[Kenneth Ellis]

"Obviously, if you set all settings to neutral, and automatic on any camera, the pictures will be flat looking."

I've seen lots of people all over the internet, this forum included, playing with all the settings on the camera to the fullest extent and still making flat, boring photos.

That's not to say I think of myself any better than that. I don't take photos as a method of artwork. I take photos as visual record sans emotion. I have to stumble across feeling when I find it, but more often than not that is not the intent for me opening the shutter.

However, working in other media and being (moderately, at best) skilled at it, I heartily agree with the lesson being taught.

There's an old axiom that no artist should be limited by his tools, and a tool that instills a limitation is a bad tool, be it brush, pen, pencil, ink, whatever. That's backwards. An artist that is limited by his tool set is a bad artist. A $150 point and shoot has just as many good shots in it as a D Mark III, the same that a 10-cent #2 pencil you buy at Staples has the same number of good sketches in it that a $2 Derwent black label F pencil has. Different methods are necessary to put them to paper, and a measure of extra vigilance and effort might be needed on the lower end models to get there, but the same ability to make art is trapped inside.

If the artist isn't able to find it, that's not the fault of the camera or pencil.