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bobbytan wrote:
If you spend a lot of time in the FM forum pages you will be terribly influenced by all the gear talk from gear heads. And there is a lot of one-upmanship going on. People love to trumpet or brag about their equipment and their knowledge about gear. These guys may have the best equipment that money can buy, but they are not necessarily good photographers. Professional photographers and those who shoot for NatGeo are not gear heads, but they are great photographers. So don't get too hung up about m43 vs APS-C vs FF debate. All of these systems/formats are capable of delivering much more than our skills level as photographers....Show more →
I think there are plenty of "gear heads" who shoot professionally, and being a self confessed "gear head" and also earning a living for the past decade as a photographer, I'd like to consider myself an example of that.
There are certainly some folks who love the tech, have the knowledge, but that do take boring shots of things like brick walls, and there are some folks who don't really care much for the tech, but having a great eye, but its not mutually exclusive.
I know plenty of folks who could write a dissertation about 20 different subjects in photography, have vast collections of gear, and that are ALSO amazing photographers.
As for Nat Geo..... guys like Steve McCurry, Joel Satore, Joe McNally et al., are certainly every bit as much camera obsessed gear heads as they are amazing photographers.
You really have to love everything about photogrpahy, both as an art form and as a technical pursuit to reach that level, and make that passion into a career.
I think most skilled photographers strive to take the best images they can, both compositionally and technically. Its just an issue of understanding what type of trade-offs one wants to make.
An 8x10 field camera gives technically superior results to a 4x5 field camera, but Ansel Adams was wise enough to know when to use which options. The 8x10 was great when shooting from the back of the station wagon on the side of the road, but the 4x5 made more sense when packing the rig in with a mule.
When I was shooting night football games, my 400/2.8 gave me an extra stop allowing lower ISO, BUT, my 200-400 f4, allowed me far more versatility in framing, and those more frames, so I'd rather have more images, with slightly less DR and higher noise.
The best IQ is always a compromise with regards to size/weight, shooting speed, and especially budget.
I mean lets face it, even the A7rII (camera I used to own and enjoyed) isn't the absolute best overall IQ on the market. Its perhaps "the best" with regards to size/weight, and a reasonable cost, but there are better options out there if money is no limit
Its like when I used to run my car at the drag strip, there was always a guy who had a pretty decked out car, who thought he was superior to anyone else, because his car was running 8 or 9 seconds quarter miles, but put that into connect with a 11,000 HP nitro car running sub 4 seconds passes and its downright slow..... not that many hobbyist would ever be running such a car, but still, the so called king of the hill is usually in the shadow of a true mountain
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