Have you done a photography course?

That's not an uncommon opinion - what you need to realise is that while
people regard photography as "real", it is in fact a flawed compromise
compared to the way we see things. Our eyes are dynamic things that
constantly adjust focus, exposure, white balance, pan from side to side,
while a camera has to take one image with all these attributes locked. The
skill of a good photographer is to learn how to see - identify what makes a
scene special and work out how it could translate to a shot - often it
won't, or it needs to be a different perspective or light to work as a
photo. Sometimes it just doesn't work.

A good example of this is someone who does a long climb of a hill, is
exhilarated to get to the top, then shoots pictures of what they see - wide
shots of hilly horizons with heaps of sky - which tend to be breathtakingly
underwhelming photos.

It'd be useful to know what kind of things you are seeking to shoot. For
example, a colleague of mine has always been frustrated by their landscape
shots - they claim the camera isn't "seeing" what they saw. Technically, you
could put that down to the sharpness of the lens, haze in the atmosphere,
perhaps the size of the print (or their screen) was too small , or even just
the fact that their eyes had scanned a scene from side to side, focussed on
key aspects, dynamically adjusting exposure as they did, then wondered why
the camera didn't do as good a job.

If you want to know what the "best" camera to use, the answer would be one
of the Canon or Nikon digital SLRs with their kit 17-55 or so lenses. That
combined with a bit of technique, and you can take some stunning pics. You
can pay a lot more and get marginally more impressive shots, or you can pay
less and get one of the "compact" DSLRs, but I haven't seen one that
produces as pleasing shots as easily as the aforementioned "full" DSLRs.

What cameras have you used? Perhaps you need to move to Large Format or at
Least Medium Format.

Sophs wrote:

I believe that's not possible and will never happen. Perhaps you need to
train your eye to see like a camera. Then you won't be disappointed (I'm
serious!).