Put the coffee on, maybe pour a glass of wine. This will take you about eight minutes to read, but it might be a great way to recalibrate for the year ahead. If you’re looking for the winners of the Gura Gear Giveaway, you can find those towards the bottom of this piece.
My first camera was relatively easy to use. A fully manual Pentax Spotmatic, the functions were few: shutter, aperture, and focus. I never revelled in the simplicity, but only because I had nothing against which to compare it, so I knew no better. Simple as it was, there was no shortage of challenge in making the kind of photographs I wanted to make. There was a world of composition and storytelling to learn—a world of light I didn’t yet know that I didn’t know. After 40 years, I’m still learning about light and colour and all the other things that make a photograph I love.
Hell, even my first digital camera was relatively simple compared to the marvels that sit nestled in the camera bag at my feet as I await a flight to Kenya tonight. Each of them is just one upgrade cycle away from being incomprehensible to me. At the same time that I got my first digital camera, I also decided to learn Photoshop, bought a book, powered through the lessons, and gained something like proficiency. But now? That young man was pretty fluent in Photoshop after a year, but he wouldn’t even know where to begin with the current version; he wouldn’t even recognize the interface.
Ah, the good old days, right? Well, no. I don’t miss being limited to ISO 64 of Kodachrome or knowing that my Ilford Delta 3200 would give me grain the size of GrapeNuts. I don’t miss manual focus or even the so-called autofocus of my 2016 Fujifilm X-T2. Compared to that camera, the autofocus of my Sony A1 feels like honest-to-Dumbledore magic. And what I can do now in post-production, I couldn’t have imagined 20 years ago.
The good old days had simplicity on their side, but probably only in hindsight. Give it twenty years, and kids will look back at the most advanced of our cameras and wonder if they’re wood-burning. They will look at the gear we now find so miraculous in the same way 20-somethings now look at rotary phones, cassette tapes, and people who still have Hotmail accounts.
How we make photographs continues to evolve. As it does, the options multiply, the vocabulary we use to describe those options requires greater expertise to understand, and it gets easier to get overwhelmed—or ashamed at how truly understand fewer and fewer of the options. For some, this is an exciting challenge; for others, it feels like just another barrier getting in the way of doing the thing you love.
If it weren’t for the restraining orders, I’d be on the phone with the engineers screaming, “Enough! Stop touching things! It’s good the way it is!”
For all the advances, the camera in your hands still does something remarkably simple: it records a focused beam of light, freezing in time a moment, a gesture, a lick of colour, or a “Hey, look at that” that otherwise would go unlooked at. It helps slow the relentless hands of time a little, gives us handles for memories that, by their nature, can be a little slippery and hard to hold onto.
This craft can be as complicated as you want it to be, but it can be enough that you know enough, you know? You don’t need to know it all.
You don’t need to know everything your camera can do before you delight in a simple line or use it to explore a landscape in which you find wonder. You need not touch every button or even know what they do, to stop your lens down, slow your shutter, and focus your lens on something that takes your breath away. The basics still do what the basics have always done. They were good enough for Ernst Haas and Cartier-Bresson and Erwitt and Lange and whoever it was who made the picture that ignited that spark in you that still burns today when you pick up a camera.
There are hundreds of options in most contemporary cameras. You are obligated to know or use no more of them than what serves you in your particular pursuit, and there is no shame in admitting that, no, you really don’t have any idea what that one does.
After 40 years, am I self-conscious that I now look at menu items without so much as a glimmer of recognition? A little. What does this one do? Hell, I don’t even know what the words mean. Was that option even there yesterday?
You’re not alone if you feel like there are more functions on your camera that you don’t understand than those you do. That’s OK. You can well afford not to know everything about how your camera works. Or what those new features in Lightroom do. If you don’t need it, you don’t need it. And if you do, you’ll figure it out. But none of us can afford not to know how photographs work. Nor can we afford not to understand our creative process and who we are as artists. That’s where we should be spending our limited attention.
