Going to where it was

We recently spoke about the efforts of photographer John Chua in Corregidor, hauling some of this photographer friends to the once-mighty fortress island to help them help others in their attempts at shooting images. At the very least, this talks about one major reality that has been true since the beginning: One’s equipment does not make one a photographer. This applies to the most basic of gear like a camera phone all the way to the just released top-of-the-line cameras of Nikon and Canon and even to digital medium format cameras. Without true guidance and mentorship, a person with a camera is just a person with a camera. You can actually see a lot of this even on Facebook groups related to photography. There are a lot of people who ask about how to do this or that, believing even the most useless comments from people who haven’t really dipped [...]