Many photographers will tell you that the equipment doesn't really matter and that while it may be more challenging to get the shot you want with a P&S or a crappy lens, it is still possible.
Personally, I have gotten some decent shots with low-quality consumer-level equipment (a really cheap telephoto zoom, for instance), but I've only very rarely managed truly excellent shots.
On the other hand, whenever I've gotten my hands on a Canon 70-200 f/4 or a 400 f/5.6, the jump in the quality of my photos was stunning, practically every exposure was damn-near perfect once I got used to the lenses.
This leads me to my question. What are some examples of great (read pro-level or shots that could be sold) shots taken with consumer-level, cheap equipment? Do such shots even exist?
Examples of the equipment I'm thinking of would be things like P&S and smartphone cameras as well as DSLRs with cheap glass attached to them.
Most importantly, if such photographs do exist, how does one go about learning to take them?
Answer
If you really need an example, I guess the current "canonical" one would be Jerry Ghionis's iPhone wedding album, which placed fourth overall in the 2012 WPPI album of the year competition. For those wondering, Ghionis photographed the wedding with his normal gear, but took extra "takes" with the iPhone (and permission of the couple) specifically for the project. And the point was not to prove that "equipment doesn't matter", but that composition, framing and the effective use of light matter much more.
If you need more, you need look no further than, say, every picture taken before World War 2. Even the "legendary" lenses of the time were absolute crap compared to the "eww, it's plastic" consumer-grade lenses of today that gearheads wouldn't use at gunpoint. Films were soft and mushy with grain the size of watermelons, and anything bigger than a contact print would show it. Shutter speeds were ballpark at best (clockwork timers in fine working order could be off by half a stop in either direction, depending on heat, humidity, age, and so on), and you didn't have much of a calibrated range to work with. A top speed of 1/1000 put you in the super-fast league (1/400 or even 1/250 was the top speed on most shutters), and longer than one second usually meant using bulb and counting. Speaking of which, the longer your exposure needed to be, the longer your exposure needed to be (reciprocity failure), so if you calculated a four-second exposure, that might mean anywhere from 8 to 30 seconds, depending on the film and the weather. It would have been highly unlikely that the photographer was using an SLR; so viewfinder parallax, framing accuracy and distortion needed to be taken into account for anything other than view cameras. A $99 point-and-shoot today beats a pre-WWII medium or small format camera in almost every technical respect. And yet people managed to take some really good pictures somehow.
Better equipment will make good photos better. It can make some kinds of shots possible that would not have been possible otherwise. It will not make a bad photographer good (although it might provide enough of a psychological lift to encourage the photographer to get good). If the best you can do with an older or cheaper camera is "meh", then stepping up to a $50,000+ Hasselblad or Phase One system will only get you "meh" that looks slightly better at 100% on a monitor. As Ansel Adams said,
There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.
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