The Camera You Have With You

In this post about convenience over quality [via Tim O'Reilly] one of the commenters sites that "The principle of least effort" states that people will use the tools that are closest to them. This is of course obviously and sometimes painfully true of photography. When something interesting is happening, we rarely have time to run back to the car, back home, or into the nearest camera store to get a better camera.

Unlike the author of the post, I haven't totally given over to solely carrying around my phone (iPhone in my case), but I have been taking some of my favorite shots with my compact camera that's always in my purse (then I have to make sure I have my purse, but I digress.) The other day, some friends and I had finished a photoshoot, used up all our DSLRs' CF space, and were just sitting around decompressing when I got this delightfully odd post-shoot moment with my compact camera (still had plenty of SD memory left.)

This really got hit home when we were prepping the table of metadata that is in the back of the Digital Photography Companion. The table list a bunch of metadata for every image in the book, including ISO, focal length, and of course camera model. When the proofreader went over the table, they queried wether that was a typo on the info for the cover shot (Derrick's interesting take on Transamerica/Zoetrope). Should that really say Canon G1? Reading the variety of cameras used to make the images in this beautiful book really hits home that it doesn't take expensive equipment to take great shots; you just need to know what you're doing with the one you have with you.

Want to peruse this cool table yourself, along with lots of helpful tips and cool photography advice? Check out The Digitial Photography Companion, available now from O'Reilly.