Will Fancy Gears Help You Take Better Pics?

If one is to believe all that's being said, one could be forgiven to think that to take better pictures one would just need to acquire the latest and greatest gears. The advertising industry shoulders a big part of the blame here but gearheads also contribute a lot to the myth.

But seriously, will fancy gears really help you take better pics? The answer unfortunately is 'yes and no'. Thus you can't blame the advertisement for spreading lies. They're only spreading half-truths. Which are worse than lies by my standards but hey, that's just me.

Fact is fancy gears will make it easier for you to take pictures but they do not guarantee great pics. Fancy gears that costs and arm and a leg will help you by giving you faster focusing, better image sharpness, increased contrast to make your pic stand out and reduce distortion and noise.
So using them will make life a little easier for you but that's about it.

Even with fancy gears, one would still need to know all the basics of photography and how to compose a picture to get a good shot. Advantage of having fancy gears is that they increase the chances of you getting the shot right but it does not mean you can't get the shot with normal gears.

Gearheads will pour technical facts all over you and try to convince you that having such and such a lens or camera body will get you good shots. They will say, "Look at that level of image sharpness on this pic! You can only get this with such and such a lens!" or "Can you see any noise in this pic? No, right? That's what such and such a camera body can afford you!" Pretty tempting words right? Yeah, but if that's a sharp image of the back of a horse taken in a dark barn using just ambient light without any hint of noise then it is not much better than a noisy, not quite so sharp image of the back of the same horse taken in the same dark barn using normal gears. Both images will not make it into any living room walls.

So get your head around this pitfall. If you don't learn to take good pictures using normal gears, acquiring fancy gears will do little to help you advance your skills. Until and unless you realise that people prefer to look at the front of horses more than the back of horses, fancy gears are not going to help much.