“People think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing” - Henri Cartier-Bresson
The above quote, in my mind is so correct. I hear so much talk about techniques and gear and I think people are missing the point of quality photography in so many ways. The Masters used gear that was far beneath what we have today and yet produced high quality work that we still value today. They didn’t have the lightning like frame rates, the ISO capabilities, the dynamic range or auto focus to name only a few things, yet they managed some of the best work that has stood the test of time.
Any camera of any brand today will more than suffice to make high quality images and yet so many of us can’t get away from looking toward that next camera or something new being released. I used to carry a heavy bag of lenses around with me, you never know when I might need that one lens, right? The one that I used once or twice a year. Did that bag of gear help me to make better images? Yes and no. What I found is that even with all those lenses I still had my favourites that got used the majority of the time yet I still carried all that weight around “just in case”.
After a trip to the UK, my wife and I decided to lighten things up a bit. We aren’t getting any younger and all that weight while traveling is not fun. We swapped our heavy Nikon lenses for much lighter and smaller Lumix gear. Are there differences and trade-offs? Sure but nothing that would stop us from shooting what we want to. The gear is just a bag of tools, the real artistic part of photography comes from us and our abilities to use those tools.
