[potatolicious]

> "All other things equal, better equipment will allow you to get better shots."

This is the part we disagree. Better knowledge will allow you to get better shots - we've gone past the point long ago where improving technical capability made dramatic improvements to how well people can photograph.

Ultimately what makes or breaks a photograph isn't sharpness, or even focus in particular, it's exposure and composition. That shite picture isn't made any less shite because the focus is bang-on. Likewise, a well-composed image survives a great deal of mis-focus, blur, or other technical faults.

If an image is shit because the focus was off, I'd hate to say it, but it wouldn't have been an excellent image even if the focus was on.

Short of extremely equipment-demanding niches (like macro, or sports) the problem is practically always with the photographer, not their equipment. The photographer is the most common bottleneck in creating great images - of any subject, banal or world-changing. Spend money on education, not more gear - and more importantly, spend time.

Technological advancements will give us much-appreciated conveniences, it won't make you a good shooter when you weren't before.

Side note: this is why I'm a fan of things like iPhonenography classes, as much as people like to mock it. Ultimately putting a camera into everyone's pockets has been great for photography and expression, and elevating the quality of this stuff (whether intended as art or just personal enjoyment) involves education, not gear.

[tripzilch]

I'm inclined to agree with you, but a bunch of common counterexamples immediately spring to mind. Very often, sorting through a huge amount of low quality phone camera pics from a party or something, I encounter a "happy accident" that would have made a great photo if only: it had been properly in focus, not blown out by light, less noisy (especially when you'd normally crop the pic, phone camera grain is way uglier than film grain), or any of those things that'd a medium-quality camera suffers way less from.

Am I wrong? Is the blurry picture possibly just as great (even if you can't recognize my friends' face?), or would it have turned out to be a shitty picture after all, obscured by the lack of focus?

[vertex-four]

Would you have got the details right and taken that particular photo at all if you were paying more attention to each shot? I don't think this has much to do with the camera - if the picture's blurry, you were likely taking it in a hurry, and you would've taken it in a hurry if you had a real camera.