I have seen achingly beautiful work from photographers who barely know how to use more than the basics with their cameras. They know what they need to know, and that’s enough. Do they know what 90% of their menu items do? They do not. Not a sniff of an idea about most of it. When it comes to the deeper mysteries of their cameras, they are, forgive my saying so, just about as dumb as a box of hair. But they know enough. Shutter. Aperture. Focus. And they know how to work a line with indelible grace; they know how to finesse a complicated composition and tell a story not easily forgotten. They explore their scenes with courage and curiosity, and play with colour with such nuance it takes the breath away. I wish I knew my craft as well as they do.
There are also photographers who can talk excitedly—and with great expertise—about their cameras all day long. They know every new function in Lightroom before it’s even released. But they don’t have a word to say about what makes a picture do what it does to touch the heart or the imagination.
Their pictures are sharp, but they are not poignant. They have near limitless depth of field, but no depth of feeling.
It’s not a question of which is better; it’s a question of what you want. What you strive for with your work. Most of us can’t do both with the time and attention we have. We can know only a few things truly well and deeply, with the kind of comfort we might call mastery. It’s possible to know everything there is to know about a guitar and know nothing about making music. Of the millions of people who know how to use Microsoft Word with near prodigious expertise, how many of them know how to write a great story? And if it’s a shit story, and it fails to resonate, will you marvel instead at the formatting?
You could be Stephen King or Mary Oliver and barely know where to find the vowels on a keyboard. With the technology, it would be enough to know enough. The magic was never in the tools, anyway.
Knowing your craft is a much deeper, bigger, and more hallowed thing than merely knowing your camera—or the software, and many of you are much closer to the former than you think. It is so much better to be really good at working a scene and digging deeper into your creativity than to be really good at working a camera and digging deeper into the menus. And if you’re still young (in this craft, if not in years), then learning to do the former will be much more rewarding than obsessing about the latter.
If I had to choose, I’d rather know everything I could about how photographs work than how to work everything on a camera.
What a very long way of saying this: you probably know enough, and that’s enough. The best part, the hard part, still remains. Pick up the camera and go make something you love. That, too, is enough.
For the Love of the Photograph,
David
Gura Gear Winners Announced
Last month Gura Gear put some great gear on the line for my readers and I promised to give it away. Here are the lucky winners:
First Prize of a Kiboko 30L+ camera backpack is Alison Bowditch
Second Prize of a 60L Mara Travel Duffel is Aaron Carpenter
Third Prize of an Accessory package is Troy Patterson
Congratulations to the winners, randomly chosen as you were! We’ll be in touch by email to connect you with Gura Gear and get your stuff shipped. Thank to the rest of you for playing and huge thanks to Gura Gear for their generosity.
Comments
Thank you so much for this article! I always feel awkward when I meet fellow photographers who know everything about photoshop and have all the fancy gear and I have no clue what they are talking about for most of it. I can handle my camera, do the edits I need and then I’d rather just focus on the photos themselves. I feel like after 20 years of discovering photography I’m finally finding my voice, it’s nice to know that’s what matters more.
Hi David…your “Enough…” post really struck a chord with me and took me back to my travels with you in Kenya, now many years ago. In preparing for that trip, I read the recommendations of what I should be able to do with operating my camera before considering a safari trip. For example, be able to change any setting on my camera without looking at a dial. I could not do that. I had a new long lens that I had used for about 20 minutes. I signed up anyway and trusted that what I could do was enough. And it was. My photos are a treasure. I have a photo of a lion in profile framed and hanging on my wall. My only regret would have been to think I should not go.
Call me a Luddite if you will. I use my Nikon DLSRs much the way I did my Minolta SRT-101, Olympus OM-1 and Nikon FM and F3 – shutter speed, aperture, focus. The new tech makes it easier. The hard part is 6 inches behind the viewfinder.
