Fun with Camera blog has some great advice for amateur photographers: your camera doesn’t matter.

Most of you would be drooling over the latest digital cameras that come out each month. You find yourself saying if I only have this camera or this lens I would be able to take great photos.

But professional photographers would tell you – “It’s not the camera that takes great pictures. It is the photographer.”

To illustrate the point, Fun with Camera shows us a Flickr set of great photos taken with a camera phone (the photo you see to the right is from that set). All of the photos in the set are taken with a PDA that snaps pics at 640×480 — significantly less than one megapixel. What these photos lack in resolution, they make up for in artistic quality ten-fold.

Fun with Camera is correct — having excellent equipment is great, but the best equipment in the world still cannot supplement a lack of skill. If you’ve read our About page, you know that the digital cameras we use for this website are nothing that you wouldn’t see on the street on any given day. Perhaps some day I’ll drop some serious cash on a camera, but not without learning a few things first.

For some extended reading on the subject of skill and equipment, read “Your Camera Does Not Matter by Ken Rockwell, who also says, “… it’s entirely an artist’s eye, patience and skill that makes an image and not his tools”.