I have said it myself, the camera doesn't take the photos, I do. As photographers we have perfected the craft of choosing the right settings in a given situation and our photos will always come out better than if we had snapped on auto. I typically shoot in Manual, it is rare that my camera is not on Manual and while I could take a great photo with any camera put into my hands guess what, sometimes it really does make or break a situation what kind of camera you are shooting with! I recently did an event at night in low light - no sunlight peaking through windows, no bright venue lighting to compensate, all of the images were taken with my own lighting except for a select few. When there were speakers standing up to the crowd talking with the projection screen behind them, I really wanted to capture the feeling of the room and have the screen showing in the background. I was left with the option of throwing off a flash but that would white out the screen so I cranked my ISO setting way up to get the shot I wanted. A typical consumer camera starts to show "noise" above 400 or maybe 800 if they are lucky. I turned my ISO up to 5,000 to get the shot I wanted and it came out crystal clear. Many consumer cameras wouldn't go that high or if they did it would look similar to an old television channel with the white noise going through the image - I was confident my professional grade camera could handle the setting and I went with it. Choosing glass with a low aperture to help bring in as much light as possible coupled with the high ISO helped me to capture the image exactly as I wanted with little to no help from Photoshop. I love the ambiance around the room, including the ceiling and was thrilled to be able to capture it all into one image.
