Friday, June 10, 2011

Thoughts on Photography

This post is dedicated to people who think that the major factor determining quality of photos is a camera.

Here I provide a proof that that's not the case by comparing two pictures taken by the same camera, of more-or-less the same subject, within seconds of each other. The first photo below was taken by the writer of this post (me), the second by my husband. To make it clear, I do not think that the photo that I took is good (for one, the man on the right has his eyes closed). The only point I'm trying to make is that the photos can be vastly different even if the circumstances and camera settings are the same.

Here is a photo I took (low light conditions, no flash, no post-production improvements):


And this is a photo that Anil took a minute later (with exactly the same camera settings):


Here is Anil's photo processed in iPhoto (it looks better now, but the colors still don't look like they should and half of the photo space is wasted):


So please do not ask me anymore what kind of camera I use. Some of the best photos I took were taken with a compact point-and-shoot camera (and some of the worst with the pro-DSLR camera...)