Truths about Photography

by Miserere

1. All camera brands build great cameras.
2. All camera brands build crap cameras.
3. A good photographer will take great pictures with a crappy camera. A bad photographer won’t take a good picture with any camera.
4. Film is just as good as digital. It’s also just as bad.
5. Expensive lenses don’t take better pictures than cheap ones, they simply let you take pictures in some circumstances where a cheap lens wouldn’t.
6. Most cheap lenses are better than you are a photographer.
7. Don’t buy a new camera until you’ve hit all its limitations and have found your photography restricted by them for at least 3 months. Do this, and you may never have to buy another camera ever again.
8. The grass is always sharper and its green channel displays increased tonal range on the other side of the fence. (Meaning: Everybody else’s pictures will always look better than yours, and everybody else’s camera will always seem better than yours.)
9. There is no such thing as a photograph that isn’t postprocessed.
10. You can tell how good a photographer is by the size of his waste-paper basket (or recycle bin).
11. Most of your pictures suck. So do everyone else’s.
12. If somebody tells you that their camera is fantastic and every picture comes out perfect, they’re lying (see Truth #11).
13. When you improve/upgrade your camera and lens system by 500%, your photographs increase in artistic quality by approximately 0%.
14. The more you complain about your camera system, the worse your photos are.
15. The artistic and technical quality of your latest photo is directly proportional to the number of activations on your shutter.

Lies about Photography

by Miserere

1. You can fix it later in Photoshop.
2. Long focal length lenses have a shallower depth of field.
3. Full-frame DSLRs are better than APS-C DSLRs.
4. Film is better than digital.
5. Digital is better than film.
6. Film is dead.
7. Digital is dead.
8. I only take photos for myself.
9. Real photographers shoot JPEG.
10. The only way to make great photographs is by using the most expensive equipment. (Corollary: you can’t make good photographs with a P&S.)
11. I take pretty landscape and flower pictures, and that qualifies me to shoot a wedding.
12. Real photographers don’t have websites.
13. The pop-up flash is useless.
14. You need at least 12 megapixels if you plan to make 8×10 prints.
15. Photography blogs suck.