Artechknowhow: Does the camera really matter?

Just the other day I was chatting with my good friend Unni, who incidentally is an awesome photo journalist who has some phenomenal work under his belt. And guess what, he uses a normal film camera. No high-fi equipment, nothing. Just basic black and white stuff is what he mostly shoots. But yeah he does own a pretty cool canon digital camera as well. Check out his site: http://www.unniphotography.com

Ok so back to what I was saying, yeah, we were talking of how most of us think, getting a better camera can get us better clicks. Well, let me get this straight, the best camera out there is your eye. See things through the eyes and store images in your brain. That's what we have been doing ever since we are born! And its this eye of ours that decides what to click and what not to, how to click and how not to. So developing your eye is what photography is all about. Train your eye to spot interesting subjects, beautiful colors, striking compositions then will be just a matter of time. Watch and learn the best lighting situations that work best for your camera, through trial and error .And yeah I hate blabbering about lens and camera technologies, because ultimately it is you that matters above all...not the cam, not the technology and not the mindless tech talk.

So, I started my passion for photography, by clicking with my old Sony Ericsson K810i Cell phone camera. Many have asked me how the hell do I click pretty decent shots with it. Well I would like to share a few points to take care of when you use a basic camera like this mobile phone camera, or any other point and shoot:

1) Never click with the sun in the background unless it is the setting or rising sun.
2) Always make sure that light falls on you subject, try and avoid very dark and shady places.
3)Make sure that you switch to various modes like landscape, portrait, macro etc according to the composition you shoot. If you shot a flower in landscape you would get a poor result but if you do the same with a macro mode, results can be quite awesome.
4)Use exposure compensation function of your camera. In my mobile phone, i just needed to make sure that my ev value is more towards the negative side in bright light and more to the positive side in dark conditions. I do this by moving the joystick up or down while the camera is on, this adjusts exposure.

5)Read the manual always before you start clicking!
6)Open up your image in some image editing software and adjust the brightness, contrast, curves etc to make your photo better. To hell with those who say, they dont use Photoshop, thats because they dont know how to use software for post processing :P

Just follow these tips and you can also end up with some pretty cool pictures from you mobile phone. Here are a few that came from my beloved K810i mobile phone.