I read somewhere on this site itself that you should spend more on your lenses and less on your camera bodies.
Is it a myth or a fact that mostly it is the lenses which make your photographs not the camera bodies? If it is true, then on what basis?
Answer
It's a bit of both.
Everything that the camera has to work with comes to it through the lens. If the lens is horribly soft (that is, it gives low-contrast and not very sharp images) when you do everything right, then it doesn't make a lot of difference what camera it's attached to, you're not going to be able to get razor-sharp images with a lot of "pop". The same goes for any of the optical characteristics of a lens -- the camera can't give you a wider maximum aperture, lower distortion, etc.†
So there is a minimum level of optical quality below which you really don't want to fall when selecting lenses, and there really is no substitute for having the right class of lens for the job (whether that means having a wide maximum aperture or the right focal length).
And there are handling issues to consider as well -- many of the "kit" lenses and crop-sensor superzooms are optically very good (some are actually excellent), but they're almost impossible to focus manually because they have only a very narrow ring of knurled plastic way out on the far end of a wobbly set of focus tubes to work with. If you don't focus manually, you'd never notice, but a Zen master on Valium could easily find himself smashing what is otherwise an acceptable lens to smithereens (and kicking kittens) if manual focus was important to him. And some lenses that get the optics very right but saved money on the construction exhibit zoom or focus creep -- the glass in the lens is heavier than the mechanical bits can handle, so when you point the lens up or down, gravity does its thing and changes your settings.
All of that said, though, a lens can't fix all of the problems with a camera either. If you need to shoot, say, people in very low ambient light, it's a lot easier (though only slightly less expensive) to find a camera that will let you work at ISO 25,600 than it is to find a lens with an f/0.35 maximum aperture (and if you did find the lens, you'd have to decide which part of which eyelash on which person you wanted in focus, since everything else will be thoroughly blurred). And on the camera I use hand-held and in the field most of the time,‡ a 6MP Nikon D70, there isn't enough resolution on the sensor for me to see the difference between an excellent lens and one that's merely very good -- I could spend a fortune on the very best lenses, but until I change cameras I can't see the difference in my photographs. So yes, the camera body makes a much bigger difference in the digital era than it did in the film era. But it still can't make up for a horrible lens.
And let's be realistic, too -- the lens you can afford and actually use to take pictures will always be better than the brilliant but expensive pinnacle of the lensmaker's art that never gets closer to you than your Amazon wish list. When it comes right down to it, it's much better to have a $300 dollar Samyang on your camera, with all of its flaws and foibles, than an $1800 Nikkor locked away safely in your local photo boutique. The picture you can't take never comes out well.
As Nir said, the photographer, not the tools, is the biggest limiting factor.
† Both cameras and some outboard processing software can remove things like geometric distortion (barrel and pincushion), vignetting and lateral chromatic abberation after the fact by calculating what the image would have looked like without the problems, but that always involves losing some of the original data.
‡ I have Parkinson's disease, and I can't afford to buy a new top-of-the-range camera every time I drop one or involuntarily swing it into a wall. Meds can keep the tremors under control (and one learns to time things), but they don't do much for the clumsiness. At under $200 per, I don't worry about the D70s so much, and that's liberating. (I can't wait for the "ew, that's so-o-o old" used D7000s to hit the market at that price, though.) There's the whole CCD sync speed thing, too -- everything is X-sync, and all I have to consider is the flash duration being longer than my selected shutter speed. And since most of what I shoot is for small prints and the web, 6MP isn't much of a limitation. Now, if I could just get it to work in available darkness...
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