Photographer or Equipment

Anyone who invests money in quality photographic equipment has heard the following, "That's a great camera, it must take great pictures."  Most photographers will smile and agree while screaming in their head, "I create the image! The camera is just the tool I use to capture it!".  Some may even give you a lengthy lesson in how the photographer's individual skill is more important than the equipment they use.  Anyone with a lot of disposable income can buy an expensive camera.  This doesn't necessarily make them any good at taking pictures.

While browsing some of my favorite photography websites I came across the perfect article on this issue.  Over at PetaPixel there is a fabulous article on the subject.  Sohail Mamdani explains in his article, Gear Doesn't Matter - Except When It Does, that to a certain extent the photographer must have the skill and knowledge to properly capture a picture.  However, there comes a point where gear does matter.  Any time you start to specialize the right gear makes a huge difference.

The best example I can give of this is my last trip to Walt Disney World.  One of my main goals was to capture images of the dark rides.  This is a great example of when the gear you have makes a difference.  For the dark rides I had my Nikon D700 with a Nikon 50mm 1.4 attached.  The full frame D700 has great low light capability and the 50mm 1.4 has a very wide maximum aperture.  The combination of these two pieces of equipment allowed me to shoot scenes that would have been difficult (if not impossible) with lesser gear.

Sure you could use flash to illuminate the subject but on any of the dark rides a flash would be distracting to other guests as well as ruin the atmosphere of the ride.  Dark rides at WDW are tricky due to low light, unstable ride vehicles, and scenes that confuse your camera's exposure meter.

I highly recommend reading the full article on PetaPixel (linked above).  That article plus many others are very useful.  Below are a few examples of pictures that were made possible by using more specialized equipment.

Pirates of the Caribbean - ISO 2500 1/30sec at f/1.4 (an ISO that my first camera couldn't achieve and would have been so noisy that it would have been completely unusable.)

POTC - ISO 2500 1/40sec at f/1.4

Rockin' Roller Coaster - ISO 1250 1/15sec at f/2.8 (used the 24-70mm lens for this one)