Not the hammer

It’s not the hammer that builds the house. It’s the carpenter.

I say this a lot when talking photography. It means no matter the size, cost, quality or quantity of your tools, you can’t do diddly squat without talent. It means no matter your camera, you can take good pictures if you have skill, imagination and sometimes a little determination.

On the other hand, one can have the most awesome cameras and accessories and still be a poor photographer, and this person usually has a pious attitude. I have known people in that category, but I won’t expound on them here. Instead, I want to talk about making the best with what you have and how you can upgrade to better tools as your talent or needs grows.

If you have awesome equipment and seasoned talent, wonderful. Just remember to rely on your skills more than your equipment and don’t let great tools be a crutch for you.

Several years back at a sport event a photographer with a lens the size of garbage can remarked about my mediocre lens. It was something like “Is THAT all you brought to shoot with?” At the time I could not afford a cool, fat 2.8 aperture lens and was shooting with a simple $200 zoom. I just smiled and said “Yep,” but I was picturing in my mind beating his brains out with one of my photography awards.

I do have pretty awesome equipment now, but along the way in my journey as a photojournalist I made good with what I had at the time and grew my tool kit as my needs and money grew.

Making do

The next time someone makes fun of my equipment....BONK!

I had to learn to make do. In the days when we did not have digital cameras and shooting film for newspapers and magazines while making deadlines required crazy stunts. I sometimes shot the beginning of a game, left at half time to rush to a one hour photo lab and beg to have my shots processed quickly to negatives instead of prints, rush back to the game to get the final score and quotes from the coach, then race to the office to make deadline. With news, I sometimes used a cheap-o Polaroid camera back then for late-breaking news on deadline. I shot an event with my good film camera and then popped of a couple of shots with the Poloroid to make deadline. Those Polaroid cameras cost about $39.95 but with imagination they got the job done.

When digital came along it was godawful expensive and out of the reach of most photojournalists. I was in a college photography course when a Canon rep showed us the first digital SLR I had ever seen. It cost $10,000 and its features are long extinct in today’s market. In time, my boss bought a simple Nikon pocket digital for a whopping $1,200 and we took turns using it. I learned to shoot football and track with the slow focus of the pocket camera by focusing on an area close, locking the focus by keeping my finger on the trigger, and then popping off a picture when the action came. Good carpenters use their skills to figure out how to get the job done with the tools they have. About a year later I was forking up the money for my own digital SLR big boy camera.

My encouragement is, if you have great equipment, great. If you don’t, well, great anyway. Just find ways to do great work with what you have and grow into better equipment and accessories as you can. If you have questions about types of cameras that will meet your need, read customer reviews. Avoid complicated manufacturer reviews and avoid reviews by customers that believe spending more money makes up for a lack of talent. Better yet, talk with a photographer friend and tell them your budget and explain to them your photography needs. Got no photographer friends? Sure you do. Just email me here.