A poor photographer blames his tools

Is your lack of fancy camera equipment — you know, the $3000 21-megapixel DSLR with HD video and f/1.4 lens — holding you back from making good photographs? Maybe the problem is with your thinking. Many of the great documentary photographers of the 20th century (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, etc.) got by just fine with equipment about as flexible as the average point-and-shoot.

Low-light sensitivity? Ha! Your point-and-shoot may only be noisy at ISO 200 and below, but these guys were working with things like Kodachrome 25, eight times worse. Depth-of-field? Ha! Partially because of the style of the times, and partially because they didn’t want to deal with careful manual focus, most photojournalism of the time tended to have everything in focus — “f/8 and be there” was the rule.

I also enjoyed the advice for getting good photos of your kids with a point-and-shoot camera: “encourage them to play somewhere well-lit.” (via gulfstream)

• photography