The truth about the world is that only photographers care about what camera you use these days. It’s nearly the end of 2015, and it’s more than possible for great images to be created with a camera phone, a point and shoot, and of course a dedicated camera. The world is less all about the gear that you’re using and instead more about wanting to know about your ideas and the photos you can create. There’s a bit reason for this; and it doesn’t have to do with the fact that photography is easier for folks to produce.
Instead, it has to do with the fact that photography and art in general is a language. But photography isn’t a language that can be spoken and expressed verbally, but instead it needs to be spoken and expressed visually. In the same line of thought: English is English no matter where you go. Sure, the British have many dialects, the Americans have many, Canadians have another and that just makes sense based on the area where one resides.
When you correlate this to photography, it can be argued that the language can be translated into landscapes, portraits, abstract art, fine art, weddings, capturing candids, street photography, etc. In the same way, some people may not like landscapes the way that they like portraits. Some folks may only care about street photography, photojournalism and documentary work. Because of this, cameras, lenses and lighting are only elements that help us to express ourselves in the same way that dialects and euphemisms tend to help us express ourselves. In the end though, what matters is the image and expressing yourself to the point where your intentions, emotions and feelings are clearly conveyed in the images.
Linguists and folks that are very knowledgeable in languages are the ones who care about dialects. Similarly, these days photographers are the only ones that care about what gear you’re really using. In reality, any camera, lens or light is more than good enough for you to do many jobs although some are more specialized than others. But what all matters again is the end result; as no married couple will sit there and think about just how great your lenses are–they’ll instead fixate themselves on the wonderful moments that you captured and the nostalgia that will hit them years from now when looking at the images.
The end result is just what someone is looking at; and very few will care about how you get there except for maybe yourself and other photographers. And one of the biggest reasons for this is because photography is an experience of a moment that is right in front of someone, not how that moment came to be.