ARTICLE: When Cameras Are This Good, Why Isn’t Everyone a Good Photographer?

Modern cameras are now so capable that a beginner can pick up a flagship mirrorless body, leave a lot of it on automatic and come back with photographs that are sharp, correctly exposed and technically impressive. Autofocus finds the subject and follows it around the frame, Auto ISO keeps the exposure sensible, and 30 or 40 frames a second gives several chances at a moment that may exist for only a fraction of a second. Afterwards, Lightroom, Photoshop and increasingly AI can remove noise, rescue exposure, sharpen detail and get rid of things we wish hadn’t been there.

I’m not nostalgic for a return to manual-focus film cameras. I use all of that technology myself. But it does leave me with a question. If the camera can now do so much of the technical work, what actually makes someone a good photographer?

I know from my own beginnings that a good camera can flatter you. When I became serious about photography I bought a Canon R8, fitted a relatively inexpensive 50mm lens and started shooting. The R8 was a far better camera than I was a photographer. Its autofocus was excellent, Auto ISO kept me out of trouble and I could make sharp, well-exposed photographs almost immediately. At the time I thought quite a few of them were good.

Looking back now, some make me cringe, yet there is often nothing technically wrong with them. What I see now is the background I didn’t notice, the crop that feels wrong, flat light, or an angle I would move away from today. Sometimes I had been so pleased that the car was sharp that I had barely considered the rest of the frame. The R8 was already doing a lot of the work. I just didn’t know yet what else I should be looking for.

There’s an Instagram trend at the moment that sums that up rather well. The first slide shows a wide, fairly ordinary scene with a tiny yellow square somewhere within it. Swipe across and the next image is the photograph hidden inside that square. Often it is a terrific composition buried in a view most people would have walked straight past. Thousands of people could have stood in the same place and never noticed it.

There’s an old idea in sculpture that the figure was always inside the block of stone, and the sculptor’s job was simply to remove everything that wasn’t part of it. Photography can feel a little like that. The scene is already there, but the photograph often isn’t obvious until somebody sees which part matters, where the frame should begin and end, what needs to be excluded and what deserves attention.

The camera records it. The photographer finds it.

You see the gap between technical competence and judgement all the time in photography groups online. Someone asks for critique and the images are often perfectly serviceable: sharp car, blurred background, sensible exposure. Yet the composition might be cramped, the editing heavy, or there may be 30 panning shots that are essentially the same photograph. I’ve seen plenty where the nose and tail of the car are almost touching the edges of the frame. The pan has worked, which is a skill in itself, but beyond that there is very little going on. It is simply a picture of a car.

That, for me, is another part of what separates a good photographer from someone who can operate a camera. A strong photograph should give you something more than proof that the subject was there. It might tell you something about speed, place, weather, pressure, isolation, aggression or atmosphere. It does not need to explain everything, but there should be something in the frame for the viewer to read.

A single photograph can tell a story without needing a caption or a sequence around it. Sometimes that story is obvious. Sometimes it is only a feeling. Either way, the camera can record the car perfectly well. Deciding what the photograph is actually about is still down to the photographer.

A recent post made me think about this from another angle. Someone who had been photographing cars for around three months already had a professional-looking website offering paid shoots while also asking a Facebook group for fairly basic critique. I don’t say that to mock someone starting out. Asking for criticism is exactly what we should be doing. I still ask photographers with more experience than me what they think of my work, and I hope I always will. What caught my attention was how quickly the outward appearance of being a professional can now be assembled. Camera, website, Instagram, booking page, price list. Experience refuses to move at quite the same speed.

And that experience isn’t just a deeper knowledge of camera settings. A lot of it is judgement built up from repeatedly being in situations where photographs happen, or don’t.

Earlier this month I was back at Spa, a circuit I have photographed several times and know well. I already have positions where I know I can make decent images, which is useful but also slightly dangerous because it becomes very easy to repeat yourself. I took my scooter around the spectator areas looking for viewpoints I hadn’t tried before. A lot were useless. A few gave me something different. I wasn’t trying to prove anything. I simply didn’t want to come home with the same photographs again.

The longer I shoot motorsport, the more I notice other things too. At the inside of La Source there is a position where cars brake hard enough that lock-ups occur fairly regularly, so once you know where to look you start waiting for the smoke. Certain kerbs and bumps are the same. You learn where cars are likely to bottom out and throw sparks, then work out which angle will actually show them. Heat haze can ruin an otherwise perfect long-lens shot even when the autofocus and settings are spot on. You learn that one fairly quickly after spending time wondering why an expensive lens suddenly appears incapable of producing a sharp photograph.

