26.06.2023
If you read my opinion on gear (here), you might guess what follows: Another attempt at squaring the circle. I state: Not telling the viewer the gear a picture was taken with greatly liberates him (or her) when looking at it.
If no gear is specified, nobody gets to say things like "oh you can't take bad pictures with that combo, I could've done it as well with that camera", or when the photo is bad: "See? Carrying X around does not make you a better photographer!". It gets even worse when people decide whether they like a picture or not based on the camera and lens written below it. That is something for gear reviews, which I take with a grain of salt.
All in all, he does not really concentrate on the art, and that does it a huge disservice. In turn, a bad photo can do harm to the reputation of a camera or a lens, because it could do better in the hands of a more skilled person. That again sounds harsh but it belongs to the set of arguments just as anything else. Luckily, we don't usually blame gear for bad photos. And very unfortunately, we tend to project the praise of another person's good photo on the gear, and not on the photographer's skills where it belongs.
As a radical consequence, photography as an art form can only fully shine with no side notes.
Albeit lots of things in a photo can be adjusted in post, some key parameters of the look are determined by the camera, and even more so by the lens you use. So trying to find (and create) a look that you like involves gear at some point. And if nobody tells you what was used to make an image you like, you will have an awful lot of work buying and selling stuff. This is where things get complicated.
One of the major illusions a "seeking" photographer faces is that images with gear notes are not gear reviews. They are a testimony of what somebody is able to achieve with that gear. The amount of corrections, repaints, cuts, crops and everything remains hidden from the viewer. There is no guarantee you will achieve the same thing, because you may not know all the tricks, or you just have a different style and process in photography.
In the end, it is probably a niché problem. Most people don't pay attention to how a photo was taken. But us photographers are confronted with it, motivated by sheer interest or active search regarding gear.
I don't put the lens and camera used below every picture I share on this website. In fact, most of them don't have any annotation and that is intentional. Chances are, you will take a completely different photo, and my choice of gear probably does not help you with that. I am still trying to figure out things, 10 years on and off into photography. Chances are, it will take some more time until I can fully decouple my work from gear. However, there might be a good chance that I won't change gear too soon because I think I found something that works. I might share it once I feel confident enough, and once the honeymoon phase is over.