You Can’t Blame A Screwdriver For Not Being Capable of Hitting A Nail

A notorious website (which address I won’t mention) recently blamed a new cinema lens (which I also won’t name) for being almost unusable outside the centre of the frame. According to the article, the only merit of the lens is its low price, which makes it affordable enough to fulfil specific creative needs. In short, the criticism raised by the website appears to be based on the ungrounded idea that there is a ‘right’ to general-purpose equipment, and if a piece of gear doesn’t match this idea, the gear doesn’t worth the price.

I think that such kind of criticism, as well as the general approach of sales-oriented photography websites toward gear, doesn’t make sense.

What I mean is that there is not such thing as a ‘bad’ lens, not every lens is meant to be an all-rounder, and there is nothing wrong with the idea of making a glass that does just one thing.

The world of photography is full of stunning images that have been taken using old equipment, repurposed gear, or seemingly ‘unsuitable’ cameras and lenses. Of course, if you are working on a specific assigment —say, reportage or sports photography— you can’t rely on the camera of a fifteen years-old console. But if your goal —or contractual duty — is to provide a specific visual outcome, than the most imperfect gear may be the ‘perfect’ one.

As an example, consider the  picture featured in this post. I took it in 2009 with a Nokia phone that was top of the range at the time, while assisting a crew from Swiss-Italian Television traveling around the UK. The director was filming a documentary about the British chapter of Echelon, the global wiretapping intelligence network, which is located at the Menwith Hill RAF base. We weren’t allowed to go near it at all — in fact, we had a ‘friendly’ encounter with the security patrol when they questioned us for wandering around the base. In this context, the Nokia was all I could use. It didn’t deliver the perfect photo, but it was good enough for the job. In fact, I would argue that it is precisely these technical limitations that make the photo somehow interesting.

In other words, everything comes down to the eternal struggle between means and ends.

If nothing else is at hand, you may use a screwdriver to hit a nail, but you can’t complain that the screwdriver does a poor job. You may question the sense of purchasing a single-purpose tool, such as the lens chastisized by the website, in terms of return on investment or optimising the storage space for other equipment. But where is the point of claiming, back to metaphors, that a Formula 1 car is not suitable also for rallies, gran touring competitions and transporting the kids to and from school as well?

On top of this opinion, however, I think the most fundamental criticism to this approach is that it misses an essential fact: each photographers has their own unique way of expressing themselves. Their language is primarily made up of the ability to see things differently to others, and, but only secondly, by the gear that enables this vision to be properly expressed.

Nailing down the argument, the point is not whether a lens or  camera are ‘perfect’. What matters, as Hamish rightly pointed out, is whether they allow to materialise what the mind sees, as long as there is something within it which worth capturing.

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