[UncleVanya]

I am lucky to be in a position to be able afford the good stuff. And I'm big and strong enough to be able to carry plenty of it.

When I was a lad I shot a Ricoh KR-10 and cheap Sigma zooms (and back then they really weren't very good). I fully appreciate the quality of kit we now have at our disposal, but also understand that the art comes from the human on the other side of the camera.

We should enjoy photography for and of itself, and for ourselves. The standards of others don't really matter unless we want to make a living out of it.

This is a great reminder to us all.

[LensBeginner]

Uhm... exchanging a challenging K100Ds with anxiety-inducing photographic gear!

[ramseybuckeye]

You can buy whatever gear you can afford and still produce a masterpiece or crap, depending on how well you know how to use it. But you can't buy a magnificent sky, or stillness of leaves when you want it. You can't buy the patience to wait for just the right moment. You can't have great light when your only time to shoot is noon. I just saying there are so many factors that go into a photograph, and if all of the non gear factors are equal, the better kit should produce better results.

[BigMackCam]

Overall, great kit helps make great images just like a great bicycle helps make a great ride

I'd add (and perhaps I'm stating the obvious, here) that great kit doesn't have to mean the very latest equipment. If it meets our real (rather than our often over-inflated imaginary) needs and performs well, that's good enough. It's very liberating to be free from desire for the latest gear, and a nice side-benefit is that it can make assembling a suitable kit quite inexpensive, with far less room for depreciation to boot

[photoptimist]

I'd add (and perhaps I'm stating the obvious, here) that great kit doesn't have to mean the very latest equipment. If it meets our real (rather than our often over-inflated imaginary) needs and performs well, that's good enough. It's very liberating to be free from desire for the latest gear, and a nice side-benefit is that it can make assembling a suitable kit quite inexpensive, with far less room for depreciation to boot

Exactly!

The universe is still creating version 1.0 photons which are still being beautifully bent by version 1.0 glass. Old glass doesn't become obsolete when Microsoft decides to deprecate something.

Sometimes the greatest is not the latest and sometimes the latest is not the greatest One of the most delightful aspects of the Pentax system is in the joy of discovering what an older lens can do.

[Mikesul]

This is a great thread idea. Much to think about.

[aslyfox]

I am a newbie at photography:

I didn't move the selection switch from " green " until May of 2016

I have been blessed with a spouse allowing me to spend money on photo gear

I have completely replaced the cameras and lenses I had in October of 2015

with some pretty good stuff ( check my profile )

I was able to find " experienced " lenses at good prices and buy new at sale prices

yet I truly believe that it isn't the gear you use

it is the experience, knowledge and skill of the photographer

practice, practice, practice

read, learn from the experiences of others and don't be afraid to ask questions

good gear helps in getting good results but it isn't automatic and the benefits of good gear can be easily negated

[UncleVanya]

Here's what I find. I find it hard to pick a kit for the day. If I'm headed out of the house I have 3 systems and multiple lenses to choose from. I have a pocket camera (LX7) a compact ILC (Panasonic GX7) and an APSC rig (Pentax K-3). The LX7 has a 24-90 equivalent field of view with an f1.4-2.3 Leica lens. The GX1 has more modest and compact slower lenses and a few primes, however the lenses are very sharp and nice in their rendering. The K3 includes a large amount of primes and zooms of excellent quality including DA* and FA* as well as DA and FA limited lenses.

Weight is a consideration as is space sometimes. This past weekend I had the option of taking the K-3 but my dad loaned me a 45-175 and wanted me to do some testing of it so I took the GX1 for the day. But the decision was painful and I felt like second guessing myself!

[stevebrot]

My goal is to not have my kit drive my eye beyond knowing what it can do.


Steve

[conniption]

As I get better (I hope), gear becomes less and less important. Too much distracts from what really matters.
The same can be said for other art forms. When I was a practicing musician I noticed the guys with all the best and latest instruments, 10 or 20 guitars hanging on their walls we're the least creative. I noticed the same effect in art college.

[UncleVanya]

My goal is to not have my kit drive my eye beyond knowing what it can do.

Admirable goal - but I want some stretch goals too sometimes. Honestly the gear (as said by others) is secondary to other things.

---------- Post added 07-02-18 at 12:08 PM ----------

As I get better (I hope), gear becomes less and less important. Too much distracts from what really matters.
The same can be said for other art forms. When I was a practicing musician I noticed the guys with all the best and latest instruments, 10 or 20 guitars hanging on their walls we're the least creative. I noticed the same effect in art college.

There is a value in pushing creative boundaries with limitations imposed on yourself. I shot with a 50mm almost exclusively on film for many many years and before that a fixed 35mm lens on a rangefinder. The eye finds ways to express things. But there are limits. This weekend I took some shots of a dam with decay and plants growing on it that would not have been possible without the 45-175 m43 lens I had with me (or a similar equivalent focal length for my K-3) there are boundaries to the equipment that may come into play in edge cases.

[stevebrot]

Quote Originally posted by stevebrot Quote
My goal is to not have my kit drive my eye beyond knowing what it can do.
Admirable goal - but I want some stretch goals too sometimes. Honestly the gear (as said by others) is secondary to other things.

The strange thing is that I shoot very differently with my rangefinder cameras than with the K-3 and different with the phone camera than either of the others. The viewcamera totally drives the process, which sort of makes it a pain.

I shot with a 50mm almost exclusively on film for many many years and before that a fixed 35mm lens on a rangefinder. The eye finds ways to express things. But there are limits.

I totally agree and have a similar history. My first serious camera was a Yashica Lynx 1000 followed the next year by a Ricoh Singlex TLS with a wretched off-brand 50mm. I shot that kit for about 12 years. Moving to the Ricoh XR7 in late fall 1982 was an amazing experience, particularly since it came with the Pentax-M 50/1.7 that I still own and also because it added a Tamron 28mm and 70-150mm zoom. Suddenly, I was granted wings.