I stand ccorrected.
I just received your website from Tomasz and it is a deligjht.
I have just forwarded it to my students (all adults).
I talk a lot in class about creating the visual narrative irrespective of the tool.
I could make a great and poignant series of moody, foggy, sensual photographs with a pinhole camera from a Quaker Oats box and it might be a sensational picture story and resonate as a stronger series than what I might make with my Nikon 3100 DSLR.
I love your website and of course I think your photographs are fabulous. Beautifully thought out and executed – each one a real gem.
LB
I’ve not been here before.
I just received your website from Tomasz and it is a deligjht.
I have just forwarded it to my students (all adults).
I talk a lot in class about creating the visual narrative irrespective of the tool.
I could make a great and poignant series of moody, foggy, sensual photographs with a pinhole camera from a Quaker Oats box and it might be a sensational picture story and resonate as a stronger series than what I might make with my Nikon 3100 DSLR.
I love your website and of course I think your photographs are fabulous. Beautifully thought out and executed – each one a real gem.
LB
You hit the nail on the head with this one.
All I can say is…thank you! from another overwhelmed elder who fondly remembers my first totally manual Nikon SLR on which I learned all I really need to know.
Nice read David! Insightful as always. Although, you have shamed me into closing my Hotmail account! 🙂
Wow! Thanks for that permission! It sometimes feels like I could spend my life learning the tech leaving little time for making image. “It’s Enough to Know Enough!” My new mantra.
David
Not gonna get into gear or processing or longevity talk – just want to say that I enjoyed the heck our of this soliloquy.
Mark
I had been sick and tired of all the books about landscape photography techniques. They implied that I have to know all of that to be an acceptable photographer. I really tried, but the more I tried, the more tense I became. Then I bought my first book by you, David, by chance, and I was relieved. Technique is not all. Technique has no soul. From then on, the joy of my photo trips returned. That is what I learnt. Focusing on wanting to enjoy photography changed my perspective on my work with photos. For the time being I know enough. And for the next project I will learn what is to be learnt to know enough.
Thanks for the article, David. Good to reminisce! I’m still using an old DSLR and a defunct Nikon-only editor. Maybe one day I’ll switch to mirrorless and Lightroom, but they’re still working for me. But that remark re: “hotmail accounts”? Ouch!
Thank you David for your thought provoking article and the many readers with their comments. Its encouraging to read these and many experiences that is captured therein. My photographic journey has been a long one, commencing in the mid 1950s with a Kodak Brownie 127 and the Kodak Box Brownie No.6. Very little controls and heaps of pressure to create the photo right the first time. The the in 1970 a Praktica LTL SLR that finally failed a 5-Day white water rafting test. It was great move to be able to use Aperture, Focus, Shutter and ISO for the 1st time. Many expeditions , many photos of the time. Jumping ahead a Nikkormat FT2 SLR and finally the digital Nikon D3200dSLR to complete the camera journey. Each one developed my image capturing skills. Becoming a Camera Club member for the past 40+ years has also helped on that journey, including the darkroom time. Most of all, I have found that learning is a life long event. Just as you know something, it all changes. Back up and relearn. My most basic foundations has been with the pioneer photographers, Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, and William Henry Fox Talbot to the modern day; Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Ansell Adams and alike. These are the ones that encouraged and directed my image taking and presentations with Eadweard Muybridge in my audio visual (Slide/Tape) shows. Your topic highlights our need to take history, shape it to meet our needs and refine it as we travel the road of creative photography that challenges oneself and the view to the wonderful world around us all.
