What you need for great photography

There is a story about a young student who was apprenticed to a master artist to learn to paint, but he felt he could not paint properly as his brushes were cheap and of an inferior quality to those of the master. After a while he plucked up enough courage to ask the teacher if he could borrow his brushes. To his great joy the old man agreed, and with the bundle of brushes in his hand he set off to his studio. When he got there he boasted to a fellow student: “I have borrowed the master’s brushes so now I will be able to paint like him.”

His friend looked at him and said, “It is not the master’s brushes you need, but his soul.”

How many times do we think to ourselves: “If only I had the same lens as old so-and-so, I would be as good as he is.” There is no doubt that there is some equipment that is better than the rest but will it necessarily make us better photographers? I don’t think so. Even the best Leica equipment in the hands of a photographer with no imagination will only result in technically superior boring photographs.

As I see it, there are three aspects to making photographs. Firstly, choosing the equipment; secondly, the taking of the photograph; and lastly the processing and printing of the picture. With the advent of digital photography there is much discussion about the choice of equipment and the methods of processing the images in the computer, and it sometimes seems that the picture taking process has become secondary.

How many times have you heard a digital user saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll fix it on the computer.” I am not suggesting that this is always a bad thing but in many ways, digital technology has made us lazy photographers. Meanwhile it should be making us better at making images. Never before has it been this easy to apply Ansel Adams’ concept of pre-visualisation. Instead of shooting madly, and spending hours trolling through hundreds of thumbnails trying to salvage something – think before you shoot.

This brings us to the most important part of the picture making process – the taking of the photograph. We are in the fortunate position of having equipment that can focus for us and seldom gets the exposure wrong. This frees us up to concentrate on composition, but unfortunately many don’t take advantage of this. We are just seeing more perfectly sharp, well exposed, but still badly composed pictures. Perhaps we should forget about the technology for a while and try to capture something of the soul of the old masters. In his day, Cartier-Bresson was not a great photographer because he used a Leica, but because he and an ability to observe people and anticipate the moment at which to press the shutter.

A celebrity chef was at an exhibition of a photographer’s work. He said to the photographer, “Your pictures are wonderful, you must have a very good camera.” On another occasion the same photographer was at a dinner catered for by the chef in question. After the meal he complimented the chef, ”The food was wonderful, you must have a very good stove.”