A professional photographer I know said he heard this question a lot: “What’s the *best* camera to have?”
His answer? “The best camera is the one you have at the moment.”
In other words, capturing the moment with any camera is better than not capturing the moment at all.
I get a little comfort out of that these days, when the camera I can use is my cell phone camera. Granted, it’s a darn good camera, I just wish I could control the depth of field to focus tightly on what the story is about.
Gonzaga’s staff photographer, Zack Berlat, caught a great pic of me in 2018 capturing SEAS students at our first Welcome Walk. I’m using our family’s SLR digital camera, and only having a little issues with the viewfinder.
Since then, my nearsightedness has gotten worse. I can still frame a photo well; I just can’t isolate the subject. People and things in the background are just as sharp as the subject, so the picture is ‘cluttered.’
I remember someone else saying photography is about the ideas and the passion you bring to it. So those ideas and passions are going into something I still do really well — photo editing in Photoshop. I use several masked layers and filters to highlight the story of a photo, playing with the lighting and saturation to make the event as vibrant as I remember.
I’m still taking candid photos at work, such as students at work or the SEAS Orientation picnic. They’re just not the professional portrait shots I used to take.
Change comes hard. Thank you, technology, for still making photography an option.
Communication By Design 