My Essential Question:When taking an action shot, does it depend more on the camera or the photograpaher?

My essential question is when taking an action shot, for a good quality photo, does it depend more on the camera or me as the photographer?

Sports photography is my passion, my goal. So to get a good-high quality photo, do you need a really good camera, or just be a good photographer? Whenever I take on a photo opp (opportunity) of a sports events I sometimes see professional photographers as well. You can easily spot them, carrying big bags, with giant cameras with foot-long camera lenses. Snapping pictures at 5.3 frames per second and capturing a leaping player for the dunk, they look like freeze frames from a video. But the photographer is what makes the shot not the camera, right?

I chose this as my essential question because it has always been a question I wondered and am able to argue both ways. A photographer who is in a studio, I believe is what makes great shots. However, they do so because they can manipulate what is seen in the picture. How the subject is posing, the light, the colors, the background, etc. But it's different in sports photography. As a photographer in a sports environment, there is only so much I can manipulate. So then do the shots depend on the camera? That's is what I want to know. Where the silver lining between the job of the photographer and the camera lies.

Finding the answer is exciting to me because I want to know if there really can be an answer sense the two together are in a gray area where the camera and photographer go hand in hand.

 As I said in the beginning, this has been a question that I have struggled with for quite some time now. It's only natural for me to have a desire to research more on the topic and read different articles about other photographer's thoughts on the matter.