Hello all, I was reminded (again) how much misinformation and disinformation surrounds and infests our most enjoyable pastime, so I thought it might be mildly entertaining to haul some out and shine a bring light on them.

JPEG is DEAD

Saw this one a week ago. The author, in a rather questionable “photography magazine” took the position that JPEG as a format is dead because there are alternatives, that may take a bit less space and be just as easy to work with in the web centric world. Utter hokum. Every decent photographic editor that lets you export images after processing defaults to JPEG while offering alternatives. All commercial photo printers demand JPEGs with rare exceptions. Every web site that can show a photo is happy with a JPEG. Is JPEG optimal? No, it is a very old design built to survive extremely slow low bandwidth transmission. It’s very lossy. And it works to the extent that no one actually cares about those things.

That’s a Great Picture, You Must Have a Really Good Camera

I still hear this gross stupidity more than I should which is never. It’s like saying to a great brain surgeon that his or her success is related to his or her scalpel. If you hear this kind of effluence, run away lest you catch something mentally fatal. The camera doesn’t matter. Only the human using the camera matters.

Sensor Size Doesn’t Make a Difference

This one is another pant load. There are multiple different sensor sizes in the market, from the microscopic phone sensors, to giant plate sensors used on view cameras. In the trad “real” camera world we have micro four thirds, crop sensor and full frame. Sensor size impacts depth of field, the number and size of the pixels in use and low light capability. Sensor size makes a big technical difference, but what is more true is that if you are happy with the results you get, then the sensor size that you have is perfect.

Megapixels Don’t Matter

This is both true and untrue. If you only ever look at your images on a display, it’s 100% true because no display anywhere has anything near the resolution of your real camera sensor. It only becomes more true if you crop very aggressively, thereby significantly reducing the number of pixels used to contribute to the final image. Thus the argument that if you will crop a lot, you want more pixels. Also consider though that the more pixels in a fixed space means a smaller surface area per pixel and that means less ability to gather data as light levels drop requiring more power and thus reducing the signal to noise ratio delivering as you should expect more noise. If you’ve ever wondered why the sensors in “pro” cameras are always in the 20MP range it is this. Pros are more likely to show up with the right glass, and less likely to crop and more likely to have to work in crap light. If the output is going to be very high resolution prints, then a bigger sensor with more pixels makes a difference.

You Need Enough Glass to Cover Everything You Photograph

If this were true, you would also need a personal shreve to carry all those lenses, an enormous amount of cash to pay for them, and the ability to swap lenses like the Flash to put the perfect amount of lens on subject. Most photographers do a fine job with more simple lens choices and their feet, moving to put themselves in the best position for the shot, the nicest composition and where needed to do panoramas or cropping to achieve the goal. Glass is lovely, and rarely pays for itself.

You Got Better Results with Film

Not by any scientific measure. You get a different look for certain, even different looks with different types of film and those of us who shot film a lot knew that Kodachrome 25 and Kodachrome 64 produced very different looks, regardless of K64 being 1 ⅓ stops faster. The same was true for Tri-X and HP4, later HP5. Different chemistry, different grain structures and different processing models including choice of which developer all contributed to different looks. More artistic? Fa! Art is in the eye of the beholder. The one thing serious photographers got when shooting film is a better success ratio because there was no simple way to burn 100 frames on the same flower under the noon day sun.

Storage is Nearly Free

This is true if one only considers the raw cost of the storage. Let’s say a single frame from your camera takes 50 MB in RAW form. Let’s say that on a typical photo outing, you come back with 200 frames. That’s 10GB of RAW images which in the storage model of today is very little, when a decent 64GB card might cost $30. So as a consequence, people get sloppy. Instead of composing and preparing and shooting 3-4 frames, they fire off 50. Well that’s cheap storage right? Nope because the burdened cost is that someone has to take the time to go through all that crap and find the one that really works. I have heard pros ten years back say that they were happy with a 6% keeper rate, so after shooting and then evaluating 100 frames, there were 6 that got processed further. Now I hear it’s closer to 2% because storage is so cheap. Only cheap if your time has no value.

If you come back from an airshow that lasted three hours with 3000 frames how far do you get through your evaluation before you think driving a pitchfork into your skull will be more fulfilling than looking at one more picture of a grey airplane small in a grey sky?

Natural Light is Best

News flash. All photons are natural. Photography is about light. No light, no photos. Saying natural light is best says that a) you haven’t the skill or the desire to develop the skill to learn how to manage light for better images. That’s ok, but that doesn’t make on a natural light photographer, it makes one a lazy photographer. Perhaps what you prefer is AMBIENT light, which is of course quite natural, and you only want to photograph using the light that happens to be present when you show up. That’s fine, but lose the attitude of superiority because a really committed photographer will have learned how to leverage that ambient light to serve her, not be controlled by it. He may even dare to augment or replace that light to serve his vision.

Wrapping Up

I really could go on for days with these falsehoods, but I would be bored and so would you. You are the photographer, not the camera or any of the other stuff. Without you, there is no art, no creativity and no personality. So show yourself the respect to discern bullshit when you hear it. You will be a better photographer as a result.

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