“What camera took these pictures?” That’s the question that
photographers hate the most. Nobody ever asked Picasso what type
of brush he was using to paint “Guernica”, and photographers
believe they are the ones taking the pictures. For them, their
camera is just a tool, that they use it to communicate their
vision. Well, it’s not completely true. Granted, the camera is a
tool, and tools don’t create. But the camera’s characteristics,
its size, its weight, its ability to withstand adverse
environmental conditions, the number of manual steps needed to
take a picture, the performance of the shutter, the aperture of
the lens, all limit the ability of the photographer to take a
usable picture of what he’s witnessing, or to convert his vision
into an image. Every now and then, a breakthrough in the design
of cameras gives photographers more opportunities to report what
they see. Whenever a new generation of cameras hits the market,
photographers start experimenting, and in the process, harvest a
new crop of pictur