Thanks for the reminder. after 75 years from discovering a kodak box brownie with prism viewfinder to a Canon R6 mk3…..it is fundamentally the same 3 tools we work with …..What is dampening my old enthusiasm is the constant updates I still use PS cc2015 and lightroom, they just work. The rapid development of Astrophotography programs Siril etc. for post processing is a constant thorn with updates every time you fire it up. We Elders don’t have enough time left to bogged down re learning. But there is an option now with Dwarflab that lets you send your data to somewhere in that mysterious cloud and it sends back processed images. But where is the sense of achievement and fun it that although there is a hint of “You press the button, we do the rest” The full circle
As I enter my 75th year, I am so comfortable with what I know about my cameras and post. And I still study all of your teachings and strive to make honest, provocative images. I don’t travel as much now, but still am getting around THIS hemisphere and my back yard as well.
Grateful for your writings, David…and this is a great one…so validating!
respectfully,
Hank
It’s easy to get bogged down in any subject. Sometimes it’s worth digging to find out more. Sometimes not.
This made me smile: “grain the size of GrapeNuts”. 😉
Thank you David.
At my current age of 97 years I am overwhelmed by all the “wonderful but incomprehensible” instructions I receive about doing something which was previously simple to me. When I got my Nikon 7500 I tried each of the options and some I may use others not so much unless I am curious.
Take care.
Doug
This is the first time I have read your blog and loved this piece. It articulates what I have come to learn about my own photography over the last 50 years. I will be back for more
Another great article David.
Modern cameras just allow a multiplicity of ways to apply the basics. ISO, Shutter speed, Aperture, and focus.
But first get your own focus. Know your craft, and how to make it ZING in this particular moment. The greats knew the limits of their materials and how to make that work for THIS image.
All the rest is just foofooraw.
2 cents worth
(What does 2 Aussie cents translate to in Canadian cents? Probably something else I don’t need to know!)
Thanks for allaying my fear of the infinite possibility and choice that all the new tech has to offer! A great reminder that it’s all manageable if you have your priorities straight and make images for the right reasons.
I am 82 years old and I have gone through all the stages and observations you mention, and I completely agree with your views.
Hands down, my favorite essay so far! My friend Candie and I are sipping our coffee whilst reading this together and texting back and forth our favorite sentences and paragraphs. In the beginning I had to learn shutter speed, aperture, how to focus manually and what film speed I put in the camera. Well, that and if I just got 40 images off a roll of 36, something’s wrong. And so yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. It is absolutely enough to know enough. But my absolute favorite is this, “The magic was never in the tools anyway.” Thank you so much for this. Bravo.
Hi David.
I’ve read quite a few of your articles. This is one of my favorites. Thanks.
Thanks, Dave!
Great article. I know about 20% of my current camera – a Nikon P950. Recently, switched back to Nikon from another brand. And gave up my two camera bodies and several lenses. Fewer pixels than my previous full-frame cameras, but I don’t print images in anything larger than 8 x 10, so that’s fine. What did I feel? Freedom! Freedom to concentrate on photographing the things I love – tulips for instance. I can make images of flowers for hours on end. Peonies are another love, and roses. Then, pared down my software – kept what I’m really comfortable with, and removed the rest from my PC. All this to say that I feel I take better images because they are images that make me happy, of things and places that excite me. And that comes through in the images themselves.
That freedom will make your images stronger, and give you greater creativity and joy, than what you gave up to get it. Well done, Kathie.
Thank you for this. Such a great reminder. I replaced my old DSLR in 2023 with a Fuji XT5 – probably considered old tech compared to the latest models every brand seems to continue releasing. But it is way more than enough for me. One of the first things I had a chance to do was talk with couple photographers who helped me with the most basic menu items to set – and I’ve barely changed anything since. I asked the Internet today how many functions or combinations of functions this camera has. It couldn’t give me a number – only that it has a vast, almost uncountable combination! Ha! I feel like as long as I know where to change aperture, speed, ISO and maybe a couple other things, I’m good with settings. My concern with the complexity is whether there are settings I don’t know of that are doing something to my photos I really don’t want – and I’m not even aware the camera is doing that. Anyhow, thanks so much for this post.
Could not agree more & I have been using Photoshop since the 1990’s……..