Photography: Who Sez It’s Not the Quality of the Camera That Matters?

It is often said that it’s not the camera that matters in photography, but the imagination and ‘eye’ of the user. Generally I’d agree with that: but there are exceptions to that vague rule. Those exceptions are things called (to use the technical term) shit cameras. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how gifted the photographer is – if he or she has a shit camera, he or she is gonna produce equally shit photographs. Here’s a case in point. I don’t do landscapes: I prefer smaller, more intimate shots. But sometimes I can’t help myself, and I  grab a snap of some nice rolling downland, seascape, mountain, or some such. On this occasion the fluctuating light thrown by scattered clouds made this shallow English valley look rather pleasant…

I took this with my Sony Cybershot bridge camera. Yes, I’m a point-and-shoot kinda guy: I don’t do clever stuff. The light was a little tricky, so I thought I’d try the 5 megapixel camera on the Huawei cell phone in my pocket as a comparison. The first shot came out looking like this…

Washed out and ghastly, I think you’ll agree. The Huawei looked as though it could be classified as a ‘shit camera’. But a second attempt resulted in this…

Not bad. Let’s call it an ‘erractic camera’, or ‘unreliable’. But definitely not ‘shit’. A photographer could take some nice shots with this. In fact my wife has taken many. Here’s one of me showing off my Do It Yourself skills…

By chance I’d taken my Qilive cell phone along for the ride. It was bought in Spain for use in Spain, for calling people who live in…Spain. Every so often, when I’m not in…Spain, I switch it on, you know, to stop the SIM card from forgetting that it exists. So, as the Orange signal registered, I thought I’d take the same shot yet again. This is the result…

Now that is a SHIT CAMERA. No one could get this sucker to take a decent photo. And just to prove it, here’s a nice middle distance shot of a sunny field with a horse in it…

 

Yes, that’s a horse. I chose this picture because  the other I took, of a grey horse laying down, looked like someone had dumped a huge bowl of oatmeal on the grass. So, if you’re thinking of buying a cheap cell phone for occasional use, don’t bother paying extra for one with a camera: it’ll be shit. Get a proper camera instead.