A famous photographer called Chase Jarvis is credited with saying ‘The best camera is the one you have in your hand’. It’s a line I’ve thought a lot about when wandering unfamiliar streets or looking over fresh landscapes. The more I’ve let this idea bounce around inside my head, the more I realise that it wasn’t about the gear, but about your relationship with the scene. It’s about how you see, not what you use to capture a scene.
Most of my life I’ve told myself the lie that better equipment was the answer that would fix everything. I’d previously done it with golf. I took up the game in my mid-thirties, played every week, sometimes twice, and convinced myself that a shiny new set of clubs would magically improve my game. Eventually, I wore my wife down, bought the clubs and … my terrible swing was still a terrible swing. There were marginal improvements in my game, but ultimately nothing fundamental had changed. It’s the same with cameras. Badly composed photos are still bad photos no matter how expensive the body.
Going back to Jarvis, the original quote dates back to a time when the democratisation of cameras was in full swing. The then recently released iPhone 3GS, was putting a 3 Megapixel camera in people’s pockets, and suddenly everyone was documenting their lives. Today we barely think about it, taking billions of photos every day. We capture our coffee, our food, our pets, our kids or some scene where the light is just right, like it’s part of everyday life. When I’m travelling I’ll often take 1,000 photos in a week, spread between my camera and my phone, safe in the knowledge I can crop, tweak and delete later with a swipe or a mouse click.
On my hard disk at home, I’ve more than 20,000 travel photos. Together they tell stories of places, but also how I’ve learned to look at those scenes. In 2011 I went to Spain, I didn’t blog, didn’t take photos and came home only with the memories in my head. I regret that choice more than most. In 2014, I carried a little pocket Lumix camera around France and started paying attention. On later trips I almost exclusively used my iPhone, and many of those images have stood the test of time.
These days, my main camera is a Canon R6 and a selection of lenses. It doesn’t make me a better photographer, but it does give me more options. I can pull a bit more detail out of a street scene, freeze a bird splashing on a lake and extract more from the RAW files when I’m back at my laptop. The tools may have changed, but the challenge is still the same. I want to show what I saw through my eyes when I stood in that place.
There’s no right answer here, no correct ratio of phone shots to camera shots to ‘serious’ photos. In the end, it’s like Chase said, the best camera is really the one you have with you, and the one you’re willing to take that snap with when something catches your eye. The images in this reflection all came from a mix of all of the above.
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