Now that a wrote the title of the text I realize I should`ve thought about making it about using colors or tones of gray (nowadays saying something about Shades of Grey makes you almost an automatic shallow repressed person. The sad thing is that I registered a blog about 3 years before with this title and never used it. Now I probably never will…). But it`s not about that. It`s about photographers and in almost all extent, about people`s behavior.
As I was researching to buy my 50mm lens (I think I never read that much before making a purchase) I dived deep into the corners of the internet, trough it`s forums and other decaying places (like abandoned blogs, even in the other side of the Geocities road). Those forums held extensive discussion about lenses or camera bodies and every other technical specifics existent in our field, and I was amazed to see how diverse were the persons discussing and how polarized were the discussions. So many people from different countries, origins and everyone had a single opinion while everything seemed to be a twofold situation.
As I was discussing on the last post, it`s RAW or JPEG, it`s Canon or Nikon, you`re a pro or you`re a moron. According to what I`ve learned during my research, Sony users are hipsters with no knowledge of photography and LEICA users are rich guys who think they know a lot. The other brands are just there like those blue guys the Power Rangers fight before the real fight begins. That said, if you take photography seriously you must choose between Canon or Nikon…oh, and shoot RAW.
I remember buying my first camera. I didn`t know anything about those technicalities so I bought from the same brand of my previous point-and-shoot: Canon. Moths latter I read about this “war” among users and started to read camera reviews and to see 100% magnified crops from each manufacturer. Yes, there was a small difference. Canon took the road of color rendition on the Rebel Series (so the red was not only red, but a saturated ruby red) and Nikon took the path of sharpness (so the colors were a bit more muted but you could see texture better). It`s not about quality. It`s just about preference. One could`ve taken the others path. The Canon lenses are, in fact, cheaper than it`s Nikon counterparts, however, lot`s of Nikon lenses are superior to Canons in things like rounded aperture blades, that do not affect the image objectively, but do make the background blur more pleasant. It`s plainly stupid to polarize such discussions. I wish I could have a Canon AND a Nikon so I could enjoy all the possibilities. Furthermore, who is paying these people to make so much noise in favor of some brand? I keep asking myself what kind of insecurity do we humans have hardwired in ourselves that urge us to stick to a extreme point of view about things. Stop and think for a moment: is Coke or Pepsi, you are from the Left or Right, it`s American or European cars…
Photography is such a fantastic form of art exactly because it`s not strapped to anything. One can express itself by making almost any form of visual representation. From a trivial brick wall to a photo of a drawing, in a way that expresses not only the drawing, but recreates the moment of the drawing`s making. And yet the focus shifts away from it. We have such fantastic machines that are capable of seen almost 16.000 colors and we, as operators of Canons or Nikons can only see 1.
Zonda`s Quest 