Using Cameras Or Making Photographs – Which Do You Prefer?

When I was shooting with a phone camera in the mid 2000s, it never occurred to me to use anything else.

I just liked exploring places, seeking out beautiful things and trying to capture them in an effective and memorable way, so I could remember them myself, plus share them with others.

The camera was really just a tool – a convenient tool that I always had with me anyway, so it made sense to use it to photograph what I enjoyed seeing.

Some time later – and I would guess around 2013 when I was knee deep in 35mm film cameras – the final image was still important.

Seeing only a couple of photographs I really liked from a whole roll, and the rest as disposable, remained a frustrating experience.

But by this time the appeal of using a camera purely for the pleasure of using a camera started to become more prominent.

Eventually the enjoyment of using a camera overtook the desire for making good photographs, and I think I’m still in this phase now.

For me the main indicator is that although I still always have a phone with me – now one hugely more capable than a 2005 Sony Ericsson with a 3.2MP camera – I rarely take deliberate, artistic photographs with it.

As opposed to family snapshots, where my phone camera accounts for over 99% of images.

These pictures are purely to aid my increasingly unreliable memory, to have some tangible evidence of the things we do as a family and the good times we have.

I don’t much care about colour, depth of field, shooting up close and other factors that hold significant importance in my other photography.

So back on the intentional photography side of this, I still enjoy using a range of cameras, albeit a far smaller range than a few years ago.

And with each camera, I enjoy knowing its capabilities and functions and finding the set up that works best.

By “the set up that works best” I mean two things.

First, one that makes decent images. If a camera churned out nothing but badly exposed, out of focus or otherwise unusable images, there wouldn’t be a great deal of point using it, even if it was a pleasure in the hand.

But more importantly, I need a set up that makes the camera as enjoyable as possible to use.

My usual approach to this these days with digital cameras is to go through every menu option, see what’s available, then choose what I think will work best for me.

Take some photos, adjust any functions as required, and repeat the loop until it’s what I consider optimised for my needs.

For this reason I don’t choose modern cameras with hundreds of parameters!

I prefer something simple enough that I can go through every setting in 10 minutes or less, but capable enough that it gives me some influence over how the camera can be used – far from “auto everything”, which is essentially what my phone is.

The tactile experience of holding and using the camera brings great reward, with the outcome of photographs I’m pleased with being a secondary bonus.

How about you? Do you prefer the experience of using cameras, or the final outcome in the form of the photographs you make?

As always, please let us know in the comments below (and don’t forget to tick the “Notify me of new comments via email” box to follow the conversation).

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