As a photographer, you often receive the gear centric compliment, “man, if only I had your camera, I could get great pictures too!”

That certainly may be true.

But I believe that the gear is mostly irrelevant.

What is far more important than the equipment is the art of learning how to see.

The two pictures above (spoiler alert, shot on an older model iPhone), were captured in the back office of a commercial building. The window you see in the bottom picture looks out into a warehouse. But from a lower angle, when the sun is at a certain position, as it happened to be when I glanced into the room, there is a very soft, diffused beam of light from a skylight that seemed to beautifully drift into the room. Ah, now there’s some interesting light!

The top picture was taken with my left shoulder parallel to the wall with the window. This is classic ‘window light’ type stuff, but my point here is that I was not in anyway looking to make a portrait. But my eye saw something, it stopped me in my tracks and from there it was just about envisioning a composition that evoked what I felt when I saw the mood of the light.

For an extreme contrast scene like this I recommend using an app that allows you to override the ‘auto exposure’ setting. Currently I use FilmicPro and Moment, but any halfway decent camera app will do. Other than that the only other thing I remind people is to clean their lens and have fun shooting.

Our camera phones are truly amazing. The cool part is that they’re pretty much within arms reach all the time.

So, don’t worry about the gear, embrace the challenge of really learning how to see light, and then go take more pictures!