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 p.5 #2 · Limited or All-round Gear? | |
johnvanr wrote:
I'm looking for an interesting discussion about something that I've been wondering about since I started looking more at the work of three photographers recently: Saul Leiter, Daido Moriyama and Sebastiao Salgado. The work of all three intrigues me as I'm seeking my own approach.
Leiter was the exception in his time because he used color before most others for his street photography and because he tended to use longer lenses (50mm, 85mm) for street photography, whereas most then and now use 28mm and 35mm for street. I, when I can, prefer to carry both a wide and a short tele when shooting street, hence my interest in Leiter's work (plus his great use of minimal color and ability to produce quiet images in a bustling city).
Moriyama uses point and shoot cameras and shoots a mile a minute. He cannot and doesn't seek technical perfection but his images are stronger than most technically perfect images and somehow to me often show street better than what we usually see in 'normal' street photography. He's mostly a B&W and high contrast shooter. I'm mostly interested in his style because of how liberating it can be and, after trying it in NYC, how it makes me want to shoot and discover images where a stricter approach made me 'blind.'
And Salgado is almost the opposite from both these men in his approach. He's traveled long and far for his subjects and made sure that when he reached them, he had the gear to shoot whatever came his way: earlier Leica R, later Pentax MF and last Canon DSLRs with the f/2.8 zooms. Other than the fact that he produced historic and memorable images, this calls to me because that kind of setup is what I always fall back on when I go out to photograph a parade or event. In those situations, instead of limiting myself to one camera and one lens, I take the gear that covers 28 to 200mm and can handle any situation. (In the same vein, Jay Maisel is known for always carrying the latest pro Nikon with a 28-300mm zoom so he can shoot whatever he encounters).
Obviously, great photography can be done with many different setups, but I'm intrigued by these differences and how I can use them in my own approach. Sometimes, I think limiting myself to one camera and one prime lens is interesting, but I tend to take more diverse images (and 'see' more) when I use a zoom lens. And then there's of course the ease of which you use gear that you're familiar with, which in my case is limited because I use so many different setups (at the same time, I don't see myself ever carrying multiple f/2.8 zooms all day long).
Without bias to what is best, but just merely at what's interesting, let's discuss.
...Show more →
As always, with street or any other photographic genre, there’s no one right or best approach. The best we can do is try to understand the pluses/minuses of each sort of equipment approach relative to what we are trying to do and then figure out what works best and/or feels right for our own photography.
But in the end, photographers do make and have made compelling work with just about every kind of gear imaginable.
The good news is that this reminds us that photography is about seeing and how the photographer’s view of the wold is expressed in their work — their vision and their ability to express that visually… and not about using some supposedly best/right/correct gear.
FWIW, for some of my photography I go out with a big bag full of lenses, a larger camera system, a big tripod, and I may work slowly and deliberately. For other work that I do I may go out with a small handheld camera and a single fixed-focal-length lens and work spontaneously.
Because photography is a gear-centric pursuit and because it is, relatively speaking among the arts, a fairly recent development, it is easy to get distracted from the fundamental nature of the medium and become overly obsessed with gear stuff.
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EB-1 wrote:
Unless there is a medical problem like color vision deficiency, humans don't see in B&W, though in very low light the rods are more sensitive. B&W is mostly an artifact of 19th and 20th century technology and costs. Sure, art is sometimes about removing info to distort reality, regardless of method, but it's annoying that some have an attitude like B&W is somehow magically better than color. We were taught some of that in school so maybe I'm still rebeling against it. 
EBH
It is definitely fair to point out that BW photography has a longer legacy than color, or at least a much longer legacy as an accessible technology. A couple of additional tidbits to ponder as we think about this...
1. Monochromatic art isn’t exactly a new thing — pen and ink drawing and pencil visual art does have a pretty long history, too. Photography didn't invent BW.
2. One thing that continues to attract many who work with BW photography is the how far it can be pushed without looking overly contrived. If we bend and stretch and push color images to the extent that we do with monochrome, the color images sooner read as “fake” (to use a simple term) compared to BW. BW seems to abstract our seeing in ways that let us push things and still regard the image as being reasonably connected to the original subject. (I’m not saying whether or not this is a good or bad thing, just that it is different with BE and color iamges.)
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freaklikeme wrote:
I do think comfort with your gear is generally more important than total coverage. Knowing how a lens and camera will behave in any given situation allows you to quickly and confidently make composition-based decisions that will give you the best capture with what you have available. And it means fewer missed moments when it doesn't matter what you brought, because all you have time for is the camera in your hand and lens mounted on it. You either get the shot with that or the moment passes you by.
FWIW, I strongly agree with you on this.
My background (by academic training and profession) is music. I regard the use of a camera somewhat similarly to how I regard the use of a musical instrument. (There are differences, for sure, but I won’t dig into those here.) The goal is to know the tool (camera, instrument) so well that it essentially disappears and no longer stands (as much) between you and what you are trying to create.
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johnvanr wrote:
I’m going through Salgado’s Genesis with more attention than before. He was asked why it’s all B&W and answered “because it’s the only thing I know..
There’s a lot to be said for that idea.
There’s a “landscape” photographer (he does’ more than landscapes) I know who continues to shoot black and white film, even though he is quite competent at using digital technologies, too.
But the thing is that he has developed an entire practice — ways of seeing and ways of working — based on decades of work with monochromatic film. (He was one of Ansel’s assistants years ago.) He produces beautiful work using this medium. Why should he interrupt that trajectory, likely taking a significant step backwards as he works to make a new technology as intuitive as the old is for him?
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FWIW, I feel that photographs tell us much about the world view and way of seeing of the photographer as they do about the subject. I’m not discounting the value of photography to show us things that we might not see or notice without it, but (as the first post in this thread suggests) it is the way those three photographers (and countless others) SEE the world through the medium of photogarphy that intrigues us. The fact that you could put three photographers into the same situation, with the same subjects, and even the same gear… and that they would produce very different perspectives on that subject points us back to the photographer — not the gear — as the most important thing in all of this.
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Edited to fix some typos.
Edited on Jul 04, 2025 at 10:56 PM · View previous versions
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