Obviously the essential questions are these:
Did Degas use a Canon or a Nikon? Or perhaps MF?
Ah, I've been waiting for somebody to ask. Of all the people associated with the Impressionists (Degas wasn't really that much of an Impressionist, but he hung out with them), he was probably the one most influenced by the relatively new art of photography, and owned and used a number of cameras. More importantly, a number of scholars think he was influenced by the way that cameras *cropped* -- quite arbitrarily, by the standards of painting, which organized the full frame. A camera was just as happy to cut somebody in half, or to shoot straight down, etc. Degas picked up on this, and a lot of his paintings show very photo-like crops and photo-like angles, unusual and unexpected and quite radical for painting of the times. The painting above is an example of that -- nobody had ever squeezed a body into one corner of the frame like that, looking *away* from the center of attention, with this huge bush of flowers dominating the center. But cameras do it quite naturally and beautifully, as Michael demonstrated.
