Human skill is important, but what having good equipment gives you is a lot less limitations. There are many situations where tech makes taking good pictures a LOT easier.
Think for instance of a sports match -- your chances of taking any good pictures of the action get a whole lot better if you have a humongous zoom lens with a high end camera attached to it.
Same with nature -- yeah, you don't want to "use your legs to zoom" when taking a picture of a lion.
Macro, you can use extension tubes, but bet you wouldn't say no to a Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 -- that's not just macro, it magnifies by up to 5x. If you've ever seen some crazy closeup of a fly that's probably what it was made with.
For something more mundane, try shooting inside at a dimly lit Christmas party -- that works best with the right, wide aperture lens. Great, you got a cheap 50mm f/1.4, but indoors in a cramped room you can't back out through the wall when mounting it on a crop camera.
My best anime conventions were taking by dragging huge amounts of equipment to the con. Here they do them at ugly places with ugly backgrounds and not a lot of nature or anything attractive nearby. My solution was borrowing Canon's 85mm f/1.2. That's a $3600 humongous chunk of glass, but boy does it work. At conventions people put a lot of work into the costumes -- a 50mm f/1.4 may do okay headshots, but little else.
Then there's the cool camera features -- good autofocus, low noise for high ISO, weather sealing for shooting in the rain, stabilization... those also lower the difficulty of taking a picture by a lot in many circumstances. While somebody is trying to set up a tripod and put an umbrella over it, you can just hand hold it.
Yeah, a pro photographer can work wonders with old or bad equipment -- so long the specific subject isn't important. If you have a specific task you want to accomplish the unfortunate truth is that throwing cash at it makes it a lot easier a lot of the time.
> My best anime conventions were taking by dragging huge amounts of equipment to the con. Here they do them at ugly places with ugly backgrounds and not a lot of nature or anything attractive nearby. My solution was borrowing Canon's 85mm f/1.2. That's a $3600 humongous chunk of glass, but boy does it work. At conventions people put a lot of work into the costumes -- a 50mm f/1.4 may do okay headshots, but little else.
Cosplay is a good example. To unify this with what the article is saying, in my experience if someone takes the time to find a suitable, well-lit setting, then even if they use a phone they'll get a better photoshoot than any amount of expensive camera can get them. But of course if you're trying to shoot dozens of people in a few days at a convention then equipment that will deliver under less-than-optimal conditions hugely improves what you can do in the time and space available.
Certainly, a good setting improves matters! But here for some reason it's very common to do anime cons at convention centers that are built in the cheapest way possible. Think a huge, empty square box, with a rough and dirty floor like a parking garage and a ceiling full of cabling and ventilation ducts. It just clashes horribly with anything not post-apocalyptic.
The lines of sight can be very long so something unfitting in the background is near guaranteed, and they like to mix and match lighting temperatures often with lights right next to each other.
This was exactly the thought, and example, I had reading the article.
The last "oh wow" level photo I took was of a dragonfly perched on a flower on the shore of a lake. My phone would never have taken the photo; it lacks the hardware necessary to capture that photo. It's not a lion, but you can't walk up to a dragonfly: it would have flown away.
Not only the zoom problem, but for that particular photo I took a series of photos at just ever so slightly different focuses. Autofocus is only so good … and sometimes just completely misses the mark; I have fought my phone on this so many times, with it just picking the wrong spot continuously. Much easier to aim a camera's autofocus, and if that fails I can manual.
But even then, sometimes the autofocus is "right" (in that it hits the right target), but I find it's still only so good. And a dragonfly is not a large target; if it's off even a bit, blur. Sometimes it's such that I can look at the preview/view finder, and it looks in focus, but once the photo is taken, it's close … but not perfect, and it ruins the wow. Hence, manual focus and just spreading a bunch of shots across the nearby range — one is bound to be close.
I've also shot dance competitions, and they're dimly lit. Looks nice, but you need a real lens to get sufficient photons.
Absolutely composition matters … but if you're just consistently missing due to the hardware, then even if you get it right, the photo is still lacking.
Human skill is important, but what having good equipment gives you is a lot less limitations. There are many situations where tech makes taking good pictures a LOT easier.
Think for instance of a sports match -- your chances of taking any good pictures of the action get a whole lot better if you have a humongous zoom lens with a high end camera attached to it.
Same with nature -- yeah, you don't want to "use your legs to zoom" when taking a picture of a lion.
Macro, you can use extension tubes, but bet you wouldn't say no to a Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 -- that's not just macro, it magnifies by up to 5x. If you've ever seen some crazy closeup of a fly that's probably what it was made with.
For something more mundane, try shooting inside at a dimly lit Christmas party -- that works best with the right, wide aperture lens. Great, you got a cheap 50mm f/1.4, but indoors in a cramped room you can't back out through the wall when mounting it on a crop camera.
My best anime conventions were taking by dragging huge amounts of equipment to the con. Here they do them at ugly places with ugly backgrounds and not a lot of nature or anything attractive nearby. My solution was borrowing Canon's 85mm f/1.2. That's a $3600 humongous chunk of glass, but boy does it work. At conventions people put a lot of work into the costumes -- a 50mm f/1.4 may do okay headshots, but little else.
Then there's the cool camera features -- good autofocus, low noise for high ISO, weather sealing for shooting in the rain, stabilization... those also lower the difficulty of taking a picture by a lot in many circumstances. While somebody is trying to set up a tripod and put an umbrella over it, you can just hand hold it.
Yeah, a pro photographer can work wonders with old or bad equipment -- so long the specific subject isn't important. If you have a specific task you want to accomplish the unfortunate truth is that throwing cash at it makes it a lot easier a lot of the time.