April 5, 2009

Transition

I’d like to think, given the amount of time I’ve spent seriously photographing (around 3 years now), I’m a relatively mature photographer in terms of the way in which I treat the medium.

I’ve moved away from gear hording, and have simplified down to a few lenses, fewer cameras and a very basic lighting set-up; I came to the realisation that whilst I should keep enough to ensure that I can allow for most situations, I honestly wasn’t using some of my gear enough to warrant it.

I don’t stick to a particular brand or type anymore, I use what will get the effect I am searching, and if that means bodging it slightly, then so be it.

I’ve spent far more time lately working out just how light works, rather than how my gear does what it does. I’ve realised that being a tech-head and a photographer aren’t necessarily inclusive…

But recently I’ve found myself thinking ‘If I just bought that new lens/flashgun/filter/tripod/light modifier I’d be able to do stuff I can’t right now, which will make me a better photographer’.This more or less goes against my whole photographic ideology; I’m for simplicity and improvisation rather than buying every piece of gear under the sun and only using it twice a year. After all, if I’ve got that much gear, I can’t learn the individual foibles of each individual lens, flash etc, and therefore cannot use them to their fullest potential. Yet still I couldn’t shake this dreaded Gear-Acquisition-Syndrome.

So I decided to go through my already culled gear and work out whether or not I REALLY needed anything more. The Leica’s a lowlight and street machine, especially with the 50mm on it; The Fuji lets me do stuff with digital that other cameras don’t because it actually looks like film but shoots like digital; The Trip is a brilliant street camera (see my review directly below); The Zorki is retro cool; The Nikkormat has some good memories of my first few photos with a ‘proper’ camera; The AV-1 is simplicity itself and I quite like the rendition of the 50mm it came with; The D40 lets me experiment with non-ai lenses for very cheap….

Those are just my camera bodies……. Just my 35mm or smaller camera bodies.

I seriously don’t need anything more, for a very long while. I can generally improvise most things with that sort of gear list, and already there’s no way I can bring that all out on a single trip with me. Even in my Peli. I’m going to have a week just taking each and every one of these cameras out individually each day so we can see how necessary they all are. In the meantime I’ve set a 6 month gear-embargo, which means nothing new for me, just learning how to better use what I do have.

Maybe we should all try to apply that sort of thinking to the wider-world, rather than just that of our cameras?