"The camera doesn't matter" fallacy
If you hang around on photography forums or share content around the subject of photography, you'll bump into this statement at some point:
The camera doesn't matter
Now, I obviously understand the intention here. You can capture great images on (pretty much) any camera. But claiming the camera doesn't matter is nonsense and it winds me up every time I see it.
You'll often see this thought paired with things like "the best camera is the one you have with you", which is much more palatable, but still I maintain: the camera does matter.
I will not go out "photographing" with just my phone. You'll notice that many of the arty types who proclaim "the camera doesn't matter" are not shooting on their phones. It's a terrible experience and phone photo quality is poor due to the inherent limitations of how they work, which I won't cover in-depth here but in brief: fixed apertures, small sensors, and computer processing. That's not to say you can't take good photos on a phone, and I do indeed still take photos on my phone, albeit primarily of my cat. Phone photos are throwaway photos, for me.
There's this funny trend amongst some photographers to pretend they don't care about camera gear, as if admitting you like cameras is enough to enroll you into the bourgeoisie. I'm not going to name names but YouTube is full of them. Watching them wrestle with their inner self as they explain why they bought yet another new camera but no, really, it doesn't matter is part of the fun of watching the larger trendy photographer channels. I wish they could just be honest with themselves and admit:
Cameras are really fun.
I love cameras.
I love the history.
I love the weird variety and insane detours they took on the way to modern standardisation.
I love the internal design of early Pentax cameras like the S3 because I vaguely understand how it works.
I love how the Rolleiflex corrects for parallax at close distances.
I love the Sigma Bf because it's beautiful.
I love learning the intricacies and foibles of each different device.
For me, there are two completely different criteria for a camera, which are context dependent:
- For wildlife or professional photography, for photography that is itself exciting and adrenaline-inducing, I want a camera that is predictable and gets out of my way. The Nikon Z9 is nearly perfect in this regard - it behaves consistently and predictably, even when it's not doing what you want, which makes it reliable.
- For everyday, street, travel and the like; for photography that is itself not technically challenging; I want a camera that is fun and engaging. For these situations much of the fun is in the shooting of the camera. The camera makes me want to get out and take photos because it's fun, and honestly I don't even care about how the photos turn out much of the time - they're just an added bonus.
Now I think #1 is fairly self-explanatory - not many people want a quirky and awkward camera when they're working professionally or in intense situations. But still the camera matters, and I couldn't capture many of my favourite wildlife images on any old camera, or at least not with the same frequency or quality. The Z9 is excellent at finding fast-moving subjects and tracking them in awkward situations:
And yet, despite the Z9 being close to a perfect machine, it doesn't tempt me out to shoot with it for fun. The wildlife tempts me out, or, in the case of professional work, the money.
#2 is the primary point of this post. For many disciplines, for me, the camera not only matters but is the entire reason the photograph exists in the first place - I would never have bothered going out and taking the photo if not for the camera enticing me out.
Take this image, currently on the homepage of this site:
I took this because I wanted to shoot my new-to-me Rolleiflex T. I wanted to try out a new-to-me film stock. And so I went photographing in a place I've photographed many times before, that I would otherwise not bother revisiting. The camera is the reason this photograph exists. And it's one of my favourites I've taken in the past year.
And so being repeatedly subjected to "the camera doesn't matter" is frustrating, because it feels like erasure of how I, and many others, enjoy photography. It's this notion that the only thing of value is the end result, not how you got there, and conveniently ignores the possibility that without a fun camera the photograph would very likely not exist at all.