Someone once asked me why I was always so focused on camera gear, particularly since I preach working on non-gear things to improve.
It's not a terrible question to ask, though. Indeed, it's one that we professional photographers have been dealing with for most of our careers, but especially in the digital era.
Back in the film world (pre-1999 and through to the early DSLRs), the cameras were cruder tools in that you needed a great deal of training and practice with them to get the very best images.
We all photographed with the same image sensor before the turn of the century (e.g. Kodachrome, or maybe Velvia later in the SLR era). But the quality of what was on the celluloid was how well we composed, exposed, focused, and timed our images. While the cameras slowly gave us automated help for those things, that help was itself often crude. Problems in images in the 20th Century were always the photographer's fault.
For most a learning curve problem also was encountered. Take some photos, run the film to the developer, wait, eventually get the film back, and only then could you see any problems in what you photographed. Which led to going back out and doing it all again. But this cycle took weeks for a non-professional to complete (it was still measured in days for most pros, too).
At one point in my early sports career, I didn't even have the best-case hour or two processing delay before seeing what I photographed. That's because in order to meet my big East Coast client's (ABC News) schedule, I had to cover a West Coast game, drive immediately to the airport, put my undeveloped film in a courier bag on a plane, and then I'd only see what was actually published (if anything) the next morning, or sometimes a day or two or even a week later. I didn't see my mistakes, so I couldn't analyze and attempt to correct them.
Even with delays like that, most professional film photographers had a solid speed difference in their cycles between them and even serious amateurs (of which there were fewer then, too). We were doing it every day, but an amateur might be doing it once a week, or worse, once a month. That's a long learning curve when you're trying to improve. Few amateurs took the time to do learn from their mistakes, let alone pick up the pace so they learned faster, but a pro had to do it to stay a pro.
The Digital Change
Digital cameras changed things. Suddenly, everyone was able to immediately chimp and see the photo they just took. Make a mistake, look at it, learn from it, change something. Over and over, as it only takes seconds to do this in the digital age.
Teaching photography was great in the early digital photography era at the start of this century. That's because as amateurs coming to workshops were transitioning to DSLRs from SLRs, as an instructor you could rapidly help them to see and correct mistakes they had been making all along. Suddenly things began to connect for them. "Aha, that's the reason why I was getting that result."
As amateurs got far better faster, their cameras were getting better, too. New advanced and automated features did a better job, allowing everyone to concentrate more on things other than basic exposure, white balance, and even focus.
Because amateurs got better, the Law of Numbers started to work against us pros.
I can only be in one place at one time. I've described this before, but here's the situation I kept finding myself in early this century: the dirt road that is the sole motorized visitation conduit in Denali National Park is 92 miles long. While I'm stopped at mile 62 (Stony Hill Overlook) hoping to find something interesting going on with the wildlife, it's pretty much guaranteed that there is some animal action going on somewhere else along that road. And there's a bus with dozens of cameras passing by that other spot every few minutes.
The odds of me getting the best image of whatever's going on in Denali National Park on any given day are low. The odds of some random amateur getting the best photo of the day are nearly 100%, particularly as the amateurs all started carrying more and more sophisticated cameras. Every year since 2004 this situation has been getting worse for the wildlife pro.
Aside: I've written this before (and the original version of this article is now over 16 years old, so I mean WAAAAY before). I'm gobsmacked that the camera makers don't get it: the ubiquity of smartphones means that serious photographers actually need cameras that are faster at delivering results, not providing more dynamic range or pixels or whatever the engineers think is the next big thing. For pro photographers to stay relevant, we need to deliver images to our media outlets and clients in less than 10 minutes after any big news event these days. For sports and a few other things, the pace is even faster. For event clients, such as weddings, within a day, but they also sometimes want to see photos while they're still at the reception. I can't think of a single camera maker that helps me do this without having to buy awkward accessories or jump through hoops, and even then it's not easy to do or reliable. Not one camera maker gets this right. Not one. You want me to pay US$6000 for a camera? I'd pay more for the right camera.
Another thing that started happening is that stock libraries shifted from being "all pro" to being "pro plus serious enthusiast" to "mostly serious enthusiast and a few pros" to "lots of amateurs plus some enthusiasts and a few pros." Plus stock images these days are even given away free or at very low cost, reducing potential income from taking images.
The sheer numbers of images that were usable for stock rose dramatically with digital cameras wandering the world. Prices had to drop (supply exceeded demand), and the one that suffered the most from that was the pro. To put numbers on that, I've heard stories from fellow pros who were making solid six figure incomes just from stock seeing that drop to the low five figures. Lots of stories. Most of the ones not telling stories about that just stopped photographing for stock at all because the return investment on their time to even just organize and submit images to a stock agency became negative.
