Mindfulness

Daily on Facebook someone asks on one of a hundred forums whether lens “A” is a better choice for street photography than lens “B”.

Facebook is nortorious for these sort of questions from new photographers. It’s all about the myth that better equipment will equal better photography and while equipment is important it’s much less important than how skilled or aware is the photographer behind the lens.

So when it comes to street photography what’s the best camera and lens? The answer is of course the one that you have.

If you look at a lot of street photography videos on YouTube you’ll see a pletora of snapshots posing as street photography. Mostly it’s not even a good snapshot. Sure somedays we get lucky and we bang off a good image but ask yourself “what does the image “say” or even “mean”? Most of the stuff on FaceBook is meaningless, vacuous and boring.

I’ve been shooting images for over 60 years now. I think I’m okay and I’ve sold a lot of images over the years.

But recently I’ve come to realize that there are a lot of very good photographers who are shooting way way better than I am. This is not a discouragement but a challenge. And the challenge for me is become more mindful of what I am doing when it comes to shooting and even more importantly to what I do post.

Case in point: A young woman, the daughter of a dear and longtime friend, has a gallery showing coming up next month in Toronto. I will be attending it. Avery Steele has a masters of fine art photography. I don’t understand her photography and that’s a good thing. We are very different photographers and she is, in my opinion, a much better artist than I would ever pretend to be. I find her work intriguing.

And I doubt very much if Avery ever askes random strangers on FaceBook about what lens she should buy. Maybe she does. I don’t know for certain. But I do know it probably wouldn’t matter.

My point is Avery could out shoot me using a pin-hole camera and it doesn’t even have a lens.