mfogiel
Veteran
I do not think I am alone on this forum, who finds a liking in buying cameras and lenses.
At various stages, some sobering moments transpire every now and then, and I try to simplify, then I try to compare, then to repress feelings of guilt, for spending money and stealing time I should devote to taking pictures, which instead is spent on sifting through Classifieds, etc.
However, as I am evolving as a photo addict, I am noticing an interesting pattern: gear ownership promotes photographic enthusiasm and improves your photography. How so?
In the first place, interesting things can be learned from testing and comparing gear - as long, as you do not limit yourself to shooting brick walls. The awareness of differences between lenses brings revealing conclusions:
1) same focal length lenses are more similar than you might think, therefore you should concentrate more on what you shoot, rather than with what you shoot
2) the two most desirable traits of a lens are sharpness and bokeh, and often they are antithetic, however some lenses score well on both counts
3) while a lens with beautiful bokeh can be excused for lack of great sharpness, it does not work the other way round, so if you have "dogs" with ugly bokeh get rid of them asap, the world is full of fantastic lenses, there is no need to be masochists...
4) the price of some Leica or Zeiss lenses may seem very high, but if you want to have a lens that is at the same time fast, sharp, has great bokeh, is compact, well built and holds its value over time, they are actually bargains
5) once you will have discovered the winning traits of each of your lenses, you have the excuse to concentrate on shooting with these ON A THEME, in other words, the beautiful bokeh lenses should give you a push towards portraiture, the sharp lenses towards landscape and architecture, while the compact all rounders should push you out of your home to shoot the street
Here we come to the other positive consequence of being a gearholic: invariably, sooner or later, you will get tired of shooting beautiful bokeh portraits, you will have exhausted the ideas for smart poses, and your models will decline further requests for work, after you will have given them some nice pictures - the same applies to tiredness of shooting landscapes or street, particularly if you do not travel much.
So?
So, your gear addiction comes to the rescue, you pull out of your wardrobe, the camera or lens, that was getting little use lately, and you force yourself to look at the world in a new way again.
This is called "The law of the instrument", here is an excerpt from Wikipedia:
"The first recorded statement of the concept was Abraham Kaplan's, in 1964: "I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding."[2]
Maslow's hammer, popularly phrased as "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" and variants thereof, is from Abraham Maslow's The Psychology of Science, published in 1966.[1]
It has also been called the law of the hammer,[3] attributed both to Maslow[4] and to Kaplan.[5]"
If you rotate your hammers regularly, you do not fall into monotony, repetitiveness, and you do not deplete your photographic enthusiasm.
Long live gearholism ! 😀
Planars by mfogiel, on Flickr
At various stages, some sobering moments transpire every now and then, and I try to simplify, then I try to compare, then to repress feelings of guilt, for spending money and stealing time I should devote to taking pictures, which instead is spent on sifting through Classifieds, etc.
However, as I am evolving as a photo addict, I am noticing an interesting pattern: gear ownership promotes photographic enthusiasm and improves your photography. How so?
In the first place, interesting things can be learned from testing and comparing gear - as long, as you do not limit yourself to shooting brick walls. The awareness of differences between lenses brings revealing conclusions:
1) same focal length lenses are more similar than you might think, therefore you should concentrate more on what you shoot, rather than with what you shoot
2) the two most desirable traits of a lens are sharpness and bokeh, and often they are antithetic, however some lenses score well on both counts
3) while a lens with beautiful bokeh can be excused for lack of great sharpness, it does not work the other way round, so if you have "dogs" with ugly bokeh get rid of them asap, the world is full of fantastic lenses, there is no need to be masochists...
4) the price of some Leica or Zeiss lenses may seem very high, but if you want to have a lens that is at the same time fast, sharp, has great bokeh, is compact, well built and holds its value over time, they are actually bargains
5) once you will have discovered the winning traits of each of your lenses, you have the excuse to concentrate on shooting with these ON A THEME, in other words, the beautiful bokeh lenses should give you a push towards portraiture, the sharp lenses towards landscape and architecture, while the compact all rounders should push you out of your home to shoot the street
Here we come to the other positive consequence of being a gearholic: invariably, sooner or later, you will get tired of shooting beautiful bokeh portraits, you will have exhausted the ideas for smart poses, and your models will decline further requests for work, after you will have given them some nice pictures - the same applies to tiredness of shooting landscapes or street, particularly if you do not travel much.
So?
So, your gear addiction comes to the rescue, you pull out of your wardrobe, the camera or lens, that was getting little use lately, and you force yourself to look at the world in a new way again.
This is called "The law of the instrument", here is an excerpt from Wikipedia:
"The first recorded statement of the concept was Abraham Kaplan's, in 1964: "I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding."[2]
Maslow's hammer, popularly phrased as "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" and variants thereof, is from Abraham Maslow's The Psychology of Science, published in 1966.[1]
It has also been called the law of the hammer,[3] attributed both to Maslow[4] and to Kaplan.[5]"
If you rotate your hammers regularly, you do not fall into monotony, repetitiveness, and you do not deplete your photographic enthusiasm.
Long live gearholism ! 😀
Planars by mfogiel, on Flickr
