
Photo School - brudgers
http://www.rogerandfrances.com/subscription/photo%20school%20index.html
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tlb
"The lens was a Voigtländer 90/3.5..."

I'd like a photo guide that shows the relative importance of exotic gear,
perhaps by showing photos of the same subject with whatever fancy equipment
next to photos on a popular SLR and a smartphone.

In the first photo, it's hard to imagine that any other lens would look much
different. The fancy APO optics in the Voigtländer lens aren't going to affect
a low-res B&W photo much.

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frostburg
The APO part doesn't matter, but the flat field of focus of a macro lens might
have relevant there given the subject.

Exotic gear only matters if your're trying to do something hard (for example
big prints from 35mm film or extreme macro or high speed photography...) and I
say this as a Contax/Leica/Hasselblad shooter/gear snob. Merely decent gear is
important - smartphone pictures are universally awful when given a closer
look.

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jdietrich
>smartphone pictures are universally awful when given a closer look.

A few years ago, I would have agreed with you. The latest generation of
flagship phone cameras (iPhone 8, Pixel 2, Galaxy S9) are comparable in
quality to a good compact camera. I really can't see much difference between a
modern smartphone and an old favourite like the Powershot S120. You wouldn't
want to make big prints, but you can get genuinely good images from a flagship
smartphone, especially with a third-party app like Camera+ or ProCamera.

~~~
lmilcin
Smartphone cameras are excellent quality. The pictures are bad because
statistical user is a person who never tried to become better photographer.
There is A LOT of excellent smartphone photos, they are just being drowned in
deluge of random photos.

~~~
frostburg
I'm not in any way implying bad faith here, but have you ever used a good
camera?

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lmilcin
Depends what you call good camera. For the past couple of years I have been
using Nikon D600 with Nikkor 17-35 f2.8, Nikkor 70-200 f2.8 VRII and Nikkor 50
f1.4 as my workhorse.

Camera doesn't mean much. I give my camera to random people and guess what, I
get random photos exactly as if they were done with a smartphone.

It is not the camera, it is the photographer that takes the picture. The
picture is the light field that was present at the moment of taking it -- your
job as a photographer is to create or find an interesting light field and the
camera is just technical means of preserving it. CAMERA WILL NOT MAKE YOUR
PHOTO INTERESTING.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGsmVw4tCWY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGsmVw4tCWY)

~~~
frostburg
That's some very good practical gear. My inner snob would say that the 50/1.4
is no Summicron, that I would rather use a 135/2 Apo-Sonnar than the (actually
not cheaper) 70-200 and that retrofocus wide angles meant to work well with
digital sensors are inferior in the more rarefied markers of image quality to
non-telecentric designs like the biogons, hologons and super-angulons of old.
This doesn't matter, you probably know that you cannot obtain the same results
from a smartphone camera (which doesn't mean that one cannot take an
artistically valid picture with a phone, it's just going to be technically
inferior).

We're not talking about bad photographers here, we're talking about someone
that knows what he's doing trying to use a smartphone camera seriously. All
the skill and knowledge can't do much against rolling shutter or banding in
gradients that should be smooth, etc.

~~~
lmilcin
Part of making good picture is knowing limitations of your gear.

My first camera I used when I started this hobby was Fuji X100. This has a lot
of limitations. Extremely slow focus, fixed 35mm (equivalent) f2.0 lens. This
forced me to study its limitations and what I can get with it.

I have quickly learned, it's not about being able to do everything, it is
about being able to do something, very well.

~~~
rangibaby
35mm f/2 should be a very good lens.

In my experience the main limiting factors of smartphone are the tiny sensor
size (noisy, low DR). Image processing keeps getting better but there are
physical limits to what can be squeezed out of a given sensor.

If smartphones could trigger flashes at reasonable shutter speed (I guess
1/125 or 1/250) I could see myself using one to take real photos in an
emergency.

There are also different definitions of what good gear is. I have several
40-60 year old lenses that are excellent for studio and street photography,
but people who want edge to edge sharpness (blah blah blah) would probably
laugh at them.

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kodis
What a wonderful series of articles! It does seem very heavily geared toward
film photography, and while many of the subjects -- lighting, composition, and
the like -- are timeless I suspect that today's beginning to intermediate
level photographers will be much more interested in digital rather than analog
photography.

~~~
jacobolus
The author wrote a bunch of photography books starting in the 1980s.

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kough
These are all bad photos. The authors seem nice and well-intentioned but I'd
take their advice more seriously if the work result was at all decent.

~~~
colanderman
Care to give specifics?

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kough
There are approximately one million places with good guides to learning the
technical skill behind photography, because there is not all that much
technical skill to learn. The rest of it is art. Subjectively, I don't like
the art they produce. This is of course just an opinion.

~~~
jdietrich
_> There are approximately one million places with good guides to learning the
technical skill behind photography, because there is not all that much
technical skill to learn._

Only if you take a relatively shallow, digital-oriented approach. Ansel Adams'
legendary trilogy (The Camera, The Negative and The Print) are still essential
reading if you truly want to understand the photographic process.

I broadly agree with your main point - most of the images on that site are
trite and uninspired.

