Few days ago I was on a graduation ceremony of a university here in Hungary. The event was held in a theater just like these kinds of events normally are. Last year on the same occasion of the same university I didn’t really care about photographer, I was just very disappointed to see the pathetic pictures of the diploma hand overs made by the official photographers. Now I was watching them.

I was watching them and I was quite surprised by how many they were there. They all looked professional carrying expensive gears. Some of them seemed to be working in pairs. Members of pairs were exchanging some equipment with eachother.

Most of them - around 6 of the 10 - were using Canon cameras. Big body professional cameras or small ones extended with the battery grip. By size I would say that on most of cameras I could see one of the 70-200mm whitish EF telephoto zoom lenses. I could see two guys having a second body hanging in their neck with a wider lens, I suppose 24-something.

There was one Nikonian with a big body DSLR equipped with a AF Zoom-Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8D ED. (I’m much better at recognizing Nikkor lenses from distance than Canon ones. :-)) This lens does not have any image stabilisation built in, and I could see the guy supporting the lens with his pointer finger and thumb of his left hand stretched along the axis of the lens and pushing his elbow to his side. He was working in quite calm and relaxed manner any way. I don’t think that blurred images caused by camera shake is a regular problem in his work.

There was a lady with a - to my surprise - Nikon D80. Nikon D80 is not regarded as a professional camera by any means. Furthermore the lens on the camera looked like an entry level one.

There was a Pentax guy. I had to look very hard to figure out the make of his gear because neither his flash light nor his lens looked familiar to me. Finally I could read the letters on his camera.
He was wearing one of those Loewepro shoulder harness things. He was continuously trying to achieve optimal lighting conditions by holding his flashlight in his left hand far away from his camera and controlling it remotely (and without any wire). It was kind of funny how the chap was struggling with this thing while his colleagues didn’t use flash lights at all, or simply put it on the top of their camera.

An finally, there was a pair, a middle-aged woman and a man, who were using film cameras. By the design of their lenses and speed-lights I think they had Nikons. It was good to see the usage of this now old-fashioned technology, and it was bad to think that they might struggle make enough for their living with that equipment.

The most memorable quote from the many that I heard on this graduation ceremony was this:

“You make a living by what you get. You make a life by what you give.” - Winston Churchill