Successful photographers attract TALENTED photographers who are willing to lend their talents and knowledge in the pursuit of the overall artistic vision.

Ultimately, SOMEONE needs to be around who DOES understand lenses, and post-processing. You're not going to luck out into a great image just by having a great eye.

World famous guitarists have guitar tech assistants to tune, fix, and customise their guitars.

World-class racing drivers don't maintain their own cars.

Michelin star chefs don't do their own veg prep.

Etc.

No, I do agree with that - to an extent:

> You don't have to be a gearhead, and there's very little to photography that should consider the gear important

But "I can't even tell you what camera it is" and then some questions arise about who is making all those decisions about things like depth of field, composition - her, camera operator, combination, etc.

If you just bought the latest Canon body whenever it came out you probably would lose track of the spec sheet pretty fast, other than having a line item in your budget to buy a $5000 body every now and then.

Disclaimer: to be quite clear, while not a full-time photographer, and certainly not a world class one, I do make five digits a year from my photography on the side, and while I may not remember how many fps a body is, or whether it's 26 megapixels or 28, but I could tell you about each of the 8 lenses I own, focal range, f-stop, and whether a given body's high ISO performance compares to another. I think at this point I probably have $40K of camera gear. Whilst it's not about the camera, as such, it is a known aspect. It'd be akin to a developer not knowing whether his computer had an SSD or hard drive, or how much memory

Until you can afford to employ someone to look after your cameras you aren't in the category where you'll start ignoring the specs.

It'd be akin to a developer not knowing whether his computer had an SSD or hard drive, or how much memory

Beyond the fact it's a 2015 Macbook Pro I couldn't tell you the specs of the laptop I'm using right now. It just doesn't matter to me what the specs are. So long as it's fast enough to do what I want when I ask it to I don't care. Plus I'm old and forgetful.

It's not about the gear, as long as you have a lot of really expensive gear.

You actually don’t need to know that either. Your employer gives you a laptop, for example. You don’t need to know what the specs are to do good work.

There’s always the gear heads in everything you do. They’re rarely the best

You’ll soon know if it only has 4gb of ram!

> akin to a developer not knowing whether his computer had an SSD or hard drive, or how much memory

which is definitely not unheard of -- particularly for some of us who use a number of different devices any day.

I assume her assistant does the obsessing for her.

Not really the point I’m making. Plenty of successful photographers have become successful by taking interesting photos, not by being a technical wizard of their camera.

An appropriate quote you've probably heard:

"Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst."

― Henri Cartier-Bresson

You can get some nice stuff with just an iPhone these days, but there's probably a risk of the software making it look very samey.

Still not really my point. Leibowitz is a good example. Certainly she knows how to use a camera, but she is mostly famous because of her subject matter: celebrities. She took John Lennon’s photo five hours before he was killed.

That's a great quote but you have to remember that he said it a long time ago, long before the advent of digital photography. It's more like "Your first million photographs are your worst" now.