as they are simple, and, if there was a magical evidentiary graph to show how much of our cameras we actually use, it is my contention that the list of most frequent operations would be small, and would not include the majority of the tools and add-ons built into our equipment. That is why, along with other reasons, I still occasionally shoot film in, completely mechanical cameras….to force myself to think in very simple rules of engagement and to find the pictures that any camera, simple or complicated, can produce. And while there will be times that I miss some of the lovely extras that now crowd our devices, I can always re-learn the habit of shooting without them, drilling down to the bedrock of what makes a picture work. And if, as the consignment sites claim, “nearly half” of us have cameras or lenses that we don’t use, perhaps we need to ask ourselves why that is.