I took a photo and zoomed all the way in to show my wife how sharp the GR lens is.
Her reply: "that's really great, but I just don't care"
Forgot she isn't into cameras. Ouch.
Does that mean you ended up with the better one?Interesting, I showed some pictures I took with a GR to my wife and she said "wow, those look really sharp".
-Thomas
Nice reality check. Only photographers really care about the technical details. Non-photographers almost ALWAYS react to how well the content of the photo was seen and composed and, to some degree, processed. They see a final product that either moves them or doesn't and they're not terribly tuned in to what it is about it, but the sharpness zoomed in to 100% couldn't mean less to them. As it shouldn't! Of course the irony is that if they like a few of your photos they usually say something like "you must have a great camera", which kind of blows the purity of their appreciation. And if they're decent cooks, I'll usually make the old analogy about how good their cookware must be, but usually I just say something like 'the camera plays some role in it' without getting to into it.
But, sometimes things like extraordinary detail, extraordinary DR, and great high ISO performance can help you produce photographs that the lay person will react positively to, even when they're not looking specifically at those details. So, it's good for US to know the ingredients in the stew, but we can't obsess too much over the ingredients at the expense of the overall stew. Leave it to the lay observer to keep the whole thing in perspective. Which we, often enough, don't...
-Ray
Her comment didn't trigger this thought in my mind at the time, but a good reminder indeed.I would agree, mostly. A technically correct and amazingly sharp photo may be boring as #$%, yet a less correct photo may attract praise because of it's content.
To me that's the single most wonderful aspect of photography - it teaches us to see. How this relates to our individual preferences for sujets, gear and processing I find most interesting. Apart from the casual fun stuff I'm still photographing the same sujets I shot for more than 40 years, over and over again but it took the better part of those years to understand why.I have one long term friend who is interested in the technical details of photos and cameras, and it is not the person I live with. I sometimes process and image in different ways and ask which one he likes better. The response is more often than not, "I don't see any difference". What I think of as subtle but noticeable many people just don't see. They're interested in shapes more than tones, and subjects more than precise color balance. Interesting.
I took a photo and zoomed all the way in to show my wife how sharp the GR lens is.
Her reply: "that's really great, but I just don't care"
Forgot she isn't into cameras. Ouch.
I have to agree with your wife... I just don't care, either. If the content of the image is good, then that's what counts, for me. If the image content is poor, sharpening isn't going to rescue it. YMMV, of course.
The cost and quality of the hammer doesn't make the house, but carpenters find comparing hammers interesting nonetheless, or at least the carpenters I've talked to do
To me that's the single most wonderful aspect of photography - it teaches us to see. How this relates to our individual preferences for sujets, gear and processing I find most interesting. Apart from the casual fun stuff I'm still photographing the same sujets I shot for more than 40 years, over and over again but it took the better part of those years to understand why.