None of those things came from reading the camera manual. They came from being there, getting photographs wrong, noticing patterns and remembering them next time.

Automotive shoots involve a different sort of judgement. I spend a lot of time looking for locations that haven’t already appeared behind hundreds of other cars, particularly places where permission takes some effort. There may be research, emails, phone calls and scouting before I even know whether a shoot can happen there. Then there is the direction of the light, where the car can actually be positioned, what happens if it rains and what I want to come away with.

By the time the car arrives, quite a lot of the photograph may already have been decided. I still want room for the unexpected because some planned ideas turn out to be rubbish once you’re standing there, while something you hadn’t considered suddenly works. That happens often enough to keep you humble.

The shutter press is usually the quick bit.

Then there is the bigger question of what we actually want a photograph to do. Photography can simply record something, and there is nothing lesser about that. A family photograph can become priceless because it shows people together at a particular point in their lives. A race photograph can document a car, its livery and an event perfectly well.

But photography is also an art form, which makes technical perfection a slightly unreliable measure of whether a photograph is any good.

I can photograph a GT3 car travelling down a straight at 1/2000sec and produce an immaculate file. Every sponsor logo is readable, the autofocus has nailed it and there may not be a pixel out of place.

It can also be a boring photograph.

The car is frozen in time and could almost have been parked on the circuit. There is no real sense of 150mph, no tension and nothing that tells you what it felt like to have that car coming past you at speed.

Photograph the same car at night with headlights cutting through rain and spray, or use a slower shutter speed so the background starts to move, and the picture becomes something else. It might feel fast, violent, lonely or dramatic. Someone else may hate it. Fine. At least there is something to react to.

That is the bit I find difficult to reconcile with our obsession with technical perfection. We spend an extraordinary amount of time talking about autofocus hit rates, megapixels, high ISO performance and lens sharpness, then inspect photographs at 100 per cent looking for flaws that nobody would ever notice when viewing the actual image. I’m as guilty of it as anyone.

Yet some of the photographs I remember most aren’t technically perfect.

Jamey Price’s Racing Unfiltered project is a particularly good example. Price took cheap, reloadable NASCAR promotional film cameras from the 1990s to major motorsport events. The cameras had almost none of the control we now take for granted. He described the important choices as where he stood and where he pointed the camera, and the resulting work became a book.

That doesn’t prove expensive cameras are pointless. They aren’t, and Price himself uses professional digital equipment for professional work. What I like about the project is how much of the usual conversation simply disappears. No subject detection, no discussion about which autofocus case to use, no huge burst rate. You are left with the person holding the camera and the decisions they make.

Software and AI make the distinction even murkier. What can now be fixed afterwards is extraordinary, and I use those tools. But I would still rather notice a distracting object before I press the shutter than remove it later, and I would rather frame the photograph deliberately than discover the composition by cropping half the file away. Not because I have any purist objection to editing. I simply want the file to start somewhere close to what I saw in my head.

I do wonder what happens when the penalty for mistakes keeps shrinking. Does 40fps make us less patient about anticipating the moment? Does generative removal make us less alert to the background? Does having 45 or 60 megapixels make us lazier about composition because we know there is room to crop?

Maybe. The same technology also gives us photographs that would have been much harder to make twenty years ago. I don’t think that argument needs tidying up into a convenient answer.

What I do know is that experience changes what you notice. When I started, a sharp and correctly exposed photograph was enough to make me happy. Now I can come away from a successful shoot thinking about the angle I should have tried, the light ten minutes earlier or the frame half a second before the one I actually caught.

That can be slightly brutal on the confidence.

I consider myself a fairly accomplished photographer now. Other photographers ask me for advice most days, yet I still ask people with more experience than me for theirs. Someone will always know more about a particular technique, light, subject or situation. Sometimes another photographer will show me an image from a circuit where I was standing nearby and I’ll wonder why I never saw it.

That probably feeds some of the imposter syndrome photographers seem particularly good at carrying around. The better your judgement becomes, the more clearly you can see the gaps in your own work. I’d be more worried if I ever reached the point where I thought there weren’t any.

So when I ask what separates someone with a good camera from a good photographer, I keep coming back to experience and judgement.

The camera can give both of us accurate focus, sensible exposure and a technically excellent file. Experience affects everything that happens around that file. It changes where you stand, what you wait for, what you ignore, what you notice in the background and whether you accept the obvious photograph or go looking for another one. It also gives you the confidence to choose the technically imperfect frame when that is the photograph with some life in it.

Modern cameras are better than they have ever been. I’m very happy about that.

But the camera can do almost everything except decide why I pointed it there.