A Happy New Year In Photography - Let's Fight

As is our wont, we looked at the DP Review site this morning - it contains a survey for the most important or popular cameras and photo features of 2012. While I did not see the Flapoflex D listed, I did see many of the other cameras that we feature here in the shop.

The real eye-openers were the comments below the main posting - looks like some people got very irate that their own favourite was sidelined or some other system touted. It was almost like reading a football paper - but not as well balanced and forgiving. There was real rage there.

Folks, these are just inanimate objects - the cameras, not the football players - and they have a real purpose in  life - the cameras again, not the football players. They take pictures. ALL of them make better images than you could do with a box of coloured pencils and a block of paper and they do it faster than you could ever sketch. If you put your pictures on the computer they ALL can do a good job. If you put your pictures onto Facebook, Blatter, Gnatter, or Kvetch they will be at such a small resolution that it won't matter.

So does this mean that you should not buy the most complex and over-specified camera on the market plus every lens that you can fit into a potato sack - and haul these objects with you up the side of buildings and into coal mines "just in case there is a picture"? Does this mean that you should deliberately match your tools to your work and your work to your life? No, of course not - this is a shop. We sell, you buy, we eat. We are ever mindful of this.

But what it does mean is you need to be ready to defend your opinions against those of other people all over the world, lest they dominate you. Okay, they are a psuedonym on the other end of a keyboard that will never touch your life...but it is the principal of the thing. If someone criticizes your camera  and gets away with it next they will be laughing at your car and sneering at the stuff in your shopping trolley at Coles. If you have ever stood there in lune while someone sniggers at your cheese slices and bread rolls you'll know the burning pain of it all.

So stand out there and beat at them with your laptop. You won't change their mind but at least they won't change yours.