A choice of camera is unexpectedly important

Our photographic consultant finds that the camera he uses can have an unsubtle effect on the pictures he takes.

Our photographer writes:

It is a truism, at least among serious photographers, that buying a bigger/better/more expensive camera will not make you take better pictures.  (Of course, camera manufacturers like to hint otherwise.)  Within wide limits, your results will depend on you, not your equipment, as I have noted before.  Indeed, in my photo albums it’s almost impossible to tell which of a dozen cameras was used to take any particular picture.

But I have found using the Polaroid Automatic 100 to be unexpectedly different.  It provides a photograph immediately, which was a novelty when it first came out.  You can get instant feedback on your composition and exposure settings.  But you have to develop one picture before you can take another one.  Instant gratification is required.  This can sometimes be inconvenient: standing in the street while timing the development is awkward, and there may be no place nearby to dispose of the negative paper.  And the print is wet and sensitive to damage for a few minutes after coming out.  So while the first picture may look just like that taken with any other camera, I may not take a second one.  In any case, I won’t take many.

Contrast this with the twelve shots on a roll available to the twin-lens reflex.  Changing rolls of film in this camera may be as awkward as developing the Polaroid print, but at least you needn’t do it as often.  I can try several approaches to a subject, or several subjects.  And the thirty-six exposures of the canonical SLR give quite some leeway.  So while I might have captured any given picture with any of the cameras in the Five Colors collection, in a paradoxical way some of them would not have been taken had I been using certain cameras.  Single pictures may be a result of your vision, but larger collections are products of the tool you use.

With the advent of digital cameras of course the exposure-count limit of the roll of film is gone.  You can take as many images of a scene, event, whatever as you have the stamina to push the shutter release.  The limitations of film, including the lack of instant feedback, have been dispensed with.  But they have been replaced by another: editing.  Out of the thousands of exposures you make, there’s still the task of working out which ones to keep/send/post/use for your purpose.  You can get a rough idea of a shot’s quality immediately, but digital camera viewscreens are as a rule tiny, even smaller than a Brownie print.  That’s fine if you’re just going to post it on Instagram (but if so, why bother using other than a smartphone?).  For anything serious, you now have to sift through many images on a large computer monitor to find the right one(s).

So to a much larger extent than I anticipated, my photography is shaped by the camera I use, something that must apply to every photographer.  This should be a sobering observation to any artist with a strong personal vision (though I suspect most of those have already found the best tool for their work).  But it also holds out hope: going to another camera may open up unexpected possibilities.