Opinion

Photographer Pierre T. Lambert wants to debunk a photographic myth. No, you don’t need to shoot in manual mode to take better photos, he says. It’s actually a lot more important to hone your photographic vision and not get bogged down in stressing over technical skills you might or might NOT need.

Do your friends often tell you that your photographs are so good you should become a professional? Do you sometimes stare blankly at the pages of National Geographic and hear a voice inside your head that says, “I can do better than that!”? Do you post on Instagram more than 70 times a week? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, read on—and unleash the master picture-taker that’s lurking in your soul.

Here’s a helpful video for any photographer out there who suffers from GAS, aka “Gear Acquisition Syndrome.” In the below clip, photographer Michael Andrew, aka Michael the Maven, tries to answer that eternal question photographers face: how many lenses is too many?

Thanks to rapid and ongoing advances in digital imaging technology, our industry is so abuzz with exciting new photographic products—both hardware and software—that it’s difficult for photographers to keep up with the latest-and-greatest gear and without worrying that their photographic arsenal is about to become obsolete. In real terms, though, much of this technical innovation is incremental in nature; better low-light capability, faster processing, higher resolution, enhanced video capability and the like.

The camera market is in a constant state of flux these days thanks to a still volatile economy and the popularity of disruptive, non-traditional imaging forces including smartphone cameras, GoPros, drones and a host of other wirelessly connected, social sharing-focused digital doohickeys. So it was not a complete surprise when a rumor started making the rounds of the photo blogs recently that Samsung was planning to exit the camera business.

I’m tired of hearing people mindlessly repeating nonsensical assumptions as though they were true facts. You and I may disagree on some of these points, and that’s fine—I certainly don’t know everything. But I have been around long enough to still practice that old maxim, “Believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see,” which in a world that has a fascination with the internet becomes, “Don’t believe nothin’ ‘til you’ve checked it fer yourself.”

While black and white digital photography is based on the conversion of a color (RGB) image to monochrome via software, those who remain adherents of film photography have an entirely different route to obtaining a black and white image.