A Good Eye Doesn’t Make You a Good Photographer

An old piece by legendary photo editor John Loengard rumbled into view on the Nieman Reports web site and it included this gem that I’d lost along the way:

Before I became a picture editor, I assumed that “good photographers” took “good pictures” because they had a special eye. What I found was that good photographers take good pictures because they take great pains to have good subjects in front of their cameras. (Reflect a moment on what cameras do, and this makes sense.)

As I start to wrestle with truly rebuilding my courses for the fall, that’s something I need to emphasize – the camera, it’s mechanical operation, isn’t as important as knowing what’s interesting to point it at.