Thanks to Kostya for reviving Roger’s thread, and raising the ante with “pics or it doesn’t count” standard.
Linn and I usually travel with 3 cameras: for her, a zoom kit (formerly RX100iii, now A7/24-70); for me, a FF with 1-2 primes, plus a smaller 28-35mm fixed lens for longer walks, evenings out, low light. Above in NYC, and below in Firenze, it’s the MD262 with ever reliable ZM 50/2.
The “other camera” has typically been a GR, RX1, or X100s—lighter, AF or Snap Focus, less obtrusive in a museum, restaurant, subway, etc.
X100s
Here’s Linn’s RX100iii getting me in a photo-yoga pose in the Uffizi, ha ha. That X100s came to me from Helen Hill (I was still trying to convert Linn to Fuji X).
RX1, Arizona (hike & climb in the heat, no pleasure hauling heavier FF kit)
I go back and forth between M and A7(ii Kolari) for interchangeable lenses—M 21/35 or 28/50, A7 55/85 1.8 usually, though it is also pleasurable to use M lenses on the A7iiK
It has been over a year since I used a film M (or Fuji GA/Klasse) as the second camera. This is partly because we made a transcontinental move and that life change, happy as it truly is, has demoted our artistic inclinations to second and third and fourth order; but it may also be that I am moving away from film at last. (A spirited return to music-making and composition, for both of us, has something to do with this, too.)
As for Roger’s original question, 1 camera/1lens was only the case when it was all I could afford. That was a long time ago—backpacking England at 20 with a Yashica 44, documenting my first child’s young life with an OM-G/50 1.8....
No question that it can be good discipline, and that tremendously admirable photographers often discussed here have done their best-known work with what amounts to a Zen kit. I came from a childhood where the family had one camera. It never occurred to my parents to ask whether I wanted a camera (or guitar, or any tool of artistic discovery), and I did not feel deprived—until all at once, in early teens, I discovered I had to have and make art from that day forward. During most of my life since, I have been a one-or-two-camera, one-or-two-guitar person, with wages or salary committed first to family and household. Once my children were done college and home life, however, and my marriage to their mother was doomed by ovarian cancer (rather than the parting of ways that would surely have ensued, given our different temperaments and values), I have been able and willing to amass cameras, lenses, guitars and other stringed instruments, work and play with all of them in leisure, compulsively too to be sure because making art is paramount.
In any case, the third and probably final act of my life is provided with enough cameras and lenses, SD cards and frozen film, to never again have to consider being a 1/1 photographer. It is a different sort of family, whose members wait dutifully in suspended animation until I take one in hand, at which point it becomes me made otherwise, me with a different optic.
Never say never, but I don’t imagine my life will end with only one camera (or one guitar) at hand.
GR
