Eye of the Beholder

“ Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

This saying first appeared in the 3rd century BC in Greek.

You should have, by now read our article on “ Choosing the right equipment.” This would have helped you find what equipment suites your unique needs. However the way you LOOK at things, through your viewfinder:  is just as, if not more important than what camera you hold in your hands.

A story from the New York Photographic Society club in the early 1900 illustrates this point, beautifully.

There was one member of the club that was considerably more well off than most, he was also taking all of the awards at the club competitions. Fellow club members were grumbling that  he was only doing so because of his superior equipment. As these things do, the grumblings came to his ears. 

In order to end this he threw down a challenge to the club. Each member would make a pin hole camera. A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens but with a tiny aperture, a pinhole – effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through the aperture and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box, which is known as the camera obscura effect.

Then they all had one day, just one day, to hit the streets of New York with these little cameras and one spool of film. At next club meeting the competition would consist of entries from the results.

He walked away with every award, as usual at that meeting.  Thus proving, that the way the photographer sees things is just as, if not more important than his equipment.

We shall be posting a few more articles on how to improve the way a photographer “looks” at things.

Choosing The Right Equipment.

Photography 101

Choosing The Right Equipment

| Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V |

Choosing the right equipment is always a very hot topic and difficult decision. There is a fine balance between professionalism and getting the job done. Unfortunately there is never a happy medium between the two and the two is merely two points on a linear line in maintaining points of reference.  a Professional Photographer will need versatile equipment that not only looks professional, but can meet all the requirements that they might encounter on a photo shoot.

Before we attempt to categorize equipment we will firstly dissect the need. Why are you going to take pictures. Personal Use, Scrapbook, Blogging, Amateur, Journalism, Professional and then comes the subcategories in each one. Money is not the only criteria. When you blog you need smaller files sizes and new cellphones does not give you a large scope of files sizes to start off with. So you end up with a mid range phone with extremely good quality photos that is to large for your application and kills both your bandwidth and uploading time as well as the bandwidth of your target market.

So let us start 

Personal Use 

Taking pictures of yourself, your kids, family outings and your pets. Here one need as high megapixels as you can afford. For the simple reason, due to the extremely high photo quality, you can always crop a subject matter and wide angle don't have camera shake, needs lower light conditions and has a much sharper focus and depth of field. This is all very confusing, but you will start understanding the various concepts as you work through the course material. So any Cell phone Camera with 8 Mega Pixels or greater.