I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at this frame I took of an old man in Old Town Stockholm a few days ago – and it got me thinking about how absurdly technical photography gets sometimes.

We obsess over corner sharpness, a sensor’s dynamic range, and pixel-peeping until the image is technically perfect. But is it really?

I think we (photographers) forget that a camera is, first and foremost, a blunt, two-dimensional, single sensory tool. It’s a contraption designed to capture a story, inspire an emotion, convey or provoke a thought.

When I reviewed the image of the old man it made me think of Giacomo Balla’s 1912 masterpiece, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash. If Balla had worried about “tack-sharp focus,” we wouldn’t have that incredible, vibrating blur of a dachshund’s legs scurrying down the sidewalk. He understood that to convey the raw energy of life and motion, you have to let go of static perfection.

The magic isn’t in the tech spec sheet. It’s in the feeling that survives the frame. This leads to the ultimate question: how many megapixels do you actually need to capture a soul?