Steve

[Wheatfield]

I don't know if I'm just going through and end of mid life crisis, whether it's just the dilution effect so many images out there, or whether I'm just getting jaded - but I find fewer and fewer pictures on Flickr (I don't operate on instagram or others) that actually hold my attention.

One possible explanation is the number of training courses and many free YouTube How To videos, which tend to lead to everyone going to the same places and doing the same things - which is an issue, but I don't consciously do that, and I'm also finding my own images less interesting. ( )

I've also noticed that since being a regular browser of PF contributions, for better and worse, I've become much more kit aware.

What I am wondering is this: is modern kit so good that it's too easy to produce images that have an immediate impact, and does this too often stop us from going that bit further to produce something exceptional, meaningful - and memorable?

Any thoughts?

Great kit just enables one to up his/her game. When I shot film, I was pretty good with 35mm, and I decided to buy a Pentax 6x7 because it was "better kit". It immediately upped my game with no further effort than having to carry more weight (rather a lot, I would add). After shooting with the 6x7 for a few years, I was finding myself limited in several respects. As a landscape shooter, I was finding the 6x7 to be difficult because securing depth of field is not all that easy with medium format.

In the studio, the 6x7 was dreamy, in the field, not so much.

So, a decision had to be reached, and the hobby part of my photography budget decided that a 4x5 was in my future. I had never have been able to justify it in my professional work, although it turned out having the view camera opened several doors that I hadn't previously looked at, so in this case, hobby crossed into pro rather quickly.

However, I bought the view camera primarily to up my landscape game, which was the type of photography I did to relax. I did sell prints from time to time, but not enough to justify the 4x5 from a business perspective. At the same time, the 4x5 very quickly became indispensable to my pro work because of what it allowed me to take on.

What the 4x5 did for me was allow much greater control of depth of field. What had previously been impossible on 6x7, or possible with greatly compromised image quality on 35mm, was suddenly simple because of camera movements, and my landscape work became much better, though the learning curve was steep. I worked with Fred Picker of Zone VI Studios learning and tweaking his exposure system that was a huge improvement over the Zone System. It took me a year of hard work to become really proficient with 4x5.

So yes, great kit will improve your photography if you let it, but to let it, you have to be prepared to work at it.

I think the problem we are having with great kit now is that the end results aren't really being viewed in such a way as to show what a difference really good equipment can make.
On a web page, it's hard to justify a full frame sensor when something tossed out by an iPhone user looks just as good.

The internet and the image galleries on it are a two edged sword. The democratization of image sharing allows for everyone to showcase what they do, but the small size that images are shown at also democratize quality.
It's impossible to excel at 600x900 pixels. At that size, everything looks more or less the same.

Sure, better kit allows you to up your game, but internet viewing brings it right back into the gutter that is the lowest common denominator.

If you make prints, then suddenly everything changes. I have pictures on my walls spanning over 40 years of my own photography. I am still displaying pictures taken when I was in my late teens taken on 35mm. I have pictures shot on 6x7 and 4x5 film, as well as 6mp, 10mp, 16mp, 24mp APS-C format and 36mp full frame.
I can look at these images and see what the larger film format did for me, and with the move to digital, what more megapixels and a larger sensor did for me as well.

I also have pictures posted to the PUG from most of these formats and cameras at fairly small screen resolutions. If all I had to go by was my gallery images on the PUG, I would be hard pressed to justify moving past 35mm film.

My advice, if you are feeling jaded, is to make a conscious effort to stop looking at pictures on the web, and stop looking at your own pictures at web resolution.
Make some prints instead. Make some big ones and hang them on the wall.
That will tell you where your game is at.

[tvdtvdtvd]

Over the years, I've gone through periods of creative inspiration and stagnation, many times over, in photography and in
other media. For the past few years, I've not really had the impulse to use my DSLR gear in a creative manner. I use my
K-3 these days almost exclusively to document my other art, (ceramics), an ongoing studio build and most recently, my
mineral collection. This usage has expanded my technical skills, both behind the camera and in post production. But it is
quite unlike the broad experimentation I might generally do and have done in the past. If anything, I've been experimenting
more in PP than during capture. Had a blast a couple years ago deconstructing perfectly good images to make them look
like digital glitches.

Over the same time period, I've also been dabbling from time to time with various 'alternative' techniques. Homemade
pinhole lenses, cyanotypes and solar prints using organic pigments like turmeric and beet juice. I also seek images that
I can use in my work in other media, such as screen printing or various transfer methods onto ceramics. The technical
requirements for these tasks are quite modest, so almost any capture tool will do, be it my K-3, Q7, a film negative or
even my smart phone.

I do have grand projects stewing in my head that would benefit from high resolution and require pushing my DSLR gear
to their limits, but those projects have yet to materialize. Perhaps after the studio build is complete.....

Edit: Forgot to add: My point to what I said above is that you shouldn't feel obligated to extract magic from your gear.
Follow whatever impulse is driving you at the moment. If that means putting down the big DSLR and heavy lens in favor
of a point & shoot or even a watercolor brush, so be it. The DSLR will be waiting for you when a genuine impulse to use
it returns.

[Thagomizer]

The eyes and imagination you bring to your subject are more important than the gear. Your vision will have a greater impact on your final image than your camera; it's the vital, unique ingredient than nobody else can have. The "best photographer in the world" will produce something interesting to look at using the cheapest gear and presented with the most unpromising of subjects. Possession of the "best camera gear in the world," at the "most spectacular location" will be no guarantee against dull, uninspired, lifeless images.

TL/DR: wetware trumps hardware.