And that brings us to this article's headline: pros are being chased.
Though I didn't do a lot of stock licensing and it was never a significant source of income for me, I still felt chased.
To salvage what you can in a situation like what's happened with available images, you have to get better. You look to your imagery and at your technique. Galen Rowell, for instance, was well known for putting his camera (and body) in places where others weren't (or couldn't get to), but he found he was having to double down on that plus find other income sources. He was being chased. Some pros specialized and went higher end, which often required improving the quality of the gear they were using. They too were being chased.
Which brings me to what prompted me to write this article. Two things:
- Consider this quote from a consumer with the latest Sony A9 firmware update: "real time tracking is incredible! It made everything so easy!"
- Those last two words ("so easy") mean I'm being chased again. I believe that one of my strong abilities has always been to make my gear track focus on tough subjects.
- Not only do I make money off of putting that into practice for clients, I also pick up some money by describing how to do that to consumers (via web articles, books, and workshops).
- To stay ahead of customers that think that "focus is easy" I'm going to have to get even better, not just at precision of focus with really fast lenses on erratic objects, but at other things as well, such as locking down composition and how the image looks (e.g. post processing).
- If amateurs can easily take an in focus picture of a bird in flight, I have to do better: I have to take compelling pictures that tell us something about the bird, the flight, or a story, and are timed perfectly.
- The second thing that prompted this article was someone posting a darned good looking image of a bird using a superzoom. No, not something like the Sigma 60-600mm. I mean from a 28-200 type of lens. They got close enough, they managed to focus through the bush, the composition and exposure were good.
- But a really close examination of the image showed the usual thing I see with the true consumer lenses on today's cameras: a little bit of edge acuity loss. It's really tough to "fix" that using traditional sharpening techniques, as if you take the blur off the edge you end up with slightly artificial-looking edges (due to the contrast adjustments that happen around the edges). Now, stepped back from a print on a wall, you won't see that. But I want my images to sizzle with edge acuity, because...
- If you've ever had a top photo editor from a place like the turn-of-the-century Sports Illustrated or National Geographic or any other image-driven publications look at your photos, you'll know what I mean. They miss nothing. When they look at an image with low edge acuity, they'll just look up at you and tell you to do better or get better gear. Don't dare miss an exposure, or white balance, or anything basic. They'll think you're incompetent and stop hiring you. Next they start tackling your composition and question everything about it: why this, why that, what motivated this, that, and the other thing?
Still, if amateurs are getting sharp (but not acute) images with consumer lenses, I'm being chased again. I was actually happy when the Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8E turned out to be the best telephoto zoom lens I'd seen at that focal range: it pushed the fundamentals underlying my images just a wee bit further than someone who might be using an older version on an older camera. Today, we're three newer versions better than that old E version, and I've picked each up as they came out to help me get every little bit of optical advantage I can.
45mp? Bring it on (I'll even take more). Another half stop of dynamic range? Love it. Better and more reliable focus performance? Won't reject that. The list goes on and on. (But note my aside, above. The thing I want most in my camera still isn't really here.)
You might notice that I'm talking gear in a section of this site that's not really about gear. There's a reason for that, and it's the thing you need to take away about being chased: yes, having state-of-the-art gear helps, but it is what you do with that gear that's going to make it really stand out.
(There's the old Thom again. I was starting to miss him.)
In other words, keep your gear current, but push your compositional and technique capabilities as far as you can. Every year I try to take workshops from other photographers or attend events like WPPI in order to keep learning.
Those two things—using better gear coupled with more learning and training—go hand in hand. As many people found out, when we first moved to 36mp image sensors (e.g. Nikon D800) suddenly a lot of folk were seeing that their technique had gotten sloppy. Just having a better camera wasn't enough, they had to improve their technique, too.
That's exactly where I've always been in this chase. Best gear, and always pushing myself with technique in order to stay ahead. Always re-evaluating my style with an eye towards more compelling composition and better story telling to keep ahead.
I mentioned semi-tongue-in-cheek to someone that I felt that I had "improved two stops" in the past decade or so. By that I meant that if I hadn't upped my photographic game as the gear got better, I would have been caught by the average photographer.
Great photographers are always pushing themselves, pushing the boundaries their gear constrains, and looking for ways to stand out.
Yes, I'm being chased. But someone's chasing you, too. The chase happens at every level. If you're truly serious about photography and want to get praise for what you do, you have to always try to run in front of those behind you.
Since 2011 (other than a small dip during the pandemic) about 1.8 billion smartphones have been sold each year. And those devices got better as cameras every year. The number of people behind you able to take competent photos is huge.
Don't let them catch you.