Photographers tend to have passionate opinions about their craft, and some of those opinions can spark heated debates. Certain topics, though, repeatedly surface in the photography world, leading to complaints that can feel redundant.
Coming to you from Dee Rosa Photo, this fun video ranks the top 10 most annoying complaints that photographers tend to make. One of the top offenders is the endless debate over film versus digital. The problem isn’t necessarily about which is better, but rather how people allow the medium to define their personality. In the end, it’s the image that matters, not the tool. Complaining about film being “cooler” or digital being “easier” just misses the point. You should focus on the image’s impact rather than the process behind it.
Another major topic is megapixels. People often fixate on the number of megapixels in a camera, claiming that more equals better. But, as the video points out, even cameras from the early digital age with much lower megapixel counts could produce large, high-quality prints. The fixation on megapixels shows a lack of understanding about what really affects print quality. Most modern cameras, even those considered “low” in megapixels by today’s standards, are more than capable of handling professional work.
Sharpness is another overhyped factor that the video addresses. Sure, lens sharpness can matter in certain cases, but it’s far from the most important aspect of an image. Composition, lighting, and subject matter far outweigh the importance of sharpness. In fact, if the composition is lacking, no amount of sharpness can save a bad photo. Many people get caught up in the technical aspects of photography, but neglect the artistic side, which is where true impact comes from. Those are just a few of the topics, so check out the video above for the full rundown from Rosa.
The weirdest disagreement is with dynamic range. That is an area that represents a large limitation of modern sensors, as well as film, as even with perfect exposure, unless you have full control over the lighting, odds are, the scene has a far wider luminance range than the dynamic range of the camera sensor, thus there will almost always be a compromise with current tech. With that in mind, a sensor and ADC that will do 15 stops of dynamic range, will do noticeably better than one that does 12 stops of dynamic range.
Strange that he is against concerns about megapixels. Modern CMOS sensors are still lacking in overall resolution. Without going to insanely astronomical price markups, on average the best most people will get is 2024, is around 100 megapixels, while what people likely want is something in the 400+ megapixel range. Beyond that, pixel shift technology is not a good solution as it requires fractions of a pixel shifts in order to get sufficient luminance and chroma samples, and with such subtle movements, even locked to a good tripod, often times you will still have some artifacts unless you are doing it in the basement or other extremely stable location (commonly seen in reviews of many modern ILC cameras where the high res mode is tested in a studio setting).