What's most important?

What's more important when taking a good photo: the talent of the individual person who determines how to get the best shot, or the camera itself? Or is it some combination therein?

 

adobe photoshop

 

you are wrong there Armandii .... Photoshop can enhance a bad photo into a billboard photo ...

most / many of todays top photographers take really crap photos but have staff who sit behind apple macs and fix them and manipulate them within minutes

have a close look at the original photos of many of the wedding photographers today .... junk photos, but made good with photoshop

My wife used to be involved in this industry for many years... and is fully experienced in photoshop, quark express etc ... that was her job

 

The 8 inches behind the view finder on a DSLR, OR The 8 inches above the shoulders on a compact

Jack McHammocklashing

 

A good camera is a good thing to have ... but the vision of the person behind it is more important because you have to take into consideration the artistic abilities and perspectives.

It's rather like having a canvas and splashing some paint on it or creating something special because you have a vision.

To me, you have an eye for art or you don't, in whatever genre it be.

 

I know .... just winding ... but it's still fact, a bad photo can be enhanced considerably with photoshop ... like I said, my wife can take an average photo and will tweak it so that it looks great as a 20x24 or even a billboard

but getting back to the OP's question ....

the camera plays a huge part in photos (modern digital cameras) .... add a dedicated flash, set it on auto, and press the shutter .... a good camera such as the top of the range Canon's or Nikons with the dedicated flashes (even used in daylight for portraits), and a good lens, will most likely produce a stunning crisp clear portrait photo no matter what time of day or light situation ...

and if shooting landscape, a decent tripod and a good camera and lens will produce good photo's if you take many at different settings during different times of the day (this is what many modern photographers do .... they take a hundred to get one good one)

but then give the photographer a good old fashioned camera such as a 1960's manual hasselblad, a a carl zeizz lens and a lightmeter, and that changes things, especially if he has to pay to develop and print each photo taken so as to view .... the photgrapher has to know about light etc

but, thats old fashioned now and does not matter, as a digital camera can take hundreds of photos and it does not cost to see them (like in the old days when you had to print contact sheets and prints), so photographers nowadays just merrily click away and know that out of every 30 photos, they will have a couple of saleable ones

and when looking at the old method of shooting on film, the lab also played a huge part .... they can push and pull a photo that was overdeveloped or underdeloped and still produce a decent print

 

I would say the combination of the two .A technically perfect picture which doesnt communicate anything is doing half of the job.
Altering pictures is a different subject alltogether...

 

When I was at uni, one module of my computing course was about 'graphical visualising'. In one practical session, we were given a digital photo of a very dull scene in a very dull location. It was people looking miserable as they went about their routine shopping in some town that happened to be in China. The exercise was to turn that very dull, nondescript photo into something for a holiday brochure. Over the course of 2 hours and following some technical rather than creative steps we enhanced the colours, shifted the shadows about to add contrast, added various filters to make the pigeon poo stained bricks look like sun bleached stone, a drunk was erased, the sky became blue, and by the end of the session we had an image that made you yearn to be there. What a beautiful, vibrant, colourful place we'd created.

I still think you need talent in the first place though. And a half decent camera. Although I think in the case of the latter, it depends to some extent on the kind of shots you're after. I think a fairly average camera or good phone camera is ok for landscape shots in decent light, but close up stuff is a different story.

 

I would say its a bit of both. If you have an average camera, you can only take pictures up tot the ability of that camera.
Likewise, you have to know how to get the best out of a camera.

 

Any tool or machine is only as good as the person that operates it. Likewise with a camera, there has to be talent behind the lens to produce anything worth looking at.

 

That's why my pics are cr*p!!